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June 07, 2005

The Clinton Legacy

Via The Corner I see that President Clinton's legacy is being discussed again, this time in response to John Harris's book, The Survivor. Richard Cohen indulges in some Clinton nostalgia while serving up the (unintentionally) amusing line that Harris's book about Clinton is the first written by an objective journalist or historian. It is left to the reader's imagination to speculate on how Cohen defines objective, although I suspect it leans in the direction of someone who thinks the way he does. This is not uncommon, as most of us like to think of ourselves as far more reasoned and logical than we in fact are, yours truly not excepted.

I have some sympathy for President Clinton. Just as his presidency was winding down, my own time as a company commander came to an end. While we were six orders of magnitude apart in our levels of responsibility, we both had reached positions we'd looked forward to for many years, and now we had to hand over that position to someone else with the knowledge we would never again serve in that capacity. While I managed to get through the ceremony without tears, it was no easy task and I very nearly broke down when my NCOs handed me a framed guidon as their going away gift to me. So it was with some interest that I watched President Clinton during President Bush's inauguration, as I had some appreciation for the pain he no doubt felt on the last day of his presidency. Worse, while I could look forward to other positions and at least the potential for higher command, President Clinton knew that there was no other job in the world where he could have anything approaching the level of responsibility he had in the White House. All that was left for him was how history might remember him.

Regrettably for the President's ego, history is likely to remember him much as it remembers most presidents: little if at all. How many Americans can name five presidents who didn't serve during their lifetimes whose names aren't Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt or Wilson? I'll wager the percentage is pretty small. We remember presidents for wars, as a rule, and President Clinton served during a time of relative peace and prosperity. Yes, the Islamofascists we fight today were fighting us during the Clinton administration, but not at a level history will remember. Even if those on the right who want to blame Clinton for failing to act against Islamofascism in the 1990s are successful (and their argument fails against the harsh facts of history: there is no evidence to suggest that a Republican administration would have reacted materially differently to al Qaeda than the Clinton administration), how many Americans can name the president who bore far more responsibility for dropping the ball on a far larger war: James Buchanan? President Clinton, if he is remembered at all, is likely to be remembered in the same vein as President Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached; people may remember the name and the fact he was impeached, but few will be conversant with the details.

Otherwise, there simply isn't much in President Clinton's record that will be remembered. He pushed NAFTA and GATT through, but trade accords are rarely considered historic events regardless of their importance. The same is true of welfare reform, a major initiative that will fall into the same category as most presidential domestic initiatives: unknown to all but a few. And President Clinton was involved in some military action, from Mogadishu to Kosovo, but those battles can be expected to fall into the same category as the United States's appalling number of minor military actions in Central America in the 20th century.

Is that fair to President Clinton? Perhaps not. But life is not fair and attempts to make it so are more likely to make matters worse. Furthermore, whatever legacy President Clinton has earned is unlikely to be recognized until well after his death and the deaths of the partisans on both sides who will seek to build up or tear down what he accomplished to further their political agendas. At which point he is unlikely to care what history says, since he'll no longer be able to read it. The best he can do for now is acknowledge that he presided over relatively peaceful and prosperous times between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of our current war. If it is not as much as he might like, it is far better than what many presidents can enjoy.