How to Game a Presidential Legacy By Joseph Wheelan
Mr. Wheelan’s new book is Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress. He is also author of Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848; Jefferson’s Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary; and Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 1801-1805.
Someday soon, unless we stand upon our First Amendment rights and demand government transparency, a president’s legacy may depend not on actual accomplishments and leadership, but on the adroit release and suppression of certain presidential papers.
We all know, more or less, what a president did, but not always why or how — the answers to which may determine a president’s place in history.
If the decision-making that took place during the Cuban missile crisis remained veiled in secrecy today, would we regard John F. Kennedy’s brinkmanship so highly? If Richard Nixon’s White House tapes had been stashed in a vault, or as Nixon preferred, destroyed, would we have been able to take the full measure of his banal villainy?
It was because Nixon, in the aftermath of Watergate, attempted to take personal possession of his presidential papers that the 1978 Presidential Records Act was enacted, declaring that the United States retains ownership of a president’s records. Under this law, the National Archives organizes these papers and, 12 years after a president leaves office, they are opened to the public.
But as with so many policies promoting openness, this one, too, has fallen victim to the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy.
However, this is not just another blow against openness; Bush’s Executive Order 13233 could change history — literally — by restricting historians’ access to materials that help them document and ultimately judge a president’s actions, lapses, and principles.
Executive Order 13233 gives ex-presidents nearly unlimited discretionary authority to prohibit the release of their papers, and allows them to name designees who can act in their stead. Moreover, a sitting president may also prevent the release of a predecessor’s papers — as Bush has already done with some of Ronald Reagan’s papers — even when the predecessor has authorized his papers’ release. These are radical encroachments on the public’s access to documents that were produced in the public interest, at public expense, by officials elected by the public. Citizens can challenge these decisions in court, but the expense and time commitment will discourage most people from trying.
A House-approved bill that would undo this blatant assault on openness has been held up in the Senate. Even if the measure advances, there is no guarantee that Congress could override Bush’s expected veto.
Anyone can see that Executive Order 13233 tramples upon the public’s right to know. Less obvious are the consequences for writing and studying history.
Executive Order 13233 portends a day when spin, the currency of politics, may become the province, too, of presidential history. One can envision a future when a presidential library’s watchdogs would allow only “safe” historians to sift through the library’s holdings for material to cook up a bracingly whitewashed version of his subject’s actions. Objective historians, denied access to the panegyrist’s primary sources and all the juicy details, would be placed at a severe disadvantage. Which version do you think would get the seven-figure publishing advance and the lavish promotional campaign?
From this high, windy ledge it is a short step over the precipice to state-sanctioned history textbooks, of the kind now promoted in Russia by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin — the kind that describes Josef Stalin’s brutal dictatorship as necessary and praiseworthy. The kind that laments the Soviet Union’s collapse as a tragic mistake, and that pronounces Russia to be “the best and fairest society.” Indeed, Putin is well aware that shaping history to suit one’s purposes is empowering, in the absolute Orwellian sense.
One day in the future, as we stand before a bookstore display, perusing the titles extolling the extraordinary farsightedness of the Bush administration, we may repent our former indifference to Executive Order 13233 and yearn for olden times, when presidents earned their legacies the old-fashioned way, through accomplishments and not spin.
George Washington won his presidential laurels by subordinating his dear wish to go home to Mount Vernon after all those years of war and public service, in order to become the first president — a tightrope act that everyone knew only Washington could perform. To hold the center together, Washington surrendered his individuality and became the icon people wanted him to be.
And then there was Thomas Jefferson who, recognizing a great bargain when he saw one, purchased the 830,000-square-mile Louisiana Territory for $15 million, even then a pittance for such a sprawling domain. Praise or damn him, James Polk got us California and the Southwest by provoking Mexico into a war and then taking 40 percent of her land.
Abraham Lincoln waged war to preserve the union, emancipated the slaves, and piloted a battered but intact America into safe waters. Under Franklin Roosevelt, America survived its worst depression and costliest foreign war. His cousin Theodore gave us a national parks system. Dwight Eisenhower stood up to Communism and built the interstate highway system, and John F. Kennedy inspired us to public service, and launched the program that put Americans on the moon.
This is nowhere near a full cataloguing of presidential achievements, but you see the point: These men built their legacies on deeds and not hype. If you take issue with history’s judgment on them, you are free to rummage through their personal papers, letters, diaries, orders, and correspondence for rebuttal material.
Fast-forward fifty years to that bookshop table, imagining the state of presidential history if George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13233 is permitted to stand — perhaps further refined by successors for whom spin is as routine as flossing. The best-selling presidential biography, The Decider, whose author was carefully vetted by George Bush’s descendants, is surprisingly rich in detail and anecdotes, selectively gleaned from the presidential papers.
