Newsletter: Doris and Presidential Legacies
Doris Kearns Goodwin's electrifying presence at the SVWC triggered this reflection on several of our recent Presidents and the Office's current occupant.
I just finished attending the 2025 Sun Valley Writer’s Conference (SVWC). The Conference is a lovely and often moving experience. The audience is predominantly white, female, older and affluent; however, it is literate and intellectually enthusiastic. The writers run the gamut from poets to novelists to biographers to historians to scientists to journalists to any combination of the above. There have been many memorable moments in my twenty plus years attending the Conference but few rival listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin. She is very likely our premier historian on the Presidency and at this frightening moment in our country’s history, Doris’ words had the power and the wisdom that is so lacking in our world. As I listened to her sift through the legacies of Lincoln, TR, FDR and most intimately, LBJ, it provoked my long-established interest in the individual legacies of our Presidents and how they shift over time. The following is a quick review of several but not all the post WWII Presidents and the shifting sands of their place in history – their legacy. Why does a discussion of legacy matter? Because I hold out hope (albeit a slender one) that it will infiltrate Trump’s mind as his term wears on. All the Presidents I will discuss below either dealt with very real vilification while they were President and/or they left under the dark cloud of history’s emerging harsh judgement. Examining a legacy is a study in how that judgement behaves over time, how it can remain in constant flux (e.g. JFK & Nixon) and how it can truly reset (e.g. Ike & Harry Truman). While many of us believe that Trump may be the end of our democratic Presidency as we know it; if, in fact, that proves not to be the case, his second term has the kernels of a long-term legacy free for all (see below). To think that all this terrible angst and fear will slowly subside into the greater tide of history, that Trump will become one of many, is a comforting exercise … one prompted by Doris Kearns Goodwin. We will start with her.
LBJ … listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin unpack the complicated rubric’s cube of LBJ and his legacy, I understand a point made by her colleague on the stage, Max Boot, that history’s judgement on a Presidency is a long term ever shifting process. What LBJ accomplished in the first two years of his single elected term has only been matched by FDR’s early New Deal days. We inhabit a world shaped by his Great Society legislation ranging from Medicare to Clean Air & Water Acts to the National Endowment for the Arts to, most profoundly, the Voting Rights Act. The list is long and has become part of the DNA of this country. It required extraordinary political courage and conviction to pass the most important nail in Jim Crow’s coffin. LBJ knew from the day he signed the Voting Rights Act that he had delivered the South and its active racism to the welcoming arms of the GOP. He left office with the scar of Vietnam writ large across his legacy; however, as Doris so movingly remarked at the Conference and weaves into her most recent book on the Sixties and her relationship with the great speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, the war’s scar is fading as we watch the long festering resentments of the Goldwater right try to erase the great steps taken in that decade. The idea of a Great Society and the idealism that fueled it, feels dreamlike as we watch today’s craven collection of politicians feed off fear, retribution and hate. The political courage of LBJ and the 89th Congress burns even more brightly as Trump and his sycophants continue to turn off the lights of our democracy and try to Make America the Fifties Again.
After reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story , and after listening to her and others at the SVWC, I felt such a tragic sense of loss. The greater good, always mixed with baser motivations, has, for now, left us. The possibility of a Trump Center for the Arts possibly replacing the Kennedy Center is so clearly not only an ugly act of political revenge but an unvarnished effort to erase the best of the Sixties. LBJ, warts and war and all, is looking pretty good these days.
RONALD REAGAN … Reagan has enjoyed a lot of biographical attention for a Presidency and a legacy that by historiographical standards remains “contemporary” (a safe historical distance usually requires the passing of the generations that voted for that particular President.) Max Boot’s new book, Reagan: His Life & Legend, has been well-received and if his talks at the Conference are any indication, deservedly so. The book may be too long for me given my deep doubts about the long-term effects of Reagan and his anti-government drivel. Boot gives him credit for bringing the Cold War to a close and goes so far as to give credence as opposed to incredulity to Reagan’s talk with Gorbachev about getting rid of nuclear weapons all together. I remain convinced that he had begun to lose it at that point. Listening to Boot, I realize that Reagan in the abstract remains his legacy … and maybe that is the Achilles Heel of the whole legacy thing. His “Morning in America”, his Normandy speech, the jellybeans and his splitting wood on the ranch remade a grievously wounded POTUS into something many people could return to with faith and optimism. If Reagan represented much of what Boot alluded to, a pragmatist among ideologues, an anti-intellectual with excellent common sense and a man who could change his mind, then why has not this deification made the newly minted GOP of today stand aghast at our current President? It is obvious as the day is long that Reagan would have been deeply disturbed by Trump the man and the President. Regardless, a GOP that has strayed so far from their Godhead, Ronald Reagan, continues to utilize him as their nostalgic political elixir just as they did with Lincoln for so many years. This messy appropriation of Reagan will continue to stall any real clarity as to his legacy. Maybe Boot’s book is one step toward this clarity but that may be for me an 880 page ‘bridge too far’.
While I am at it, I think I’ll do a quick flyover of the most alarmingly misunderstood post WWII Presidents (as of this writing!). As clarification, “misunderstood” applies to the legacy that first attached itself to the President and that either remains the primary definition of HIS tenure or is the subject of a serious reconsideration.
