By Jessica Bennett
January 16, 2009
Imagine—just for a second—that it's 2020, and George
W. Bush has restored his reputation. (I know, it's hard to imagine,
but be creative.) Now try to answer this question: what would it
take to actually make that happen?
The easy answer is that somehow between now and then, Iraq becomes
a flourishing democracy, a source of cheap oil for the U.S., and
a staunch ally in fending off the spread of terrorism in the region.
Or that—by some sort of miracle—the American economy
recovers, and Dow 20,000 becomes a reality. But neither of those
scenarios seems particularly likely at the moment. So how would
a person go about restoring Bush's legacy without the benefit
of those gifts? How do you sway public opinion in a climate where
98 percent of historians view your tenure as a failure—according
to a recent poll by the History News Network—and only 13
percent of Americans believe you've helped the country's problems,
according to a December Pew survey?
Image experts suggest you acknowledge the negatives (Iraq, the
economy) but then remind the public of the positives: education
reform, funding to fight AIDS in Africa. You paint the president
as a man faced with unprecedented challenges (9/11, a new age
of terror)—and no blueprint for how to deal with them. You
repeat, and repeat, and repeat again that under trying circumstances,
George W. Bush made the American people safer—in an entirely
new era of national security. You take Karl Rove and Dick Cheney
out of the public eye, and you start planning Bush's second act.
Will he become a global humanitarian, as Carter did? An environmentalist,
like Gore? Or exit the limelight entirely? Above all, according
to former speechwriters, friends and PR execs who spoke with NEWSWEEK,
you must take responsibility for the failures to regain the public
trust. "Whether it's in politics, business or Hollywood,
we are willing to forgive if we fully believe that a person is
being repentant—if we believe it goes beyond just words,"
says Mike Paul, a former Republican aide who now heads his own
reputation management firm, MGP & Associates. "This is
really a defining moment for him."
No matter how you dice it, trying to rehabilitate an image at
the end of a presidency is no simple feat—especially for
W. Over the last few months, the 43rd president's poll ratings
have plummeted to Nixonian depths, and he leaves behind a trillion
dollar deficit and an economy in shambles. Memories of flood-ravaged
New Orleans remain fresh in the public psyche, while the billion-dollar
war in Iraq drags on, with a body count of some 4,000 U.S. soldiers
to date. Historians, pundits and politicians alike predict he'll
be remembered as being among the worst presidents in American
history.
But, as Winston Churchill once put it, history can be kind to
those who write it. So can time. Harry Truman's problems in office—economic
strife and an unpopular war—were similar to Bush's, yet
he's now applauded for his handling of the Cold War. When Gerald
Ford pardoned Nixon in 1974, many believed it cost him his election—but
today, the move is often recounted as an act of courage that helped
heal the country after Watergate. Jimmy Carter left office with
a 34 percent approval rating, according to Gallup—but in
2006, 61 percent said they approved of his time in office.
Even Nixon, who had a lower approval rating than any other president
upon exiting the White House, was, in his later years, regarded
as a respectable elder statesman. "It's not uncommon for
a president to end up in a very different place 30 years after
he leaves office than where he was when he was in office,"
says Kasey Pipes, a political historian and former speechwriter
for Bush. "It's still very early in the process when you
think about it in historical terms."
That's been something of a mantra coming out of the White House,
perhaps of necessity; Bush himself recently told ABC's Charlie
Gibson that he doesn't "spend a lot of time really worrying
about short-term history." But those around him are trying
to figure out how, in these final days, they can at least get
the ball rolling in the right direction. Rove and longtime Bush
strategist Karen Hughes are said to be heading up a Bush Legacy
Project—an unofficial image restoration effort that's likely
behind his vast outgoing media tour, a list of suggested talking
points sent out to administration officials last month en masse
(among them: that Bush "kept the American people safe"
and lifted the economy through tax cuts), and a 40-page downloadable
PDF presently on the White House Web site, entitled, "100
Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record."