Unsurprisingly, The Decider argues that the 43rd president, portrayed in his day as a radical but inept ideologue, was in fact courageously prescient in his bold extension of U.S. hegemony over the Middle East for the first time. It describes Bush the Elder’s blow against Iraq’s Satanic Saddam Hussein as portentous of the son’s coup de grace. And none of it would have been possible without the vision and wisdom of the man whom the author unabashedly proclaims the Father of Modern America, Ronald Reagan. Contrarians, of course, can always write their own history — it’s a free country. But without access to the primary documents, they will find it difficult to compose a credible refutation.
The Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233 underscores the new fact that presidential legacies, once the domain of academic historians and parlor game aficionados, have become a serious business — so much so that a president has mounted a Kremlinesque campaign to stifle the free dissemination of information. The Bush administration is playing for keeps.
We once chided Americans for their indifference to their own history by warning, “He who ignores history is condemned to repeat it.”
To this we should add another, ominously Orwellian aphorism: “He who can shape history to his purposes controls the levers of power.”
_________________
LittleWing sometime in July 2007 wrote:
Unfortunately, it's so elementary, and the big time investors behind the drive in the stock market aren't so stupid. This isn't the false economy of 2000.
_________________ "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." -- John Steinbeck
Joined: Wed May 10, 2006 2:35 am Posts: 18585 Location: In a box Gender: Male
Remember when people complained about the illegal wiretapping/any other invasion of privacy and were told that if they had nothing to hide there was no reason to object to it?
He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”
The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.
Quote:
December 30, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist Add Up the Damage By BOB HERBERT
Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?
You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.
We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.
But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.
When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.
This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.
The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?
Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.
A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”
And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.
Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.
The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.
If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.
There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.
In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.
He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”
It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.
The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.
He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”
The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.
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Post subject: Re: The End Of The Bush Presidency/Legacy
Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 5:51 am
Landry
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 12:50 am Posts: 11842
im reading this book on the french revolution, and the public outcry there makes me really sad to see what apathy has done to our social and political conscious. guys during that time crowded out cafes and parlors (creating salons and get-togethers JUST TO TALK ABOUT ACTION) to discuss how the govt was fucking them over and the measures they were willing to take to justify their freedoms to an aristocracy that obviously had never listened to the third estate in the country's history.
obviously there are differences, and i dont expect to see a bunch of redskins fans storming the white house as bush leaves. but where's the fucking anger? the quantifiable desire to really change things? i see a country full of people who turn on the news, go 'well that sucks' and go back to their shitty jobs that are getting shittier and hope the axe doesn't fall on their heads next.
bush should be getting the equivalent of a destructive football ear-hole tackle right now from the public. maybe places like rm have become our salons, i dont know, but it sure as hell hasnt spurned us on to blow bush out of the water on some of this shit, aside from hoping somebody else does it for us while we vote in popularity polls and hope it makes a dent.
i just feel like im going to watch bush fade into the sunset with the sinking feeling that he's getting away with this. like he's just going to have wrecked a whole lot of things and will spend the rest of his life fat and happy on a ranch just not giving a shit like he hasn't his entire life. can we storm crawford instead?
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2004 1:36 am Posts: 5458 Location: Left field
Pathetic. At least I can take some solace with the fact I didn't vote for this piece of shit. What's a fucking shame is how politics have become a topic you can barely talk about with people. Maybe it's because politicians, in a very tactful way, successfully connected religion with politics. It needs to change.
_________________ seen it all, not at all can't defend fucked up man take me a for a ride before we leave...
Rise. Life is in motion...
don't it make you smile? don't it make you smile? when the sun don't shine? (shine at all) don't it make you smile?
Pathetic. At least I can take some solace with the fact I didn't vote for this piece of shit. What's a fucking shame is how politics have become a topic you can barely talk about with people. Maybe it's because politicians, in a very tactful way, successfully connected religion with politics. It needs to change.
or maybe its just because people immediately start off with, with obama we are doomed or hitler would be better than bush
face it, religion in politics isnt why people cant discuss politics openly, its that both sides are so convinced they are right that they cant see the other sides point of view, yet whine and cry that people need to be open minded when in fact they themselves are as closeminded as those they rail against.
perfect example is the gay marriage issue.
to a democrat a marriage is between two people and to think otherwise you are closeminded and just wrong
but to a republican a marriage is between a man and a woman with no leway for interpertation and to think otherwise you are just wrong
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2004 1:36 am Posts: 5458 Location: Left field
Peeps wrote:
jwfocker wrote:
Pathetic. At least I can take some solace with the fact I didn't vote for this piece of shit. What's a fucking shame is how politics have become a topic you can barely talk about with people. Maybe it's because politicians, in a very tactful way, successfully connected religion with politics. It needs to change.
or maybe its just because people immediately start off with, with obama we are doomed or hitler would be better than bush
face it, religion in politics isnt why people cant discuss politics openly, its that both sides are so convinced they are right that they cant see the other sides point of view, yet whine and cry that people need to be open minded when in fact they themselves are as closeminded as those they rail against.
perfect example is the gay marriage issue.
to a democrat a marriage is between two people and to think otherwise you are closeminded and just wrong
but to a republican a marriage is between a man and a woman with no leway for interpertation and to think otherwise you are just wrong
Thanks for pointing out the gay marriage issue. That's my exact point. It's a religious issue with many people and now it has become a political element, which is what I had said.
