THE CURSE OF GOOD TIMES

(2 of 2)
"Modern historians like crisis management, crisis response and presidential swashbuckling," says Richard Norton Smith, a biographer of George Washington's. "My reading of Rutherford B. Hayes is that he was a great man who was President at a time when greatness lay beyond the presidency--in Congress and in the private sector." That situation exists in this nation today.

Other historical similarities between the Hayes and Clinton eras are startling. A Europe beginning a 40-year interlude of peace (for Clinton, read as the end of the cold war). A nation changing from an agricultural economy to an industrial base (now, industry to information). A First Lady, "Lemonade Lucy," devoted to attacking the great social and family scourge of alcohol (not far removed from Hillary's health-care and children's crusades).

Ari Hoogenboom, a wonderfully iconoclastic historian at Brooklyn College, has written two books on Hayes in the firm belief that history has shortchanged him, and in no small part because of a throwaway line by the brilliant but careless author Thomas Wolfe, who described Hayes along with Arthur, James Garfield and Benjamin Harrison as "lost Americans" with "gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces."

Without ever intending it, Hoogenboom has defined both Clinton's opportunity and his historical peril. If Clinton can deliver a heroic message on the commonplace and prosaic things of government (Social Security, balanced budget, education), he may climb up beside Roosevelt. But Hayes was not able to do it, even though he was a Civil War hero who, wounded five times and repeatedly cited for bravery, rose from major to general, and in office (Congressman, Governor, Senator and President) was judged to be intelligent, informed, squeaky clean and fully engaged with the issues before him. But there was no world or national upheaval worthy of the name.

"Clinton," says historian Smith, "needs to decide what needs to be done in this country, and he needs to just do it. If he starts to poll historians about what to do, he probably will never make it."