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Every semester, flocks of college students settle into their seats for seminars on some variation on the theme of presidential power. And while the professor at the lectern will rightly illustrate the specifics—pardons and clemencies, declarations of war, and peace negotiations —there’s often one crucial role that gets missed: historian.
That’s right. Presidents in the United States have a unique power over their own legacies owing to their unmatched bully pulpit. As every word they utter can capture a global audience, Presidents can, over time, move the way the country thinks about itself. Some understand this explicitly; one professor of American civilization even wrote a fascinating 2018 book about the phenomenon, Barack Obama: American Historian, and how the 44th President harnessed his own reading of U.S. history to inform the political moments of his own life. Other Presidents are more indifferent to history, and the last Oval Office occupant in particular seems to have adopted a fiercely ahistorical posture.
Eventually, though, most realize that they’re simultaneously creating and midwifing the history of their nation. And, when they fully appreciate it, they can use the power for their own advantages. For all of the good that apparatchiks and technocrats can bring to improve government, the story of any President gets far richer when there’s been someone loyal to the boss keeping an eye on legacy. Myth-making isn’t something that died with the Greek and Roman tales.
After all, what are presidential libraries if not interactive rewrites of history? Tour any of them and you’ll notice plenty of sharp edges that have been sanded down. Until 2011,…
Source : time
