History Has a Way of Vindicating Great Presidents. So Don’t Prejudge Trump.

From Daily Signal.com (Feb. 18):

A recent event in Washington featured accomplished academics and government officials, some of whom had worked for either the George W. Bush or Obama administrations, discussing the first year of the Trump administration.

The moderator for one panel mentioned how a former president had been unfairly maligned during his time, and how a significant percentage of Americans had held a low opinion of him.

Since then, however, new evidence emerged that changed the perception of that president—declassified information on how he ran his meetings and made decisions. Essentially, the evidence shows that president to have been an effective commander in chief who made wise decisions.

It appears that this president’s critics—who had scoffed at and maligned him—were wrong in their assessment, and history’s evaluation has been much kinder.

……………………….

Throughout his tenure, Dwight D. Eisenhower was dismissed by critics as passive and disengaged—as a benign, grandfatherly figure who was ill-suited for the atomic age.

His occasional mispronunciations gave critics the impression that he didn’t have the intellectual heft to be president. The fact that he appointed several business leaders to his Cabinet convinced some that he was a puppet of Wall Street.

The year after Eisenhower left office, academics ranked him as a below-average president (21st out of 31).

Of course, presumptions about Eisenhower’s intellect ignored the fact that he was one of the most accomplished military figures in American history, leading the successful invasion of Normandy in 1944 and serving as the first supreme commander of NATO.

Since then, historians have discovered that Eisenhower’s supposed passivity was a misperception that resulted from his preference for working behind the scenes, and that in actuality, he was fully in charge of his presidency.

…………………….

More recently, Ronald Reagan also was dismissed as an intellectual lightweight, an “amiable dunce.” Reagan’s critics believed him to be a right-wing war monger whose defense budget increases and tough rhetoric against the Soviet Union (or, as he called it, the “evil empire”) could lead to nuclear war.

In 1980, Reagan insisted he was “willing to negotiate an honest, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons.” Soon after entering office, he explored the possibility of reducing nuclear weapons and even eliminating all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

These efforts seemed to go against Reagan’s image as a right-wing cowboy.

Critics, including those in the Freeze movement (which advocated a freeze in the building of nuclear warheads), dismissed Reagan’s moves as efforts to kill arms control efforts. There was no way, they believed, that right-wing Reagan was serious about reducing Cold War tensions.

But when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev took power in Moscow in 1985, Reagan found a willing partner. The rapport they built up in their summits in Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavík in 1986 helped to end the Cold War.

Reagan’s critics no longer could question his sincerity when he and Gorbachev signed a treaty in 1987 that eliminated all intermediate-range nuclear and conventional missiles—far beyond what any previous Democrat or Republican president had achieved in nuclear arms control.  [read more]

Yea, I remember the press dismissing President Reagan as just a cowboy or actor.