December 4, 2006
Historical Malpractice Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post entitled “He’s the Worst Ever.” Readers will probably not be stunned to learn that the antecedent of the pronoun in the title is George W. Bush. It is not the work of a historian, however; it is a work of politics masquerading as the work of a historian (and a distinguished one, I might add, when he sticks to history). He writes, “He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them.” But neither Magna Carta nor any subsequent foundational legal document gives these rights to foreign terrorists. He writes, “His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world.” This simply begs the question of the lawful status of those being held, when, in fact, that status is very much in legitimate question, as the issues raised are novel ones. They are not “prisoners of war” by any reasonable reading of the Geneva Conventions, whether or not they are legally entitled to be treated as such. Professor Foner doesn’t bother to mention the fact that Franklin Roosevelt threw an entire race of United States citizens into concentration camps on no evidence whatsoever and without so much as a hearing. He accuses the Bush administration of being as corrupt as that of Warren Harding. But in fact the Bush administration has been one of the cleanest in history (which is more than can be said for several Republican members of Congress, of course, but Bush heads the executive branch of government, not the legislative one). Professor Foner doesn’t mention the fact that Bush’s predecessor lost his law license for perjury and ran an administration in which several senior members got into serious trouble. The only senior member of the Bush administration to be in legal jeopardy is Scooter Libby, and his legal woes came about because of a “scandal” that, it has finally become clear, was no scandal at all. He writes, “One other president bears comparison to Bush: James K. Polk. . . . Polk should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one third of its territory for the United States.” I wonder if the citizens of California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico rank Polk as low as Professor Foner does. Polk, at No. 50, is one of 17 presidents to make The Atlantic’s 100 Most Influential Americans list, and several of those made it for reasons other than their presidencies (such as the two Adamses, Madison, Grant, and Eisenhower). I will discuss the Mexican Cession in another post, but apparently in Professor Foner’s political cosmology, it is a terrible sin for an American President to vigorously advance American interests and to sometimes use convenient excuses to do so (in which case William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt must also be at the bottom of Professor Foner’s Presidents list). He calls Abraham Lincoln one of our great Presidents, but I can’t help wondering if, had Professor Foner been around then, he would have voted for George McClellan in 1864. After all, McClellan had merely been an abject failure as a general and wanted to sit down and talk rather than fight, while Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus on very dubious legal grounds. I have no problem with Professor Foner or anyone else expressing his or her political opinions in any venue willing to pay for them. But in this piece, Foner damns a President whose administration is not yet three-quarters over, using dubious, highly tendentious, and sometimes flat-out wrong historical analogies to do so while omitting positive achievements, such as a flourishing economy and rapidly decreasing deficit. That seems to me historical malpractice. History, after all, deals with the past, not the present, let alone the future. And history can turn on a dime. Warren Harding’s reputation was sky high when he died in office, and his tomb is the most elaborate of all presidential tombs except Lincoln’s. Harry Truman, on the other hand, was reviled at the end of his Presidency, in large measure for presiding over a difficult war that he had decided to wage. Today he ranks on everyone’s near-great list (he’s No. 21 on the Atlantic’s list of influential Americans). I hereby nominate Professor Foner for this week’s Diane McWhorter award.
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