David Greenberg, Slate Magazine, August 6, 2007
For a guy with a reputation as an intellectual slacker, George W. Bush has always professed a surprisingly strong interest in history—however politicized some of his takes on the past may be. Bush has likened the “war on terrorism” to the Cold War, compared the occupation of Iraq to that of Germany, endorsed the “stab in the back” theory of America’s defeat in Vietnam, and fancied himself Harry Truman redivivus, standing firm in pursuit of noble goals while getting trashed as the worst president ever.
For all this attention to the past, Bush’s study of history has recently taken a turn toward the philosophical, at least by his own standards. Instead of just grabbing for analogies to serve as talking points, Bush appears to have become a pensive, almost romantic thinker ruminating about the ultimate design of history. According to a series of recent articles, he has been summoning scholars to the White House, perusing chronicles of past wars, and mulling over his place in the grand scheme. “What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I’m facing?” Bush asks the historians at his intimate sessions, according to the Washington Post’s Peter Baker. “How will history judge what we’ve done?”
In some ways, there’s less here than meets the eye. Throughout his term, Bush has made clear that he likes to read history, as do many politicians. Other presidents, too, have shuttled in scholars in order to skim off their insights about a crisis—Jimmy Carter turned to Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism, to make sense of his era’s malaise, and the elder George Bush hosted Theodore Roosevelt biographer David McCullough to glean the secrets of TR’s success. As for wondering how posterity will regard his actions—what leader hasn’t? When we’re feeling charitable, we refer to this kind of consideration of long-term consequences as “vision.”
What’s new and strange about Bush’s latest turn to history is that it doesn’t seem to stem from a desire to serve his policy-making—not even as PR. Historians’ insights, after all, can have little practical utility now. A historian can’t predict with more authority than any other informed observer whether jihadist radicalism will wax or wane, or whether a liberal democracy will eventually take root in Iraq. And while there’s no harm in asking a scholar like Alistair Horne, author of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-72, to parse the parallels between the Iraq war and France’s effort to suppress terrorism in Algeria, such parallels rarely yield neat prescriptions. Besides, the historians who furnish advice in these contexts usually filter it through their own prejudices. Writing in the Telegraph, for example, Horne blamed Bush’s Iraq misadventure on his decision “to heed too often the voices of the Zionist lobby.”