By Jack Butler
Sunday, August 21, 2022
‘We are only passing through history,” says the villainous archaeologist René Belloq of himself and his rival (and our hero) Indiana Jones near the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. “This,” he says, pointing to the Ark of the Covenant, which Jones threatens to blow up unless Belloq releases Marion, Indy’s flame, “this is history.”
Today, there is a group of historians not content merely to pass through history. Instead, they want to help make it. Toward that end, they have attached themselves to the presidency of Joe Biden, the presidency having become essentially sacralized as an office of near-spiritual significance. They have consulted with him and guided him, as recently as this month. And they presumably hope that, with their help, he can become a world-historical figure. But in this endeavor they have dishonored their profession and even damaged the country.
Even before Biden became president, one of this crew was already leveraging a historian’s knowledge of the past in service of a glorious Biden future. Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, formally endorsed Biden in March 2020. “Donald Trump won’t be the last American president,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “But history — ancient and recent — tells us that, come November, we ought to make Joe Biden the next one.” (Convenient!) He then gave a speech for the 2020 Democratic National Convention. He called the upcoming contest “a choice that goes straight to the nature of the soul of America.” (Subtle.)
When Biden became president-elect, Meacham was there to affirm for us, through a Biden speech he helped write, that it was now time to “rebuild the soul of America, to rebuild the backbone of this nation, the middle class, and to make America respected around the world again.” (“Soul”!) Appearing on NBC shortly after this speech, Meacham praised it — without acknowledging that he had helped write it. With his help, an election in which voters removed an unpopular incumbent and left his successor with divided government became a historic mandate. Never mind that said Republican incumbent had himself helped give Democrats what they initially lacked after the 2020 election returns came in: control (albeit narrow) of the Senate. The stage was set for a new era — or so Meacham would have us believe.
And onto this stage Meacham rushed, this time with friends, hoping to act out their predetermined drama. In March 2021, according to Axios, Meacham organized a meeting of fellow historians, in which they deliberately inflated President Biden’s pretensions. We do not know all that Meacham, Michael Beschloss, Michael Eric Dyson, Joanne Freeman, Eddie Glaude Jr., Annette Gordon-Reed, and Walter Isaacson discussed with Biden. But the excerpts Axios provides give a nice flavor:
Hosting historians around a long table in the East Room earlier this month, President Biden took notes in a black book as they discussed some of his most admired predecessors. Then he said to Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I’m no FDR, but . . .”
Why it matters: He’d like to be. The March 2 session, which the White House kept under wraps, reflects Biden’s determination to be one of the most consequential presidents.
Biden told this crew that “he knew the gravity of the multiple crises facing America,” and, despite knowing “a lot” about FDR, he “peppered Goodwin with questions about the World War II leader.” Ominously, “they talked a lot about the elasticity of presidential power, and the limits of going bigger and faster than the public might anticipate or stomach.”
Biden would spend much of the rest of the year trying, and ultimately failing, to force his “Build Back Better” plan, a New Deal–style supercharging of the government’s role in American life, through Congress on narrow majorities. Meanwhile, the more workaday aspects of his job eluded him, as the domestic- and foreign-policy minutiae that can float or sink a presidency tended to break, one after another, against him. Actual history, not fan-service, might have provided a warning about leaders who let grandiosity out of whack with their abilities and mandates consume their focus.
But the historians weren’t done yet. Earlier this year, Biden attempted to bully Congress into passing H.R. 1, a titanic restructuring of election law that would have shifted the balance of control over elections decidedly toward the national government. And he used Georgia, a state that dared to reform its own election laws by shedding pandemic-era exigencies, as a foil. With Meacham again as a muse, Biden put the choice for America in stark terms:
History has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights. And it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion.
So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?
At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
A month later, Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, spoke in similarly stark, hyperbolic terms. Noting that one of the last speeches Abraham Lincoln gave before his assassination by John Wilkes Booth — who heard the speech and acted out of fear of its portent — argued for giving freed slaves the right to vote, she then made a direct parallel to today. “And here we are, 150 years later, and there are people in the country now trying to get the idea that voting rights should be pulled back, rather than pushed forward.”
And that brings us to the most recent meeting, in early August, which was private but about which we’ve somehow learned so much. It unfolded, the Washington Post reports, as a kind of “Socratic dialogue” between Biden and the historians, who “painted the current moment as among the most perilous in modern history for democratic governance.” Of course, “comparisons were made to the years before the 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln warned that a ‘house divided against itself cannot stand’ and the lead-up to the 1940 election, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled rising domestic sympathy for European fascism and resistance to the United States joining World War II.” With Biden’s pretensions flattered thus yet again, there is no telling what momentous follies he might be tempted to pursue.
Allegedly professional interpreters of the past, Biden’s court historians have instead contorted and corrupted it in service of their present biases. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends, in their narrative, toward the 2020 Democratic Party platform. We often hear it said that something or other is on the “wrong side of history.” Any honest study of the past, with its contingencies and improbabilities, disinclines one to think in such terms. As National Review's Jay Nordlinger has said, history does not have sides — though historians do.
An honest study of, say, the FDR presidency would offer examples both of genuine leadership and of rank demagoguery. Ironically, Meacham, in his initial Biden endorsement, favorably cited an example of the latter: “In their need [the American people] have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action,” FDR said in his First Inaugural address. “They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.” One sees in this faux humility a man who had already committed to a course of action that would presume to fulfill the wishes of the entire nation, prior limitations on his power be damned. And take another example that Meacham did not cite, yet which flows logically out of the one he did. If FDR speaks for the people as a whole, then to oppose his agenda, he said in his 1944 State of the Union address, would be to “have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.” Honest historians would acknowledge such blemishes on the record of a president they otherwise hold up as a model.
For some historians, there is too much history to be made. Onto their favored figure — in this case, Biden — they project stratospheric ambitions, and then prescribe only more cowbell when ambitions are frustrated.
There is a further irony in this particular project: Its outcome was predictable. “The fear of that kind of work is you get labeled a court historian and are seen as being hyperpartisan,” Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley told the New York Times in November 2020. “But if anyone can pull it off, Meacham can. He’s liked by moderate Republicans. He’s a best-selling writer. He’s a wordsmith, and that’s what Biden needs. He’s probably able to keep a foot in both worlds.” Brinkley should have trusted the historical record. There is a temptation toward lenience for chroniclers of the past when writing about powerful men. Writing to Mandell Creighton, Lord Acton denied that we should “judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong.” To Acton, “If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases.” In fact,
great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
And this was about figures long dead. The allure of living presidents is the possibility of using them to become part of history yourself.
History should humble us, not embolden us. Invoking it should be a scrupulous exercise, not a foray into partisanship. By flattering Joe Biden, by misleading him, by striving openly to become part of a history tailored to their own biases, the president’s historians haven’t just dishonored their profession. They have damaged the country. Thus, a final irony in their conduct: They have made history, all right, but they’re likely to be remembered in a bad light. For our and their sakes, they should not set foot near the White House again.
Perhaps they belong in a museum.
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