_________________ seen it all, not at all can't defend fucked up man take me a for a ride before we leave...
Rise. Life is in motion...
don't it make you smile? don't it make you smile? when the sun don't shine? (shine at all) don't it make you smile?
Thanks for pointing out the gay marriage issue. That's my exact point. It's a religious issue with many people and now it has become a political element, which is what I had said.
but the point is people vote for different reasons, whether religious, personal or using logic, some people, gay marrige is all three reasons where as others it is two of those reasons and still another group where it may just be one of those reasons.
you cant have a politcal conversation with strangers because you as well as they, may not see the reason to vote on certain issues the same as you
Thanks for pointing out the gay marriage issue. That's my exact point. It's a religious issue with many people and now it has become a political element, which is what I had said.
but the point is people vote for different reasons, whether religious, personal or using logic, some people, gay marrige is all three reasons where as others it is two of those reasons and still another group where it may just be one of those reasons.
you cant have a politcal conversation with strangers because you as well as they, may not see the reason to vote on certain issues the same as you
the problem is that people start defining themselves and their country along the party lines they themselves draw on these issues. in the grand political scheme of things (the global economy, the US budget, international relations, humanitarian crises), where does abortion come across? nothing to sneeze at to be sure, but ive seen far too many people shut you off after disagreements over that and you cant even get to the bigger issues with them.
its like over the last 100 years people have forgotten or chosen to ignore that some of the mortar that built our country was the importance of disagreement. now its like if you dont agree with me on one issue, you just dont agree with me and i don't want to debate with you.
plus, i cant even count how many times people have told me "you care too much about this stuff," or "i just cant talk with people who are too passionate about your opinions." fuck that. the apathy some of these people have toward this place sickens me. misplaced allegiances are almost worse.
the problem is that people start defining themselves and their country along the party lines they themselves draw on these issues. in the grand political scheme of things (the global economy, the US budget, international relations, humanitarian crises), where does abortion come across? nothing to sneeze at to be sure, but ive seen far too many people shut you off after disagreements over that and you cant even get to the bigger issues with them.
completely true, and both sides of the fence are guilty as sin about doing just that. you can take out abortion and insert any other issue, and if you disagree with THEM on it, then you are close minded
Quote:
its like over the last 100 years people have forgotten or chosen to ignore that some of the mortar that built our country was the importance of disagreement. now its like if you dont agree with me on one issue, you just dont agree with me and i don't want to debate with you.
plus, i cant even count how many times people have told me "you care too much about this stuff," or "i just cant talk with people who are too passionate about your opinions." fuck that. the apathy some of these people have toward this place sickens me. misplaced allegiances are almost worse.
again, it happens on both sides. the whole you are closed minded argument, over any issue to me is in and of itself a wall that person puts up to fend off their own closemindedness
as soon as the closeminded argument is brought on be either side, i know that person is just as closeminded as those they accuse, and the act of talking will never take place
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:51 pm Posts: 14534 Location: Mesa,AZ
Of course Bush is going to get away with wrecking our country, just as did Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and probably many others.
_________________
John Adams wrote:
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
Of course Bush is going to get away with wrecking our country, just as did Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and probably many others.
America is apparently getting wrecked more often than an easy stupid girl who likes to attend frat parties.
I'm still finger crossing that his last ever speech will consist of him suddenly having a British accent and blurting out "PSYCH! BWA-HAHAHA! Oh, my fucking god. You people...I mean, you fucking people. You really bought it, didn't you? Jesus Christ, what a bunch of dip shits. Oh, hang on, hang on, I'm crying from laughing so hard. Oh, hee hee. It...really, though. It's okay. I'd like to thank Michael Bay for making that whole Iraq thing look so real, David Copperfield for the convincing twin towers stunt, and Ashton Kutcher for having me on his show. Goodnight, folks."
Of course Bush is going to get away with wrecking our country, just as did Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, FDR, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and probably many others.
America is apparently getting wrecked more often than an easy stupid girl who likes to attend frat parties.
I'm still finger crossing that his last ever speech will consist of him suddenly having a British accent and blurting out "PSYCH! BWA-HAHAHA! Oh, my fucking god. You people...I mean, you fucking people. You really bought it, didn't you? Jesus Christ, what a bunch of dip shits. Oh, hang on, hang on, I'm crying from laughing so hard. Oh, hee hee. It...really, though. It's okay. I'd like to thank Michael Bay for making that whole Iraq thing look so real, David Copperfield for the convincing twin towers stunt, and Ashton Kutcher for having me on his show. Goodnight, folks."
bwahahhahahhahahaha
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