Nasty Little Man

Bush's place in history: Wilson, Hoover, LBJ, Nixon

John Dean, White House counsel to Richard Nixon and author of Worse than Watergate, is already predicting that George W. Bush will go down in history with Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Wilson rode his unpopular League of Nations proposal to his ruin; Hoover refused to let the federal government intervene to prevent or lessen a fiscal depression; Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam while misleading Americans (thereby making himself unelectable); and Nixon went down with his bogus defense of Watergate.

George Bush has misled America into a preemptive war in Iraq; he is using terrorism to claim that as Commander-in-Chief, he is above the law; and he refuses to acknowledge that American law prohibits torturing our enemies and warrantlessly wiretapping Americans.

Americans, increasingly, are not buying his justifications for any of these positions. Yet Bush has made no effort to persuade them that his actions are sound, prudent or productive; rather, he takes offense when anyone questions his unilateral powers. He responds as if personally insulted.

Dean bases his analysis on the work of political scientist James Barber, who categorized every president through George H.W. Bush. The categories were based on the following: the president enjoyed the job, did not enjoy the job, was active in the job, or was passive in the job. By combining these elements into four categories- positive/active, positive/passive, negative/active, negative/passive- Barber could detect patterns in how a president's administration played out.

Dubya falls into the negative-active category, according to Dean, and these presidents usually end up on the scrap heap of history.

Active/negative presidents -- Barber tells us, and history shows -- are driven, persistent, and emphatic. Barber says their pervasive feeling is "I must."

Barber's collective portrait of Wilson, Hoover, Johnson and Nixon now fits George W. Bush too: "He sees himself as having begun with a high purpose, but as being continually forced to compromise in order to achieve the end state he vaguely envisions," Barber writes. He continues, "Battered from all sides . . . he begins to feel his integrity slipping away from him . . . [and] after enduring all this for longer than any mortal should, he rebels and stands his ground. Masking his decision in whatever rhetoric is necessary, he rides the tiger to the end."

John Dean: If past is prologue, George Bush is becoming an increasingly dangerous president

posted by Kinder Gentler Little Man @ 9:02 PM