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Jewish World Review Dec. 18, 2000 / 21 Kislev 5761
Philip Terzian
This all seems a little naive to me: Legacies are something posterity confers, not
presidents. As Abraham Lincoln once said, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess
plainly that events have controlled me." To pursue a "legacy" in so literal a fashion -- it is
very nearly all Clinton's White House acolytes discuss these days -- seems to miss the point
that presidents do their jobs, for good or ill, and leave their legacies to fate.
Remember Jimmy Carter? He tried to claim the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt by delivering
televised "fireside chats" on pertinent issues, just as FDR used to do. Carter even took the
trouble to deliver his talks, wrapped in a cardigan sweater, while seated beside a White House
fireplace, with crackling logs. The only problem, of course, is that FDR delivered his fireside
chats behind a desk and a bank of microphones: The "fireside" referred to his listeners, who
were sitting in their parlors tuned to the radio. And of course, to paraphrase another famous
Democrat, Jimmy Carter was no Franklin Roosevelt.
Presidential legacies are not so obvious to contemporaries. When Lyndon Jhnson left office,
a wise analyst would have guessed that LBJ was driven from office by the Vietnam war, which was
bound to influence his place in history. Yet while time has not erased the catastrophe of
Johnson's war, and will not, it has recognized his enduring legacy in the size and scope of the
federal government. When LBJ took office, the US budget was still less than $100 billion a
year. We now live in a trillion-dollar universe.
Legacies are often deceptive. When Dwight Eisenhower went home to Gettysburg, he was rated
poorly by left-wing historians as a lazy executive, overshadowed by his young, dynamic
successor, John F. Kennedy. Now, of course, Ike's eight years of peace, prosperity and domestic
progress look very different when compared with the Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall and Judith Exner.
Harry Truman, who crawled back to Independence under a cloud of scandal, is revered now for his
(small r) republican simplicity, and smart decisions in the early Cold War.
Bill Clinton's legacy, perhaps, is the search for a legacy. His two primary home-grown
achievements -- the passage of NAFTA and welfare reform -- were really Republican initiatives
he ultimately endorsed. And the Clinton-Gore prosperity, now looking slightly shopworn, had its
origins in the Reagan-Bush years.
When presidents are frustrated by domestic failure, they turn to foreign affairs for
relief. But as he leaves office, Bill Clinton cannot be too sanguine about the state of the
world. The Northern Ireland "peace process" is not quite the shambles the Middle East peace
process has become, but it's looking rather tenuous all the same. Clinton's sponsorship of Fr.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti has merely traded one form of despotism for another. The
Russian oligarchs with whom Clinton and Al Gore formed personal relationships have since been
revealed as thieves, or hopeless incompetents. And his cultivation of the Chinese communist
hierarchy not only failed to reduce tensions between the two nations, but yielded a series of
roubling questions about foreign influence (and cash) in US elections.
Then, the other evening, Clinton's legacy revealed itself. There was Lanny Davis, the
official White House spin doctor during the Monica Lewinsky year, talking on television about
the U.S. Supreme Court. Did you know, said Davis, that Justice Antonin Scalia's son is a member
of the same law firm that employs Theodore Olson, who was arguing George W. Bush's case in the
Supreme Court? It was, as a point, beside the point: All the justices are themselves, or have
friends and relations, somehow connected to the combatants in Bush v. Gore:
It's a small world in Washington.
But Davis did his job. If you cannot win an argument on the merits, the next best thing is
to impugn the motives of your adversary, and besmirch him/her as a human being. It's a process
begun with Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, and perfected at the expense of Billy Dale, Kenneth
Starr, Linda Tripp, and many others. It's not much, but it's a
12/13/00: Cops and soccer moms
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