George W. Bush Looks Toward History for Political Rebound

In 1936, three years after he departed the White House, Herbert Hoover complained that "democracy is a harsh employer." Harsh indeed. In the three decades after leaving the Oval Office, he published more than 24 books defending his White House years and blasting the New Deal as a "fascistic" agenda that also included moves toward "gigantic socialism." He argued that the banking collapse that had occurred on his watch was not, in fact, a true "crisis." He kept waiting for the day when his reputation would be restored, his legacy resurrected. The comeback never happened.

President George W. Bush leaves office Tuesday, and he is banking on much the same hopes that Hoover never saw realized. His place in history, he says, won't be known for quite some time. His approval ratings have hovered in the mid-20s in recent months, and three quarters of the American people say they are glad that he'll be leaving office on January 20.

While the country is collectively bidding him "good riddance," Bush's loyal team is hoping that this president can mount a political comeback; that events will vindicate his actions, making him look like a president of uncommon vision, wisdom, and foresight. But any serious look at 20th-century presidents who left office with their ratings in the tank reveals that Bush and his most enthusiastic defenders will have little control over how his historical legacy gets defined. If Hoover is one example of how a post-presidential campaign to shift people's views of a presidency came up short, Richard Nixon is another.

When he left the Oval Office as the only president to resign, Nixon set about defending and burnishing his presidency. He granted interviews to David Frost and authored 10 books—including a 1,120-page memoir serving up a detailed defense of his interactions with Communist Chinese and Soviet leaders and his foreign policy. Nixon helped oversee the establishment of his presidential library and visited some of the world's most powerful leaders, including Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping. He also counseled Ronald Reagan on global affairs.

His efforts to reinvent himself as an elder statesman were unable to erase the unavoidable stain of the Watergate scandal. Despite his prodigious post-presidential book writing and his high-profile overseas missions, Nixon never overcame the reality of how he had departed the White House. He never blotted out the abuses of power that had led to his downfall.

Jimmy Carter has assumed a role as the most visibly active ex-president in modern times. But he, too, has never successfully shed his image as a detached, foundering president. His post-presidential achievements are substantial indeed: He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, mediated countless global conflicts, led the fight against global diseases like malaria, and defended human rights and democracy in continents ranging from Africa to South America. His ceaseless efforts on behalf of a host of worthy causes haven't seriously upended the belief that his presidency was riddled with problems and miscalculations. "Being a good ex-president doesn't somehow retrospectively make you a better president," said Hendrick Hertzberg, a former Carter speechwriter. Despite his globe-trotting humanitarianism, Carter is likely to be remembered as much for stagflation, his "malaise" speech, and the Iranian hostage crisis as for his post-presidential achievements. While one recent CNN poll showed him with 60-plus presidential approval ratings, the views of his presidency among historians, journalists, and politicians have remained relatively static since he left Washington.

The one historical model on which Bush has pinned his hopes? Harry S. Truman. When Truman left office, the Korean War was raging, the American people were disillusioned, and the president was widely denounced for his simplistic grasp of public policy. But now he stands tall as an American folk hero; as a man who stuck to his beliefs, made hard decisions, and proved right in the clearer light of historical judgment.  

Bush's defenders believe that Bush will enjoy a similar sort of political rebound as the world moves on and as his policies are vindicated with the benefit of hindsight. There's a problem with that assumption, though: Truman had scant influence in determining his legacy once he returned to Missouri.

Memories of Truman's presidency shifted within American popular culture because of a confluence of factors beyond Truman's control: He had attempted to enact a national healthcare plan and was partially vindicated when Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965. Truman decided to go ahead and abolish segregation in the U.S. Army, and his containment policies, it was later said, laid the basis for the successful prosecution of the Cold War and the ultimate U.S. victory under George H. W. Bush decades later.