Excerpt
JIM LEHRER (Editor, Newshour): Michael, as a matter of history, will Barack Obama be known from now on as the man who got Osama bin Laden?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, presidential historian: I think he will, along with, presumably, a lot of other things, especially if he gets a second term.
But you can be sure that the Obama Presidential Library, whether it's on the south side of Chicago or in Honolulu -- these are the two contenders -- will have a large remembrance of the day that President Obama did this.
And in real time, I think it's important, because we have heard during the last couple of years that this was -- from Obama's critics, this was a professor so addicted to nuance that he couldn't make a decisive move in foreign policy.
And someone known as little as Barack Obama before he became president, you feel as if you're learning all sorts of new things about him. Go back to Sunday. This is a guy whose gut -- who has got a lot of guts, who is willing to take a decision that, if it had gone badly, could have cost him a lot.
JIM LEHRER: Beverly Gage, do you agree this says more about President Obama than people knew before the other day?
BEVERLY GAGE, Yale University: I do agree with that. I think it pushes back, as Michael was suggesting, against a narrative of indecisiveness, kind of weakness when it came to terrorism, when it came to military matters.
But I think it also is a narrative that hasn't just dogged Obama, but has actually dogged Democrats for several decades at this point.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Right.
BEVERLY GAGE: If you think back at least to the Iran hostage crisis in the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter attempted a somewhat similar mission, it was a secret military strike mission. That case, it was to actually rescue the hostages. It wasn't a mission of assassination.
And it turned out to be an absolute disaster. And the icons of that became the helicopter that went down in the desert before they even reached their target. And it became one of the defining moments of the Carter presidency. And I think it's had ramifications for Democrats ever since.
So, it's important for Obama, but it is also really important for the Democratic Party as a whole in pushing back against that image that dates at least to the 1970s.
JIM LEHRER: But the politics aside, political parties elements to this aside, Michael, use the Jimmy Carter example. He had guts. He made the decision to rescue the hostages.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: He did.
JIM LEHRER: And it was -- he's not the one who brought the helicopters down. And yet he was blamed for the failure and was accused of all kinds of things...
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: There were accidents. And the result was, he didn't get the hostages out. Had it worked, he probably would have been reelected in 1980, but, instead...
JIM LEHRER: And that would have been his...
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That would have been decisive Carter. You know, this great masterstroke goes down in history. Instead, people connected this to high oil prices, gas lines, high inflation, frustration in Afghanistan, this kind of thing.
And so this is what these things oftentimes mean. Another example, Gerald Ford, in the wake of the Vietnam War, spring of 1975, America had just lost the war in Vietnam, first war we had lost. A Merchant Marine ship, the Mayaguez, American ship, was taken hostage by the Khmer Rouge.
Ford sent the Marines in. The Marines liberated the ship. The staff -- the people who were on the ship all survived. Eighteen Marines were killed in the course of this, but this was seen as a great masterstroke for Gerald Ford, a more decisive leader than we thought.
And also -- and there's a resonance of this today -- it raised American morale in the wake of the loss in Vietnam.
JIM LEHRER: So Beverly Gage, in many ways, these presidents make these decisions, gutsy or whatever you want to call them, but the people who have to carry them out are the ones who make it either work or not work, or providence and a lot of other things are involved, correct?
BEVERLY GAGE: That's absolutely true.
I mean, Michael's right that, in some sense, Jimmy Carter's role ended when he made that decision, and it was the same decision whether the mission itself succeeded or failed. But of course the presidents, in the end, actually end up being the figureheads of these moments and are, rightly or wrongly, given a lot of responsibility for how the operation actually plays out.
I'm actually not sure that I agree with Michael that, had that mission succeeded in -- in the Iran hostage case, that Jimmy Carter would have been re-elected. I think we actually have lots of examples of these kind of great moments of decisiveness, a bump in the polls, that in fact doesn't end up changing electoral outcomes.
You think of something like Harry Truman in 1945, who's seen as a weak president. People don't have a lot of confidence in him. He makes the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. It's this moment of horror on the one hand, but of real, you know, American dominance. People are impressed with American technology. Harry Truman is suddenly seen as this very decisive figure, in a way that he hadn't been before. And he's clobbered following year at the polls.
So, I don't think that we can say, necessarily, that history is going to suggest that this makes it an easy road for Obama now. In fact, there's a long time between now and the 2012 elections. I think it will certainly change the way historians write about Obama in 20 or 30 years, but I'm not sure it's going to be the thing that changes how people vote in the upcoming election.
JIM LEHRER: Michael?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Jimmy Carter point, what I really meant was not that the mini-drama of a hostage rescue would have helped Jimmy Carter, but the hostages would have been out. You wouldn't have had that problem for Carter all the way through 1980, culminating in the election. Carter would have had a much bigger chance against Ronald Reagan.
And the other point I would like to make is that there is a general pattern here, as there oftentimes is in history. And that is that, since 1945, presidents have encouraged Americans to think that they're responsible for almost everything...
JIM LEHRER: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: ... you know, increase in prosperity, wars that we win, other things that you like, while at the same time, they're not responsible for the things that you don't like.
And one symptom of this is that, when there is a decision like this that really does rest on the performance of the SEALs this case, or other things that are beyond a president's control, it's the president who gets the credit or gets the blame. And perhaps we should be a little bit more modulated in giving presidents both.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, Beverly Gage?
BEVERLY GAGE: I do agree.
But I think one thing that, again, the Carter example really underscores is just how much of a risk Obama took in authorizing this mission. So, it certainly could have gone either way. There are any number of things that could have gone wrong that he wouldn't have been directly responsible for, sandstorms, for instance.
But, on the other hand, given that he knew the number of things that could have gone wrong, it was a huge risk for him to take in his presidency. And it's going to be a risk that pays off. But how much it pays off, in the end, in terms of electoral success, we will have to wait and see.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I -- I agree with Beverly.
JIM LEHRER: OK. But if the raid had gone badly, both of you agree that, no matter how -- quote -- "gutsy" his decision was, if the raid had gone badly, for any reason, it would have been an Obama -- it would have been on Obama's record, and he would have been blamed for it?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Everything that people would be frustrated by in the Barack Obama administration would have been connected to this, and this would have been a symbol of that.
Barack Obama knew that. And that does show how much courage he had in making that decision.
JIM LEHRER: And, Beverly, I'm interested in your -- your Truman analogy as well. Truman -- as you say, Truman went out lowest in the polls in American history up to that point, and maybe since.
But he's now considered one of the great presidents. In other words, many, many years later, you historians went back and said, oh, he wasn't so bad after -- after all.
BEVERLY GAGE: That's absolutely right.
And so, you know, with historians, I always say what is the impact going to be? I don't know. Ask me in 30 years. Ask me in 40 years, and then we will really know what this moment means.
These historians MAY have skipped an example, President John F Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis (aka The Missiles of October). Talk about if this presidential decision had gone wrong.....
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