Nicholas Lemann: What is George W. Bush's legacy? | Big Think

Nicholas Lemann: What is George W. Bush's legacy?

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Its hard to trust your impressions in real time, Lemann says.

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Nick Lemann:

Nick Lemann is the Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a former New Yorker staff writer. While at Harvard – where he graduated in 1976 – Lemann served as President of the Crimson. He has worked as a reporter and editor at The Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly and The Washington Post, focusing primarily on national affairs.

Lemann is the author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, about the SAT, and most recently, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, about the failure of Reconstruction. At Columbia, where he was hired as Dean of the Journalism School in 2003, Lemann implemented a two-year curriculum and has focused on teaching alternative journalistic mediums in the Internet age.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Nicholas Lemann: It’s really tough to answer that because it’s very hard to trust your impressions in real time. In the conservative world, people are starting to say already, “See? It’s all gonna work in Iraq, and everybody’s gonna thank Bush for this.” I’m skeptical of that. I think the war in Iraq will look like a mistake by Bush, and that his . . . that generally his approach in foreign policy to, you know, eschew diplomacy and go with unilateral force will be seen as having been counterproductive and having decreased rather than increased American influence in the world. So I would predict he will be seen as a rather unsuccessful president in the realm of foreign policy. In the realm of domestic policy, but in my opinion by far the most important thing he’s done, is the No Child Left Behind Law which has been wildly under-covered by the press. And that’ll take years to sift out. But basically what he has done is it’s a little bit like Nixon to China – you know that a Republican president did this – is to say for the first time, we’re gonna make the federal government a real forceful, dispositive presence in the American public school system. And really this will be seen as the moment when we western Europeanized ourselves, and went from being a place where public education seemed just a completely local function to making it much more of a national function. And that will play out in lots of interesting ways – whether good or bad, I don’t know.