JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WAS GIVEN to apoplexy after his defeat at the hands of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Throughout his one-term presidency, Adams had been excoriated and then rejected by the American people. “Posterity will scarcely believe . . .” he vented bitterly in his last days in the White House, “the combination of parties and of public men against my character and reputation such as I believe never before was exhibited against any man since this Union existed.” Two years after retiring to his native Quincy, he was unexpectedly drafted back into public service by local constituents who elected him as their representative in Congress. Adams’s post-presidency was consumed by eighteen fruitful years in the House of Representatives, where he earned the reputation of venerable elder statesman along with the nickname “Old Man Eloquent.” After his passing on the House floor at age eighty, an outpouring of grief followed not seen since the death of his father and other prominent founding fathers. Newspapers across the country effused their praise for his service to the nation as thousands lined up to pay their respects while he lay in state in the Capitol and as his body was carried by rail to Boston and then taken back to Quincy, where he was buried next to the elder Adams at the United First Parish Church.
History is like that. Only with the passage of years do passions begin to fade, allowing for more detached reflection. It takes at least a generation to assess a president’s legacy with any degree of objectivity. Simple mob judgment gives way to more nuanced views as complexities are acknowledged and weighed dispassionately with the benefit of hindsight. Events that play out after a president’s reign often show the effects and consequences of the actions a president took and the policies he put into place. Did he do the greatest good for the greatest number? Did he contribute toward the lasting betterment of the nation? Did he elevate America’s position in the world, making it a stronger and more influential and prosperous force? Those questions and others take a while to sort out.
Harry Truman left office in 1953, with an approval rating of 34 percent, blamed for the lingering war in Korea. Worn down by Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson opted not to run for reelection in 1968, leaving office with the dark cloud of the war balefully obscuring his transformational domestic legacy, including civil rights. A year after leaving office in 1989, Ronald Reagan was seen in a decennial poll among prominent historians to be a “below average” president, placing him in the fourth quintile in ranking the thirty-nine presidents from Washington forward. For the legacy of each, time offered perspective and clear-eyed reflection after the myopia of contemporaneous appraisal. Historians would come to rank Truman, Johnson, and Reagan either as “high average” or “near great” presidents—just below the pantheon reserved for Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. Even Gerald Ford, while widely placed in the “average” category, would be vindicated for his damning pardon of Richard Nixon, which is now widely seen as a courageous, healing act that allowed America to move forward.
Time would be a friend to George H. W. Bush as well. Just two decades after leaving office, no longer in the shadow of the iconic Reagan, Bush would begin to be recognized for his sheer competence as president during a seminal time, credited for his incisive foreign-policy mind, diplomatic facility, and steady, prudent hand as commander in chief. Even his broken “No new taxes” pledge, his political undoing, was exonerated. While Americans tossed him out of office due to the image of him toiling indifferently in the Oval Office as the economy limped along, economists would generally come to believe that the tax hikes Bush was compelled to sign into law helped pave the way toward the prosperity of the Clinton years, which saw the biggest economic expansion since the post–World War II boom.
Moreover, in a barbed, self-aggrandizing age when passion all too often overcame reason, Americans came to value 41’s character. In February 2011, Barack Obama draped the Medal of Freedom around Bush’s neck in a White House East Room ceremony. “Like the remarkable Barbara Bush,” Obama said, paying tribute to his predecessor, “his humility and his decency reflect the very best in the American spirit. This is a gentleman.” The following month, Newsweek, which may have landed the unkindest blow to Bush with its 1987 cover story “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor,’” provided its own repudiation in a feature article titled “A Wimp He Wasn’t.” “Qualities once branded as vices,” it read, “[Bush’s] civil tone, willingness to reach across the aisle, even his sway with Mideast strongmen—suddenly seem more like virtues in a world weary of attack politics and confronting a cascading series of global crises.” Two years later, after the octogenarian former president shaved his head to show solidarity with the two-year-old leukemia-stricken son of a member of his Secret Service detail, a photo of Bush and the boy, both bald as cucumbers, spread like a balm throughout social media. The forty-first president had become a beacon of decency. In the unexpected warmth of his winter years, the public servant who called for a “kinder, gentler” nation got a little of it back.
Kindness and gentleness found its way to George W. Bush, too. In June 2014, Bush’s approval ratings had risen above Barack Obama’s, exceeding the 50 percent mark for the first time in almost a decade. By the time the Trump era swept vociferously across the American landscape, 43’s policies didn’t look quite as harsh as they did when he was in office. The month after Trump’s inauguration, where he reportedly commented of Trump’s fiery speech, “That was some weird shit,” Bush, in an interview on the Today show, implicitly repudiated Trump. Responding to Trump’s view of the media as “the enemy of the people,” Bush called it “indispensable to democracy,” adding: “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account.” Asked about immigration, Bush replied that he was for “policy that is welcoming and upholds the law,” and responding to allegations that Trump had ties to Russia, claimed, “We all need answers.” Suddenly, Bush was a font of reason. Shortly after the interview, the National Review published an article under the headline “George W. Bush, Liberals’ New Hero,” which included a tweet from Glenn Greenwald, an author and left-leaning journalist specializing in national security issues, that encapsulated its essence.
2005: George W Bush is a pillaging, torturing war criminal who let a city drown.
2017: I may have disagreed with Bush but he was A Good Man™.
But not enough time had passed for history to cast anything but diffuse light on 43’s legacy. Given the complications of the age in which he ruled and the messy aftermath of the decisions he made, a dispassionate assessment would likely take far longer than it had for his father—especially with untold documents relating to his administration’s security measures unprocessed or yet to be declassified, and with the morass of the war in Iraq, the dominant part of his legacy, still too thick for a clear view. Only time would tell.
On February 21, 2017, George H. W. Bush and Jean Becker had lunch in the Grille, a cozy, elegant dining room at Houston’s Forest Club, next door to Bush’s office on Memorial Drive. Forty-one was now back in good health and good spirits after a bout with pneumonia that had landed him in the hospital for over two weeks in January. Less than a week after his release, on February 5, he was well enough to toss the coin at the Super Bowl in the Houston Astrodome, where the former president earned a standing ovation from a crowd of more than seventy thousand, which included Mike Pence, the vice president of just over two weeks. As 41 dug into a prodigious slice of apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream, Becker talked of how beloved he was. “You’ve become an icon,” she would often tell him, and the old man would roll his eyes. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he would say repeatedly, “Let history be the judge.” Now history’s indebted nod was clear. “I’m glad that the judgment of history has come in your lifetime,” she told him as he enjoyed his dessert.
At that moment, George H. W. Bush’s thoughts were less about his own presidency than that of his eldest son. George W. Bush hadn’t concerned himself with his legacy while he was in the White House, nor did he have illusions that he would see a binding verdict in his lifetime. One of the lessons from his father that helped to guide his decisions in the White House was “History will ultimately sort things out, so one shouldn’t worry about legacy.” But George H. W. Bush, whose now-lauded presidency was stunted by the verdict of American people who he believed didn’t know his heartbeat, was worried about his son’s legacy.
“What about George?” the forty-first president asked Becker plaintively, his heartbeat as palpable as at any point in his ninety-two years. “I want this for George.”