On the eve of President Joe Biden’s departure from the White House, we’ve asked historian Douglas Brinkley for his assessment of our 46th president:
When President Richard Nixon died in 1994, most Americans thought instantly of one word: Watergate. They didn’t think of the EPA, the vital government agency Nixon created. Nor did they think of China, the country he visited as president and strengthened diplomatic ties with. No, the country remembered him, above all, for his foulest political blunder.
Whether the same fate will befall Joe Biden remains to be seen.
His achievements are tangible and numerous. Enrollment in the Affordable Care Act has nearly doubled from four years ago. Biden got more federal judges confirmed than any president in a single term (save Jimmy Carter). His steadfast support for Ukraine and NATO expansion, at a time of creeping autocracy in Europe, was heroic.
But Biden’s mistakes cost him, and his country, dearly. He appointed an attorney general, Merrick Garland, whose painstaking scrupulousness delayed, and ultimately doomed, the DOJ’s prosecution of Donald Trump. Furthermore, Biden undermined his own credibility by pardoning his son after repeatedly vowing not to.
Another broken promise proved far more consequential. Biden’s implicit campaign pledge in 2020 that his presidency would serve as a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders rang hollow when he ran for re-election four years later. When he reluctantly handed the reins to his vice president, Kamala Harris, he put her in an inauspicious position from which she didn’t recover.
Biden’s mistaken conviction that he, and he alone, could defeat the man he considered a threat to the democratic order is the very reason that man will place his hand on the Bible tomorrow.
Over his 50 years of public service, Joe Biden has proved himself a patriot. But for all his basic decency, history may come to remember him for another trait: hubris.
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Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley
Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Karen Brenner.
See also:
Writing the first draft of President Biden’s legacy (“Sunday Morning”)Douglas Brinkley and the lesson of Trump’s guilty verdict (“Sunday Morning”)Douglas Brinkley: Let us celebrate patriots who put country over party (“Sunday Morning”) Douglas Brinkley: Congress is to blame for an imperious presidency (“Sunday Morning”)
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Douglas Brinkley on President Biden’s legacy
