[I. M. Trenchant]

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my enquiry. Your comment that "In spite of his foreign policy achievements, he was awful on the economy, and let political conflict get way out of hand." is unarguable -- although I'm ever-mindful that Milton Friedman said 'Nixon was one of the smartest men I ever met.' and that Nixon's temporizing with wage & price controls, as a short-term measure, did work; and abandoning the Gold Standard prevented most of the U.S. Gold Reserves from being shipped to the U.K. Although I'm sure we could get into an argument about the appropriateness of Nixon's having acted on expediency rather than on principle (as Friedman thought he had), I think our principal point of disagreement is with respect to the way in which public assessments of U.S. presidents will or will not change in a time-dependent fashion. Again, I can't disagree with your view that the rating for Nixon, if it continues to be measured the way it is now done by Gallup, is unlikely to change, or to change only slowly in the short term: at 32% now, it might approach 50% in a few years time, when the GOP finds it necessary to support a nominee who has 'moderate' credentials and, like Arnold, is unafraid to mention Nixon's name at a GOP Convention. We'll see.

What I do expect will change, but only in the longterm, is the way in which the assessments are made, i.e., not using the words Approval and Disapproval, but using the words Job Performance, Policy Competence or Accomplishment. As Gallup now structures its poll in this era when annual retrospectives on Watergate continue apace (but will eventually peter out), the Gallup poll question is the equivalent of asking a respondent if he/she approves of their President being a crook. I'm a bit more optimistic than that. If you have the patience to read further, I would outline what I think is wrong with both 'populist' (Gallup, Harris etc polls) and 'elitist' (by professional historians) polling.

In time, I think Gallup assessments, like the Lovenstein Presidential I.Q. polls and the Arthur Schlesinger & Son polls of expert opinion, will be viewed as laughable anachronisms from a bogus era in U.S. journalism-cum-history. Insofar as I can determine, the renaissance of Truman's reputation came in the midst of Watergate when HST's alleged 'plain speaking' reputation came to the fore [Were there ever any hints of this renaissance in HST's reputation in the intervening years between 1952 and 1972? -- not as far I can determine]. However, as in the case of the 'Saddam 911' effect I mentioned in my earlier post (#92), the public was, by 1972, almost totally oblivious of the fact that HST lied his way shamelessly through the Alger Hiss scandal. Truman proclaimed to his death that he wasn't sure Hiss was guilty even though all of Bradley, Marshall, Hoover and the Canadian Prime Minister (via Gouzenko) had privately told him what decoding of Venona [and later the GRU files of the former Soviet Union] would later reveal to the public: Hiss was a Soviet agent code-named ALES who pocketed his Stalin Medal during the Yalta Summit.

I recall Frank Newport or one of his minions, on a network newscast, announcing, almost in tears, that recent polls suggested Nixon is better known for the China opening than for Watergate, and he -- a polling official yet! -- then volunteered that this was a very disturbing trend in view of the assault on 'our' Constitution by the Nixon adminstration. Surely there is a doctoral thesis 'out there', one that can be recycled into a Best Seller, which takes an appropriately mawkish view of the whole corrupted system of Presidential evaluation, and offers a vision-of-amendment that would elevate the quality of both 'populist' and 'elitist' polling by linking the results to some palpable knowledge (on the part of the respondent) of the notable achievements (job performance) that emerged from a given president's administration. As things now stand, one has to wonder if most respondents aren't about as informed as those charming airheads who are the subject of Jay Leno's 'man-in-the-street' type interviews. Thanks for your patience if you've come this far -- and thanks, also, for the tip about Kuklick's book, which I just ordered from AbeBooks.

[x]

You're right that these polls are popularity contests. You'd have to evaluate presidents separately on separate criteria to have meaningful answers.

Truman did become a folk hero during Watergate. He'd just died and his book Plain Speaking had just come out, as had a stage show with James Whitmore. People took "honest, plain spoken" Harry for the Anti-Nixon. But he'd already cracked the top ten in Schlesinger's 1962 poll of (liberal) historians, so his reputation had been rising with academics before the Seventies.

There's a lot to be said for Truman, and some truth in the notion that "he was right about all the big things (though he was wrong about a lot of the little ones)." It's more the folk hero, wonderful little Harry that I object to. People who longed for him to return after he died probably would have hated him if he were in office again. He rubbed people the wrong way.

And some of those decisions that he did make were very questionable -- the Hiss case, nationalizing the steel industry, wage and price controls. While he may have been right on the "big question" of firing McArthur, there was an awful lot of bungling in his administration's policies on China and Korea. I can accept the idea that the country was still struggling to figure out its Cold War policies in the Truman years, so nobody could have gotten things completely right, but Truman's fans let him off too easily.