January 15, 2007	Monday	Zilhaj 24, 1427

LOS ANGELES: When Calvin Coolidge left the presidency in March 1929, having forsworn what surely would have been a re-election romp, he was basking in public adulation of a rare kind. Credited with six years of “Coolidge prosperity,” praised for restoring integrity to Washington after the Teapot Dome scandal, admired for avoiding foreign wars, Silent Cal decamped to his native New England a man beloved. Back in Northampton, Mass., reporters peered in his car window, and one tried to enter his bathroom while he was showering.

Just four years later, however, when Coolidge died suddenly from a heart attack, he already seemed a relic. With the Depression and renewed European hostilities, his economic programme had come to appear blinkered rather than sensible, his foreign policy self-deluding rather than statesmanlike and his hands-off governing style flaccid rather than prudent. The country had just swept Franklin Delano Roosevelt into office, a man whose ideas Coolidge had disparaged as “socialistic.”

“We are in a new era,” Coolidge lamented to a friend just before his death, “to which I do not belong.” His public image has never recovered.

Coolidge may have been the last American president whose reputation plummeted after his term ended. The national hoopla surrounding the deaths of Richard Nixon in 1994, Ronald Reagan in 2004 and last month — to the astonishment of historians, as well as most other Americans over 30 — Gerald Ford suggests that nothing helps a chief executive’s standing with the public so much as his demise.

After all, Ford, notwithstanding his much-celebrated Midwestern decency, will likely escape notice in the next century’s history textbooks, except perhaps as the man who let Nixon go free — an act, lest we forget, that also permitted vital “what did the president know” questions go unanswered. Nixon, for his part, was not the internationalist visionary his eulogists canonised but a mean-hearted, power-hungry lawbreaker who thought himself above the Constitution (and one whose foreign policy legacy actually remains mixed).

Reagan, though adored in certain quarters, was deeply reviled in others — loathed as much as the current incumbent for his ultraconservatism, his simple-mindedness and his scorn for the welfare state.

Of course, we shouldn’t construe the sonorous eulogies and lofty pronouncements about history’s judgment of Nixon, Ford and Reagan as proof of their permanent rehabilitation. Funerals aren’t the time for carping — whether to dwell on Ford’s fecklessness, Reagan’s callousness or Nixon’s criminality.

Nonetheless, it certainly appears that leaving office does wonders for one’s reputation. Bill Clinton, defying forecasts that the Monica Lewinsky scandal would shape his legacy, has seen his popularity rating rise to 70 per cent since leaving the White House. George H.W. Bush — turned out of office in 1992 with the lowest share of the popular vote of any incumbent since William Howard Taft — now wins kudos from old critics who contrast his multilateralism and wartime restraint with his son’s heedlessness.

Why do we venerate our former presidents so much more than our sitting ones? One argument is that when they take up humanitarian causes in their retirement, they gain respect from across the partisan divide. Bush the elder and Clinton were back in the public eye after the 2004 tsunami and again after Hurricane Katrina to raise money for the victims; Carter, for years, has built homes for the poor.

We like to imagine former presidents as belonging to an elite club of veteran wise men. Having earned their battle stars and scars, we figure, they now deserve a certain respect.

History delivers few final verdicts. What’s important is to maintain a humility about those judgments we offer. When presidents make news for heading up disaster-relief efforts or chairing commissions or being laid to rest, we should bear in mind that some of those whom we consider heroes may soon be remembered as rogues, some sinners as saints, and some men of decency as nullities who just happened to briefly hold the most powerful office in the world.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service