The Curse of Arthur Schlesinger:
The Bugaboo of Best and Worst Presidents

Thus it was with driving curiosity that we read the most recent chapter in this Freudian drama, a series of op-ed pieces in the Washington Post by four degreed historians and a controversialist. [1] The election having been over, and the sitting president having suffered a rout of his allies and confreres comparable to First Bull Run, the Meyer-Graham machine that runs the Post judged it safe to loose the hounds on President Bush's future reputation.

With one exception, the conscripted essayists were uniformly negative. Vincent Cannato, a literatus who preaches at the University of Massachusetts, was the cautious one. You never know what could happen in the next two years, he said. Who knows how things will evolve in the war of terrorism? The unspoken presumption is that capturing bin Laden, or another attack on US soil, could raise the president's historical stock. [2]

Cannato of course invokes the shade of Harry Truman, recounting how the little haberdasher recovered from universal opprobrium to retrospective reverence (of course, the real reason is that he unexpectedly won the 1948 election; his improbable victory gives vain hope to every behind-in-the-polls political hack from the candidate for commissioner of the Kettering Mosquito Abatement District to 1996 presidential candidate and ED huckster Bob Dole).

Withal, though, Cannato's defense of Mr. Bush is thin gruel, considering that the professor once served as a speechwriter for the president in 2001. Like Dickens' Mr. Micawber, he hopes that something favorable will "turn up" and vindicate his former employer.

David Greenberg (Rutgers) and Douglas Brinkley (Tulane) make the standard Nixon/Hoover comparisons against President Bush. These perennial benchmarks of bad presidents denote a failure to grasp that presidential incompetence was not unknown before the invention of motion pictures with sound. And Professor Greenberg's assertion that Nixon bested Bush in the scoundrel championship is somewhat thin. If Nixon were demonstrably worse than Bush, the latter should have produced policy accomplishments at least equal to Nixon's opening to China as a counterbalance to the Iraq fiasco. But such successes are nowhere in evidence.

Perhaps emblematic of academia's short-sighted perspective was Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia. He regards President Bush as the worst president in history, but conveniently forgets most of the American pageant. He harps at length on the defects of Andrew (not Lyndon) Johnson, because of old Andrew's retrograde racial views. But he forgets the context in which Johnson became president.

Johnson, and indeed Lincoln, would never have been promoted to the imperial purple had not James Buchanan, through nefariousness or neglect, willed the Civil War into being. This national catastrophe dwarfed the current Iraq disaster, and makes Foner's judgment that Bush is "the worst ever" seem like trivial muckraking.

Foner also expounds on the sins of Harding and Coolidge, easy targets for a pseudo-leftist/progressive with an agenda. Yet for one who excoriates Andrew Johnson as a racist, he is conveniently blind to the defects of Woodrow Wilson, whom he does not mention. Wilson, of course, more than any other president since the Civil War, represented white supremacy. He resegregated the Civil Service, presided over the final imposition of Jim Crow in the South, and enthusiastically screened Birth of a Nation at the White House, an act which did nothing to impede the recrudescence of the Ku Klux Klan. It is odd that liberal historians, ever on patrol for signs of racial animadversion, grow mute on the topic of Saint Woodrow.

What else remains on Wilson's ledger? There is the little matter of 115,00 Yank corpses in France for no good reason; the Espionage Act (up to 10 years in prison for criticizing Wilson or complaining about war profiteering); the occupation of Vera Cruz (on behalf of Big Oil) [3]; and the fruitless search for Pancho Villa (shades of bin Laden); the Red Scare; need we go on? He threw away American participation in the League of Nations, his hag-ridden dream, because he refused to compromise an inch to get two-thirds of the Senate (like Bush, he was an "active negative" personality, riding a rigid and failing policy down to defeat rather than settling for 90 percent of a loaf). And his Wilsonian "democracy at gunpoint" became an inspiration for neocon hallucination to this day.

By contrast, what were Harding's sins? He makes every "worst" list, but he was basically an amiable soul who wasn't quite up to the job. He was not actively malignant, like Wilson, Nixon, or Bush. Teapot Dome was bad, but he did not profit personally, and it was no worse than innumerable scandals before and since. He pardoned Eugene Debs of the crime of criticizing Wilson's policies. Why? Because he was not spiritually rancid like Wilson. He sought disarmament at the Washington Naval Conference, concluded a formal peace with Germany, and stayed out of idiotic wars.

