Public Rehabilitation

Many of George W. Bush's most ardent supporters insist that history's verdict of his presidency will be kinder than the assessment of his contemporaries.

One often hears his defenders draw the comparison between Bush and Harry Truman.

Truman's rehabilitation in the public eye took a couple of decades to achieve, but, by the mid-1970s, a few years after his death in December 1972, the reversal was so complete that "Give 'Em Hell Harry" was the subject of a hit one-man play starring James Whitmore and a modestly successful pop song by Chicago.

Although not as much of an influence on popular culture, Richard Nixon also needed a couple of decades to revive his public image after leaving office, but his efforts led to his treatment as an elder statesman when he died in 1994.

I'm no fortune teller. I can't gaze into a crystal ball and say whether Bush's image will improve in 20 years.

But it would be a mistake to look at the experiences of Truman and Nixon as typical. There is no road map one can follow to redemption.

If there is, no one bothered to share it with James Longstreet.

By virtually every account one can find, Longstreet was regarded as the most capable, most skillful general in the Confederate army — if not the most capable and most skillful general on either side in the Civil War.

Even his adversaries thought so.

But he committed three great sins in the eyes of his fellow Southerners when

• he quarreled with Robert E. Lee about the tactics to be used by the South at Gettysburg,
• he was proven — by the outcomes of both the battle and the war — to be right in his assessment of the South's strategy, and
• his work for the federal government after the war led to his conversion to the Republican Party, which was held responsible for the pain the South experienced as a result of Reconstruction.

The Civil War ended in 1865. Longstreet was in his 40s when Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, and he lived nearly 40 more years — until this date in 1904 — but his reputation was still in tatters in the South well into the 20th century.

The moral of the story? Even if you're in the right, it may take a very long time for people to realize it.

Bush is 62 years old. Image rehabilitation (if it happens at all) may not occur in his lifetime.