Historians weigh in on the Bush presidency
The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, edited by Julian E. Zelizer.
Princeton University Press, 2010. $29.95, 386 pp.
When Bob Woodward asked George W. Bush how history will judge the Iraq War, Bush replied with a shrug, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Though Bush is not, in fact, dead, historians have already started judging him. This collection of essays by eminent historians attempts to untangle the complicated strands of Bush’s legacy, offering a rigorous nonpartisan assessment of the historical background and importance of his presidency. Each of these essays illuminates a different aspect of Bush’s presidency, but a common thread is the dramatic expansion of executive power. By taking presidential authority to new extremes, these historians believe, Bush tainted the image of conservatism and transformed the modern presidency.
The New Conservatives
By 2000, most conservatives had already learned to stop worrying and love presidential power. Presidents Nixon and Reagan had already pushed presidential powers into new territory. Bush’s expansion of executive power, then, was not an anomaly, but part of a trend.
Still, editor Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton, shows that the extent to which Bush expanded presidential powers was unprecedented. Bush surrounded himself with conservative veterans from the Nixon and Reagan eras, like Vice President Dick Cheney. The September 11th attacks provided justification for sweeping expansions of executive power to fight the war on terror.
Presidential Powers and the Law
The Bush administration’s drive to expand executive power shaped its relationship with the judiciary as well. The administration aggressively guarded against judicial review of its prosecution of the war on terror, attempting to avoid the purview of the courts by placing detainees outside the jurisdiction of the United States and by declaring them “enemy combatants,” rather than prisoners of war.
By the end of his presidency, Bush began to lose battles in the courts. But Timothy Naftali, the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, argues in his essay that these decisions were little more than a slap on the wrist, as the administration crafted new laws for fighting the war, with little push-back.
An Ideological President
Bush left office deeply unpopular and shunned by his own party. His legacy still finds few defenders, even among conservatives. President Obama continues to invoke the specter of a return to the Bush era, as one might expect from a Democratic president, but the party that disowned Bush during the 2008 election continues to hold him at arm’s length.
While historians continue to debate exactly where Bush’s presidency falls on the ideological spectrum, liberals and conservatives alike deem many of his policies failures.
This collection of essays serves as a reminder that, while Bush angered liberals with tax cuts, torture, and the war in Iraq, he also ran afoul of conservatives—at least retrospectively. Bush’s bipartisan ability to anger will challenge historians who seek to understand his legacy.
Arjun Mody ’14 is a Contributing Writer.