Mencken was right: the country is better off when the White House is occupied by a mild nonentity than when it becomes the military HQ of an egomaniacal messiah who would lead us into paradise at the point of a bayonet. It is a pity that Foner, in the grip of his ideology as well as the fallacy of presentism, fails to grasp that fanatics, be they labeled progressives or reactionaries, generally arrive at the same result. Wilson, the "progressive," gave us the Espionage Act, while Bush, the "conservative," inflicted the Patriot [sic] Act and the Military Commissions Act upon the world.

And, to be sure, presidents are a refection of their times. President Bush did not personally operate the instruments of torture at Abu Ghraib, nor did he shoot at cars full of women and children at a checkpoint in Iraq. Thousands of hands did the deeds. And for those Democrats, progressives, and the tender-minded generally, who believe that the 2006 elections mean an opportunity to sweep out the Augean Stables, a word of caution is in order.

The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) could be potentially one of the most powerful men in government, if the principle that knowledge is power still holds. Yet the following interview with Congressional Quarterly suggests that Rep. Reyes, who has already shown defective judgment (he has suggested throwing 20,000 more troops into the Mesopotamian maw), shows abysmal ignorance as well:

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East. We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism's major players.

To me, it's like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who's on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

"Al Qaeda, they have both," Reyes said. "You're talking about predominately?"

"Sure," I said, not knowing what else to say.

"Predominantly — probably Shiite," he ventured.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they'd slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball. [4]

If this is what the governing class in Washington is like, is it any wonder that President Bush gets his facts wrong?

The last submission to the Post's catalogue of presidential folly was that of Michael Lind, erstwhile Wunderkind of the National Review and now a panjandrum at the New America Foundation. Unlike the other four authors, Lind is not a pedagogue by trade. Lind, it will be noted, has gone crazy in the past, most notably with a transcendently execrable book titled Vietnam: The Necessary War. [5]

Lind, however, has of late redeemed himself. His Post reprise offered a refreshing vacation from the presentism that infest academic historians; he assessed Bush as only the fifth-worse president, towards the back of the pack of our chief magistrates, to be sure, but not sui generis.

Lind chooses James Buchanan as the worst president of all time, correctly assessing his reputation based on the effects of his policies. Six hundred thousand dead out of a population of 37 million is pretty catastrophic. His cabinet harbored such vipers as Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd, who conspired to release the contents of Federal arsenals to secessionists, as clear a case of treason as that of Aldrich Ames.

After gliding cursorily over hardy perennials Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, Lind alights on the counterintuitive choice of James Madison as a president worse than George W. Bush. Lind states the obvious, which is of course unremarked by most professional historians: Madison, chief executive of a newly-established and weak republic, prevailed on Congress to declare war on the British empire. The current president's imbecilities are legion, but he has not yet managed to get his own executive mansion, as well as the Capitol, gutted and burned by an invading army.

Geschichte, wie es eigentlich gewesen, according to Leopold von Ranke: History as it actually happened. It is often a quite different tale than the sob stories and morality plays that are now fashionable. For the most part, those ambitious enough to lunge for the imperial purple are not stable enough to exercise its power and prerogatives wisely. As for the guild of Cleo, Lind proves that just as in the Oldest Profession, in the craft of history, an inspired and enthusiastic amateur sometimes gives more satisfaction to the client than a jaded professional.

* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] "What Will History Say?" The Washington Post, 3 December 2006, p. B-01.

[2] Since the time of Alexander the Great, extending through the Crusades, and arriving in the era of remembered disasters like the siege of al-Kut and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a true sucker's bet has been to believe that future events in the Middle East will redound to the good fortune of an outside meddler. Israel cannot even meddle in the affairs of its neighbor Lebanon anymore. And why a disaster, like a major terrorist attack, makes insanely popular the politicians who failed, through inattention, incompetence, or sheer bad luck, to prevent it, is a mystery known only to psychopathologists.

[3] Wilson intervened in Mexico, according to himself, in order to "teach the Mexicans to elect good men." Oil had nothing to do with it. Does anyone see a fleeting similarity to the present situation?

[4] "Democrats' New Intelligence Chairman Needs a Crash Course on al Qaeda," CQ.com, 8 December 2006.

[5] In "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," George Orwell remarked that it was difficult to review books professionally, because the majority of them elicited no emotions in the reviewer whatever. Lind's Vietnam opus would have presented Orwell with a different dilemma: a book of such titanically aberrant awfulness that the reviewer is simply dumbfounded.