GEORGE H.W. BUSH … was there ever a more highly qualified man for the Office of the Presidency? Based on a resume litmus test, the answer is NO. When was the last time any President was even close to his 90% approval rating after the first Gulf War? In fact, has any President ever achieved that level, even for a day? He was an awkward speaker. He was clumsy but … 90%? He was also a one term President who lost in 1992 because the GOP walked away from him after one of the more courageous political acts I have witnessed. After campaigning (“read my lips”) on no tax hikes, he increased taxes to create a measure of fiscal responsibility in light of a fast-growing deficit. This almost miraculous act of adult behavior doomed his reelection but set in motion a brief balanced budget moment at the end of Clinton’s Presidency that HW’s son later tanked. If you want to realize how courageous an act that was, simply watch the craven and reckless performance of the GOP and its Big Beautiful Bill and the lengths they will go to PREVENT a tax hike. As politics loses any semblance of dignity, as the GOP dives deeper into its amoral morass, H.W. Bush’s legacy is only going to shine brighter.
JIMMY CARTER … it still matters very much who you talk to when it comes to this one term outsider. However, even a died in the wool conservative might be less dismissive of Carter after not only a remarkable career as an EX-PRESIDENT but the slow rewrite of a deeply besieged Presidency. Many of Reagan’s defense and foreign policy initiatives had begun under Carter. His human rights focus proved to be a major contributor to the fall of the Soviet Union and the undermining of communism as an alternative to democracy. Fiscally he was a pragmatic Southern Democrat prone to getting lost in the weeds. He was confident enough to surround himself with mostly highly competent individuals. The ugly fact of most Presidencies is that they get defined by the unexpected and in this case the OPEC oil spike, the stagflation that came with it and the Iran hostage crisis. It is very likely that no President would have survived this set of events (FYI: if the election had occurred a month later, Carter may have won). Ultimately, he was his own worst enemy. His wardrobe, his delivery and tone, his tone-deaf aloofness opened the door for the charismatic Reagan as much as any of his policy issues. Style matters. In the short-term calculation, it can “trump” substance. The algebra of legacy, however, is the fading remembrance of style and the steady appreciation of substance. Carter’s changing legacy is a good example of this.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER … Ike left the White House popular among most voters, particularly Republicans. His popularity, however, was leavened with condescension and scorn from Beltway veterans and academics. His slow response to Civil Rights, his apparent appeasement of McCarthyism, his ubiquitous presence on elite golf courses gradually undermined his war hero image. For years, his polling among academics had him pegged in the bottom half of the Presidential rankings. He was quietly drifting into POTUS purgatory. Nobody wrote books about him unless it was about WWII. Then we experienced what we now take into consideration before condemning an ex-President. The releasing of the confidential papers of his term(s) after a twenty-year cone of silence. With these papers, a massive recalibration of Ike began and continues to this day. Ike resisted, often alone, the hawks in his administration who too often considered the nuclear option viable. He tried to start détente against the objections of most everyone around him. He refused to dismantle the pillars of the New Deal. His Presidency became a nuanced, often admirable, exercise of Executive power and RESTRAINT. This latter quality is contributing to his rising popularity among today’s disillusioned Republicans and forlorn Democrats. What is revealed in the broadest of contexts, is that with Ike, the American people had a true ADULT in charge of the DC Nursery in a time of many terrors and insecurities. No wonder the shifting legacy …
HARRY TRUMAN … Harry is the 20th century’s legacy case study. Laughed at when he succeeded FDR after his death in 1945, written off as he sought reelection in 1948 and swept into the corner of history by the immensely popular Ike, Harry Truman was a man returning to his real place in history – a small man from Missouri who lives with his mother. A decade later, LBJ conferred with Truman about Civil Rights and gave him the first Medicare card in honor of his failed efforts as President to create a national healthcare system. It soon became clear that Harry would be admired for as much for his failures (e.g. universal healthcare, ending segregation in the military & the government) as for a now legendary character marked by candor, grit, honesty and the ability to do the right thing (e.g. firing the nuke crazy but wildly popular Douglas McCarthy). He is pretty much untouchable at this point – on both sides of the aisle. As with any Presidency, there are plenty of things to criticize or question ranging from the indiscriminate bombing of Japan, the A-bomb itself, cronyism, a tendency to black & white thinking and a hot temper. But until AI takes over, every President is human, and the legacy argument is simply history giving with one hand and taking with the other.
DONALD TRUMP … where does Trump fit into this conversation? His chaotic, revolving door first term with impeachments, scandal and a pandemic finale left him in the legacy dustbin. It is certainly one reason among many that he refused to acknowledge defeat and was so focused on pulling off a Grover Cleveland staggered reelection gambit. Though it feels like years, we are only in the first year of his second term. Right now, there are two powerful legacy forces squaring off after his unnerving and prolonged version of FDR’s 100 days. On one side, one occupied by Presidents Polk and Reagan, he has followed through on his campaign promises with tariffs rewriting global trade, the southern border being virtually quiet and our long-standing alliances all being renegotiated. This is legacy catnip. On the other side, there are threats to civil liberties, defiance of the judiciary and efforts to manage or censor the media. Any of these fully manifested will dominate any legacy conversation. It is important to talk about this subject since it is always in the mind of whoever is POTUS. As noted by comments from JFK to Reagan, walking into the White House as President is walking into history. Even in a such a mercurial and sometimes unhinged President like Trump (not the first by the way), this relationship with history will influence much of what de does and doesn’t do.
Enough with POTUS ...
My next letter will be a “catch-up” on recently read books. Thank you for reading
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