Letters to Clio

I wish I had a daughter named Clio , because all the boys want to make nice with her. Clio is the muse of history , and wooing history has become the favorite pastime of modern politicians, mired as they are in an unappealing present.

People like Vice President Dick Cheney , for instance, like to gaze at the faraway horizon, because the view close at hand is just plain ugly. About a year ago , NBC's Kelly O'Donnell invited Cheney to revisit his 2005 assertion that the Iraq insurgency was in its " last throes." Responding to this impudent question, the vice president instinctually reached for the history card.

"I really believe that when the history books are written that what we'll find is that 2005 was the turning year, the watershed year for Iraq operations," he told O'Donnell. "And I think when we look back from the perspective of history, we'll see that that was the turning point . . . I don't think you can judge it just day by day, or what's happened this week, or what happened last week."

Ah, yes. The years know what the days cannot. And yet it has been more than 365 days since Cheney said those lines, and it seems unlikely that Clio will be sending the vice president love notes any time soon. I was recently stuck in an apartment with only one book -- I know, it sounds like the setup for a bad joke -- "My Year in Iraq," by former US viceroy Jerry Bremer. Published in 2006 , the book reads as if it were written a thousand years ago, with President Bush and Bremer reassuring each other every 10 minutes that "we are not going to fail in Iraq." That's history now.

A few months ago Columbia University historian Eric Foner called George W. Bush "the worst president in US history." In a Washington Post essay, Foner argued that Bush has "clung to flawed policies" and even more than the heinous Richard M. Nixon, has "considered himself above the law."

Foner stuffs Bush down at the bottom of the wastebasket of history, next to James K. Polk. " Some historians admire [ Polk ] ," Foner notes archly, "because he made their job easier by keeping a detailed diary during his administration, which spanned the years of the Mexican-American War."

But Clio is nothing if not inconstant. Other historians, most notably Tulane University's Douglas Brinkley , admire Polk for seein' his chances and takin' 'em. Through war and big-stick diplomacy, Polk grabbed more real estate from Spain and Great Britain than Thomas Jefferson acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Say what you will about California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Oregon, but, absent Mr. Polk, San Franciscans would be paying taxes to Mexico City and the Portland Trail Blazers would be a famous cricket team.

In his article, Foner alludes to the famous Schlesinger presidential rankings, when Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and then his son polled American historians in 1948 , 1962 , and 1996 , asking about presidential greatness. Polk tends to score quite high, in the "near great" category. Nixon always scrapes along the bottom. But I'm not selling my Nixon futures yet. He's only one sycophantic -- sorry, sympathetic -- biographer away from rehabilitation.

The his-story of the moment is the resignation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair , yet another man who claims that the ill-starred Iraq adventure "can only be judged by history." "How will history judge him?" the center-right Economist magazine asks on its cover, and then damns the charismatic marketer who "re-branded" "Cool Britannia" with faint praise: "How did Mr. Blair manage to make so little of so much?"

Blair has presided over a decade of relative economic security in Great Britain and helped broker a peace accord in Northern Ireland. So "why do Brits dislike the departing prime minister?" Geoffrey Wheatcroft inquires in Slate magazine. The writer notes that UK citizens assure pollsters they are worse off than when Blair arrived in office 10 years ago, even though this is demonstrably not so.

Where politicians are concerned, time is on their side. Thanks to a sympathetic biographer, Harry Truman is now hailed as a brave, tough-minded realist, and not the cynical, tarnished pol derided by his contemporaries. The warmonger Polk is flirting with greatness. That scuttling sound you hear is Nixon trying to claw his way up, lobster-like, from the bottom of the historians' barrel.

And what about George W. Bush, the "worst ever"? The future holds many surprises.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.