David Cloud reminds us of another president regarded as a terrible failure at the time.

“I wonder how well you have been sleeping these last nights? Mothers and fathers all over our beloved land are spending sleepless nights worrying again over their boys being sent to fight wars on foreign soil—wars that are no concern of ours.”

—Letter to the President from the parent of a U.S. soldier

Talk about discouraging. All year long the negative numbers about the war rolled in like the tide. The President’s approval rating in the Gallup poll bottomed out at 23 percent. Another poll showed that 43 percent of Americans thought it was a mistake to have entered the war. The enthusiasm from early victories quickly evaporated.

Opposition party members spared no effort in blasting the President and his Administration. One senator called the Secretary of Defense a “living lie,” and another called for the Secretary’s resignation. The most bombastic senator went so far as to call the Secretary a traitor. Another senator began using the President’s name when referring to the war, and his intention wasn’t to honor the Commander in Chief.

Newspapers and magazines also joined the frenzy. A New York Times editorial characterized the Administration’s war misjudgments “a colossal military blunder.” A front-page editorial in the Chicago Tribune called for immediate impeachment proceedings against the President. Time said he was “responsible for one of the worst military disasters in history.”

The pessimism was not confined to the opposition. Members of the President’s own Administration shared the negative mood. His Secretary of Defense conceded, “We were at our lowest point.” The British Prime Minister believed that the conflict should be abandoned in order to focus resources on protecting Europe. The British leader flew to Washington to lecture the American leader on how to run the conflict after the President performed badly at a news conference.

That president was Harry Truman and the war was in Korea.

The letter quoted above was typical of the mail Truman received, as his letters ran 20-1 against the war. The term “Truman’s War,” coined by Nebraska Republican Kenneth Wherry, became an epithet. “To err is Truman” was a clever saying of the time. George C. Marshall, Truman’s Secretary of Defense, was vilified by the right wing and singled out for special abuse by Joseph McCarthy. When he announced that he would not run in 1952, virtually no one—including Democrats—was sorry to see Truman go.

But a funny thing happened after Truman left office. Historians and the public began to realize the importance of what he had done in standing up militarily to Communism in Asia. It is frightening to think what would have happened if Truman had heeded British leader Clement Atlee’s call to forsake Asia in order to safeguard Europe. With Korea gone and China already lost to the communists, the defense of Japan might have been impossible. Imagine the hardworking, industrialized Japanese as part of the Soviet or Chinese sphere.

We could also pull out similar quotes from the Civil War, during which Abraham Lincoln was excoriated by the Peace Democrats throughout the War. Republicans were so fed up with his leadership that his own Secretary of the Treasury considered running against Lincoln for the 1864 nomination. Lincoln was so convinced that he was going to lose to McClellan, a general running on a peace and compromise platform that Lincoln got his cabinet officers to sign a secret memorandum pledging to continue the fight even if Lincoln lost that Novemeber.

We just don’t know now how history will look back on the war in Iraq. As Cloud points out, it all depends on what happens with the efforts to build an operational democracy there. If that is successful, historians may regard Bush quite differently than they do today. And Clinton’s presidency could appear more as the antebellum presidents do today, men who did nothing to stave off the impending crisis.

(Cross-posted at Betsy’s Page with additional thoughts on the Truman/Bush comparison by Jeff Jacoby)

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