It is true that modernity has made it more possible for leaders’ reputations to be redeemed (and also newly trashed) by our wondrous technological advances and our enormously revised ideas about the sanctity, or lack of it, of private communication. So far as I know, there are no secret tapes of Richard III saying ““And, oh, by the way, be sure to finish off those little brats in the tower.’’ Today, there would be tapes, and you’d be able to get six of them in a Handi-Pak, although only after the king had lost a lawsuit to retain control over them for use in his memoir. So hostile impressions and/or fake, sunny ones are not embedded in concrete, resisting alterations over the centuries. There’s a little room, sometimes more, for maneuver and change there. We have, after all, seen an amazing outpouring of once tightly held secret records in recent years, and they are in some measure revising our opinion of the merit of different leaders as well as the merit of different policies and programs.
It is also the case that our roiling politics and enterprising scholarship over the past couple of decades have energized the impulse to historical ““revisionism.’’ The alabaster pieties have come crashing down. There is a lot of politics in all of this, and whether all that much of the iconoclasm will take hold and last is anyone’s guess. But it surely has raised hell with the most settled (one had thought) ““legacies.’’ Consider the transformation of poor Columbus’s once relatively untarnished reputation, only a few years back. In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, as every literate American schoolchild could once chant. But coming up on his 500th anniversary, in fact just in time for it in 1992, the great navigator got hit in the face with a custard pie. His ““legacy’’ was revised by a great number of scholars to go from courage, imagination and diligence, among other sterling qualities, to an assortment of villainies that include genocide, racism and heedless rape and ruin of the environment.
These reputations can change then for the better or the worse, mostly, I think, when there is a political motivation for the change, when it provides a kind of convenience or comfort to one side in an argument. I have been bemused, as have no doubt any number of my Washington contemporaries, by what happened to Sen. Robert Byrd’s image–his legend, his folk song–among my liberal colleagues in journalism and elsewhere, as his position on impeachment gradually unfolded. Senator Byrd was seen for a time as just another starchy, retrograde legislator, all hung up on the archaic lore of the Senate, ceaselessly spouting citations and precedents from the Constitution. To be rude about it, as they were, they dismissed him as a bore. But when it became apparent that his inclination and his own studies were leading him not to a love of Clinton or even to a degree of political solidarity with him, let alone any sympathy for what he did, but rather to conclusions about the Constitution that would be advantageous to Clinton, all that quickly changed. Byrd became in the Clinton supporters’ depiction a great Roman statesman, a man beyond reproach–a living, walking, breathing toga.
This reminded me powerfully of a similar attitude so many of us in the press and in liberal politics took toward North Carolina’s Sen. Sam Ervin during the Watergate hearings, which he conducted in 1973. It wasn’t just that we liked what he was doing to the Nixon administration (generally to our happy surprise) or that we admired his refusal to be cowed by its maneuvers and tricks, or even that we were unexpectedly gratified by the sharp edge he displayed when the questioning required it. All that would have been standard. Rather, what we managed to do was elevate him overnight to the status of constitutional scholar par excellence, devoted promoter of American citizens’ rights. Senator Ervin was a man who, not so long before, had been contributing mightily to the continued systematic repression of black people in his state and in the country at large. He lent his legal talents to the cause of thwarting the desegregation of public institutions. That hardly fit in with our newly adopted huggy-bear image of him as ““Mr. Sam.’’ But we disregarded this discrepancy.
And just so we have lately done something similar as regards Senator Byrd. I am not referring to his membership in the Klan, as a young poor boy in West Virginia. I am referring to the fact that well within the memory of many living in the capital now, Senator Byrd, as a committee chairman with responsibility for much that profoundly affected the lives of Washington’s black poor, was in fact their scourge, a legislator still remembered for prolonging their misery. He had a big and formidable reputation for that. I don’t say that people don’t change. Both men, to their immense credit, have accomplished remarkable, constructive things. Neither needs to worry about his ““legacy.’’ The problem is that the rest of us are tending to reject the very idea of such complexity because it threatens our position, whatever it is.
Perceived ““legacies’’ can change for the better, as a result of real achievement and serious reflection on the part of the public. Anyone who is old enough to remember the scurrilous way Harry Truman was portrayed by the press in the final days and early aftermath of his presidency will know that. But it takes time, and it takes genuine accomplishment. The Clinton people may or may not be able to get there. But they can’t do it in a hurry or on the cheap.
