Judging Presidencies, a Second Rough Draft

Thoughts spurred by Biden’s exit, Trump’s return and Carter’s farewell

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

The name of this newsletter—Second Rough Draft—refers to a quote (from many sources, as it turns out) that posits journalism as the first rough draft of history. With one presidency ending, another beginning and a former president recently being laid to rest, I want this week to do something slightly different, and to look at how we judge our presidencies, and what that may teach us about journalism.

After a half century of watching, thinking and reading about the presidency, I believe we can draw a number of lessons regarding how we ultimately rank our leaders. I want to offer four:

The limits of first impressions

Early judgments are directionally right, but overstated. As Joe Biden shuffles into history, I think we can be fairly confident that, while falling far short of greatness in the presidency, he will eventually be more positively remembered than he is today. This would continue a pattern that has been followed with almost all of our modern leaders.

Those who left the White House on a downswing—including Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Donald Trump (in 2021)—rebound, at least a bit, when an historical view is applied. Even Bush and Trump I, for instance, damaging as they were, were hardly, in even brief retrospect, as bad in the presidency as James Buchanan, who laid the groundwork for the Civil War, or Andrew Johnson, who forged the wrong path out of it, setting us back for a century in race relations. (And before you holler, yes, I know historians disagree about Trump. Also, ranking someone in the bottom 10% rather than 2% is not a big endorsement—and Trump now has a second chance to do worse, or better.)

On a more positive note, Lyndon Johnson, with a major assist from Robert Caro, and Jimmy Carter, in part on the wings of the most accomplished post-presidency in our history, are increasingly receiving the credit they deserve for significant accomplishments, even as their limitations and faults remain apparent.

The same reversion toward the mean mostly holds for those who leave the White House popular. The reputations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are illustrative, the former increasingly seen as having succeeded in doing almost entirely small things in a selfish way, the latter to have done one very big thing—the Affordable Care Act—but also to have fallen short of his transformative promise, and to have made a number of key errors, with his failure of nerve on Syria lately in the spotlight. Obama’s post-presidency, apart from eloquent efforts to rally the faithful every four years, is a particular disappointment of self-indulgence, at least so far (he’s only 63).

The pre-FDR consensus choices. (photo: Thomas Wolf)

What can reporters learn from this? Perhaps most important is that journalistic perennial—the value of skepticism, especially with respect to any current consensus. Closely allied is the need to guard against the risk of any trend story: the temptation to disregard facts that might run counter to the trend being spotlighted.

Let the picture develop

Polarization fades as history reveals its outcomes. Presidents leave office in the middle of most stories. Only when we know how the story ends does their success or failure become fully evident. Thus, Reagan is, largely appropriately, I think, judged in light of the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union in the years immediately after he left Washington. So history seems to be revealing Biden to have been more nearly right about the urgency of disengaging from Afghanistan than Obama, and Trump perhaps intuitively clearer about the challenge from China than some of his contemporaries. Looking farther back, LBJ’s political courage on racial matters looms ever larger, as does the damage done by Nixon and Clinton’s debasement of expectations of presidential character, the essential precursor to Trump.

For journalists, the caution to be absorbed here should soften the tendency to be conclusive on matters which remain unresolved, to lean against demands to tote up final scores during what history will see as intermissions, to render judgments with more humility and greater uncertainty, to embrace the possibility that some things of importance simply cannot yet be known for sure.

The power of mere words

Rhetoric results in special cases. Professional historians, in the latest survey, rank John Kennedy tenth among the 45 men to have served as president—notably just below LBJ and well behind Obama (historians are a progressive group). But the latest Gallup poll of US adults ranks Kennedy far ahead of all of his successors, while another recent poll puts JFK’s favorability ahead of FDR and of all of the Mount Rushmore presidents except Lincoln. Before you conclude this is all partisan, you should know that the recent president who ranks second with current US adults is Reagan.

What’s that about? I would suggest that Kennedy and Reagan continue to soar with the public, and even to some extent with historians, on the strength of their ability to communicate, in particular to give a great speech in the age of television.

Here the lesson for journalists should be more obvious. Saying and doing are not the same thing, and shouldn’t get confused, no matter how strong the emotional temptation. Ronald Reagan was justly called the Great Communicator. John Kennedy gave some of our greatest speeches; his inaugural address was the most powerful in almost a century, since Lincoln’s second. But no one who really understands American history would rank him in significance with Washington or FDR, and the fact that the public is confused about this should stand as a warning to reporters as they convey our contemporary spectacle.

What endures

There is no substitute for doing big things. Washington, Lincoln and FDR each saved the country. But even with lesser mortals, we can see this lesson with particular force in the revival of LBJ (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, an invigorating tax cut) and Carter (the Panama Canal Treaty, cementing peace between Israel and Egypt, deregulation of airlines, trucking, natural gas and telecommunications, championship of human rights in foreign policy, civil service reform).

In our own time, it means that Obama’s place in history is anchored by the Affordable Care Act and the killing of bin Laden, and that Biden’s may be much more transient than was expected just a couple of years ago, but also that 2025 (and perhaps beyond) will have a great deal to say about how our grandchildren view the events of 2021-24, from Ukraine to Gaza to how greater federal investments are curtailed—or maintained.

Let me conclude this piece with yet another plea for modesty in our work as journalists. The more we think about the second rough draft of history, the more we ought to see the imperfections in the first. Honest journalism has deep as well as transitory value because things likely really are as they directionally appear to be, and because contemporary accounts have an enduring value of their own. But in the details, some of which may not yet be evident, and in our degree of certainty, the pictures in our heads today may not develop as sharply as we currently perceive. Deadlines mean we need to render judgments of the moment, but history teaches that we should do so provisionally, and always with care.