And of course, to paraphrase another famous Democrat, Jimmy Carter was no Franklin Roosevelt. Presidential legacies are not so obvious to contemporaries. When Lyndon Jhnson left office, a wise analyst would have guessed that LBJ was driven from office by the Vietnam war, which was bound to influence his place in history. Yet while time has not erased the catastrophe of Johnson's war, and will not, it has recognized his enduring legacy in the size and scope of the federal government. We now live in a trillion-dollar universe.
Legacies are often deceptive.
When Dwight Eisenhower went home to Gettysburg, he was rated poorly by left-wing historians as a lazy executive, overshadowed by his young, dynamic successor, John F. Kennedy. Now, of course, Ike's eight years of peace, prosperity and domestic progress look very different when compared with the Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall and Judith Exner. Bill Clinton's legacy, perhaps, is the search for a legacy. When presidents are frustrated by domestic failure, they turn to foreign affairs for relief. But as he leaves office, Bill Clinton cannot be too sanguine about the state of the world.