When asked about Bush's legacy, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel
said he couldn't comment specifically on the legacy project, but
that the overarching strategy "is to provide opportunities
for the president … to communicate the achievements and
the accomplishments and the challenges we've tackled." He
added: "Obviously we have a lot of issues to deal with."
That's an understatement. But Nixon had a lot of issues to deal
with when he left office too—yet over time, "he shifted
the narrative from criminal to great diplomat," says Dan Abrams,
the former MSNBC anchor who now runs his own media strategy firm,
Abrams Research. Nixon did much of the repositioning himself; he
wrote a number of books, traveled the world, and made a serious
effort to establish himself as an éminence grise. He also,
until his death, headed his own private Nixon Library & Birthplace
Foundation in sunny Yorba Linda, Calif.—a $21 million hillside
shrine where, until the exhibit was demolished in 2007, visitors
learned that Watergate was really a "coup" engineered
by Nixon enemies. As one Nixon scholar put it at the time, "You
didn't know whether to laugh or cry."
What's fascinating about Nixon, says Pipes, is that he truly
set out to rehabilitate his presidency—and himself—when
it seemed as if the world was against him. Reagan, on the other
hand, had enough of an established following that he didn't necessarily
need to. Among his admirers were the members of the Ronald Reagan
Legacy Project, which, over the past decade, has placed the 40th
president's name on close to 100 public landmarks, including schools,
highways, an aircraft carrier and the former National Airport,
in Washington. "The difference between Bush and Reagan is
that when Reagan left office, you knew exactly how history would
judge him, because he succeeded on the two things he'd set out
to do: grow the economy and take down the Soviet Union,"
says founder Grover Norquist, a conservative lobbyist and the
president of Americans for Tax Reform, created during the Reagan
years to help promote his tax act. "The challenge for Bush
is that he leaves with not a lot of successes."
The job of rehabilitating Bush may take more sophisticated strategizing.
His legacy advisors are said to be planning a library and institute
in his name, but he's made it known he has no interest in, as
he puts it, remaining on the world stage. Without a post-presidential
redemption to look forward to, experts say Bush is erring when,
again and again, he refuses to accept responsibility for at least
some of what, over the last eight years, went wrong. He has discussed
in recent interviews his many "disappointments," such
as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, as well as "missteps,"
like the unfurling of the "Mission Accomplished" banner
after U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. But admitting
actual "mistakes," we know by now, don't come as easily.
At his final press conference, when asked the state of the economy,
Bush noted that the "problem started before my presidency."
His response to the badly executed Iraq occupation was that "hard
things don't happen overnight." And in defending the federal
response to Hurricane Katrina, he quipped: "Don't tell me
the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled
off roofs right after the storm passed." But perhaps most
heatedly discussed was when he told Charlie Gibson last month
that his biggest regret was the "intelligence failure in
Iraq." "We need to come to grips with reality,"
says former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who publicly
broke with Bush over his handling of the Iraq war after leaving
the job. "Things didn't turn out the way we expected or hoped,
and we need to accept responsibility and acknowledge that. Saying
that the intelligence was faulty is just another way of pushing
responsibility onto others—and that's not going to get him
very far."
However he chooses to spin it, the real challenge for Bush and
his allies may be knowing when the public is ready to hear it.
"There's a lot of anger toward this administration and this
president, and talking about the successes at this point I think
may be falling on deaf ears," says Abrams. As Nick Ragone,
a senior VP at Ketchum who is also a presidential historian, puts
it: "PR is not a very good retroactive tool."
So where does that leave Dubya? In the hands of history, apparently.
He's said he wants to be remembered as the "man who liberated
50 million people and helped achieve peace." Well, "if,
20 or 30 years from now, Iraq is flourishing, I suppose everybody
will say, 'Well, Bush was right," says Lanny Davis, a long-time
friend of Bush's (from their days at Yale) who worked under the
Clinton administration. "But that's time, not spinmeisters
or legacy projects." No matter how you spin it, this legacy,
it seems, won't be easily salvaged.
