It's fairly common practice for failing politicians to attempt to rescue their legacy by trying to liken themselves to Harry Truman. Truman offers a compelling target because he won an election he was predicted to lose in 1948, and the critical assessment of his Presidency at the time was soon rejected by historians, such that he is now regarded amongst the best Presidents of all time. Bush and Rove have tried it a number of times already, but now former Liberal Party adviser, Josh Frydenberg, has attempted to do the same for our very own man of steel: A past victory has lessons for the present.
But any student of history must surely scoff at Fydenberg’s attempts to liken Howard’s political moribundity to the great wartime President. Howard’s policies may have encountered political opposition before he won the Senate, but the reality is he was handed a period of unparalleled prosperity and a generally uncritical media, and the best he can claim is to have fiddled at the edges of economic reform. Elites may have got Truman wrong at the time, but he emerged triumphant in history because he faced a hostile media and Congress, and still managed to establish the new global collective security regime under the UN, rebuild Europe, create NATO, and lay the foundations for winning the Cold War.
The most insulting thing about the comparison is that Howard’s major foreign policy engagement, the Iraq war, was initiated in a way fundamentally incompatible with Truman’s legacy. Unlike Howard, Truman understood that the best way to advance Western interests was to ensure other players in the international community internalised the values of the West through a credible, consistent and universal application of the rule of law, which formed the basis of the new collective security regime. With Iraq, Howard spurned this legacy, and the Atlantic Charter consensus laid down by his hero Churchill, and instead appealed to ad hoc exceptionalism - one rule for us, another rule for everyone else.
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