The press have been all a'twitter over what ought to be capitalized as the Bush Legacy Project. We Kossacks of course already know - or think we know - that Bush will go down as the worst president ever. But had there been a DKos in 1974, we'd surely have said the same of Richard Nixon. And more than a few of us were or would have been writing of how history would condemn Ronald Reagan in light of the Iran-Contra scandal.
It's difficult to predict how history will judge present day events. Will George Bush join Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, and Herbert Hoover? Or will history vindicate him as he argues it has for Harry Truman? Come to think of it, has history vindicated Truman? Has history yet decided why the U.S. lost in Vietnam? What about why Germany lost in World War II?
More beyond the fold....
John Keegan famously wrote that "History is ideology imposed upon the past." That is not quite the same as the oft-cited axiom that "History is written by the winners," but it's close. While Chris Matthews often says "journalists write the first draft of history," most historians have long held that history doesn't begin until 60 years after an event. Springoff the Fourth, a history major, likes to quip: "Historians want everyone else to die, so we can start working."
That complicates George Santayana's adage, "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." Then again, every generation has been convinced that, unlike every other generation before, they will write - or at least frame - the history of their own times. And George Bush is surely trying to do that.
Note to George: Having to duck flying shoes in a country you claim to have "liberated" ... is not a good sign.
As it happens, I agree with the traditional view that enduring historical analysis cannot really begin until the participants in the events are dead, and that the analysis will - as Keegan suggests - reveal more about the ideological discourse of the historian's own time than it does about the historical period. And that's why I think it's a mistake for any of us to assume we know how history will judge George W. Bush.
I think it's important to distinguish journalists, chroniclers, and historians.
Journalists try to present the story as they understand it - or want us to understand it - as the story is happening. Much of that will later be proved wrong. We all "knew" that the Columbine High School gunmen had been bullied, until that turned out to be a convenient fable. Jessica Lynch was the poster child for combat capable women in the Army, until she herself debunked those myths. We heard the breathless tales of rape, murder, and other horrors from inside the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, until that was revealed to be sensationalist rumor. Journalists get more wrong than they get right, not due to competence or bias, but because they're writing about events that are still happening.
Chroniclers pick up the story next. For the first 30 or so years after a major event, the narrative will be dominated by the leaders, in memoirs and chroniclers' comparisons and criticisms of the memoirs. The memoirs and criticisms begin to fill out the historical record, albeit in flawed ways. They tend to be ideologically and personally self-serving, and are usually rife with factual or analytical errors. The factual errors may be because of the writer's incomplete knowledge, or simply an attempt to impose a convenience the facts to not support. Analytical errors - where the facts are right but the explanations wrong - can stem from ideology, personal conceit, or simply withholding the still-sensitive information on which a decision was actually based. (E.g.: Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (1948) makes no mention of the role of ULTRA intelligence in his decisions.)
Chroniclers continue to develop the record through the second 30 or so years after an event, but now the narrative shifts to reminiscences of other participants. We saw this happen with World War II starting in the 1970s, as the focus shifted from the decisions of Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, et. al. to the actions of ordinary soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians. This period often features waxing and then waning waves of nationalism, first polishing the leaders' narratives by adding in the heroism of ordinary participants (e.g.: the corn-fed American heroes of Stephen Ambrose's work), then knocking the shine off as old men and women feel secure enough to reveal counter-narrative events (e.g.: the raw and often disturbing accounts of Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy).
Like the historians who come later, the chroniclers' narratives say as much about the ideological discourse of the chroniclers' own era as they do about the events themselves. The first narratives emerging from World War II were of a German military unmatched in skill, undone by Hitler's bungling and overwhelmed by U.S. industrial might. In the 1980s, that was displaced by the Reagan-inspired and Ambrose-driven narrative of Germany defeated by the superior courage and skill of the American (and occasionally British) fighting man. Germany's war with Russia was seen as a side affair, background to the victory in and of the West, because of course our erstwhile ally was now our sworn enemy. Only in the past few years have some historians dared to assert that Germany was defeated not by the U.S.-led Western Allies but by Russia, who faced and crushed 80% of Germany's forces from 1941-45. In this third narrative, the main role of the United States is again economic, supplying Russia with the trains, trucks, boots, and other materiel that allowed her factories to focus on making the tanks, artillery, and aircraft with which she broke the back of the German military. That was hardly a story that could be told during the Cold War.
Historians come along after chroniclers have filled out the record, and finally begin to write the analyses that become "the verdict of history." Historians often claim this is to be free of the ideological pressures of the events and their participants. But as Keegan said, they tend to pass verdicts that confirm the historians' own ideologies. At the very least, historians are citizens of their own times and thus write in the dominant discourses of their times. Much of what Americans know about the Roman Empire was written by British imperialists. The darkness of the Dark Ages has more to do with those imperialists' judgment on the absence of a dominant empire than on living conditions at the time. More recent research suggests the fall of Rome had less to do with decadence than with climate changes in northern Europe forcing the mass migration of Germanic tribes, and that the Dark Ages were far from the chaotic and horrific "collapse of civilization" long described.
Which brings us to Harry Truman, Vietnam, and George Bush. While it's true that Truman's legacy has been polished some in recent years, that may have more to do with American triumphalism in the wake of the Cold War than with real qualities of Truman himself. It's too soon to know how history will judge the Cold War, whether it was indeed a case of the United States as the leading bastion against communist tyranny, or one of a United States blinded by anticommunism and all too willing to "talk the talk" of human rights while overlooking abuses by right wing despots, and ultimately seeking only to guarantee resources and markets for corporate interests. If the latter emerges as the dominant discourse, the legacy of Harry Truman may be worse than even his harshest critics at the time imagined. His Cold War-winning policy of "containment" would be recast as the dawn of American Corporate Imperialism, a narrative already well in place in many parts of the world.
Vietnam is still being chronicled. Its narratives range from a U.S. military victory undone by a liberal press who used Watergate to force Nixon to surrender, to a brave attempt to hold back communist aggression that failed because of political meddling and/or lack of popular support, to either a moneymaking boondoggle for the military industrial complex or U.S. colonialism that collapsed when the American people recognized it for the bloody disgrace that it was. Which of those or other narratives will emerge as "history's verdict" will depend more on how history comes to judge the Cold War than on anything that happened in the war itself.
As for George Bush, we're still in the journalistic phase. Chroniclers will come next, and I will be long in my grave by the time historians get the chance to deliver history's verdict. If President Obama and the more securely Democratic Congress have eight successful years, that may usher in a generation of progressive voices dominating the discourse. If so, Bush defenders will face a steep, uphill climb to rescue his name from the ashes of two quagmire wars, cronyism that let New Orleans drown, and ideological blindness that let the U.S. economy suffer the worst collapse since the Great Depression. Bush's farewell visit to Iraq, interrupted by the "liberated" Iraqi reporter's shoe, might take its place alongside Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" speech.
But it's far too soon to be certain of that.