Legacies of previous American presidents

By Partogi Samosir

MOSCOW (JP):Presidential legacies are often very subjective matters. Although most people view the legacy of president Lyndon Johnson as his disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War, his die-hard supporters like to point to the Civil Rights Act and the "Great Society" as his lasting legacy.

To most Americans, the legacy of president Richard Nixon will always be the "Watergate" scandal, but to many living in the former Soviet bloc, they remember him as the architect of detente and better relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Conventional wisdom says that presidents spend their first term concentrating on domestic policy to insure re-election and the second term on foreign policy to insure their legacy. With regards to President Clinton's legacy in foreign policy, there are several areas that can be pointed to as Clinton success stories.

The Middle East or the Northern Ireland peace processes may be a future Clinton milestone, but at this time the prospects for peace in these regions is still unclear.

The two areas that may actually play a large role in defining how history views president Clinton are his policies toward Russia and Kosovo respectively. The Clinton policy towards Russia is presently linked to the whole debate: Who lost Russia?

The question this debate raises is whether Clinton really did lose Russia; or is it more likely that it was not his to lose in the first place?

The issue of Kosovo and how history will judge the intervention is probably even more contentious than the loss of Russia. In choosing to intervene in Kosovo because of human rights violations by the Yugoslavian government on its citizens, the Clinton administration and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have overturned a cornerstone of international relations theory, the inviolability of national sovereignty that dates back to the 17th century.

There is an argument, though presently dismissed by most political pundits, that this intervention will have an impact on disputed regions for many years to come. The same debate now occurs in Indonesia, because for Indonesians, Clinton's legacy is his proactive response to Amien Rais's 1998 call for moral intervention of the U.S. government on many issues in Indonesia.

While some may argue that it was the Monica Lewinsky affair that made Clinton the second president in U.S. history to face a vote of impeachment before the Senate, the legacy of his policy mainly is the economy. President Clinton was in office during the longest period of sustained economic growth in US history.

Some say Clinton only benefited from the lack of history and from Alan Greenspan's chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank. In his defense, Clinton said it best when he asked the audience at the Democratic National Convention the standard measure of an incumbency: "Are you better off now, than you were eight years ago?"

As noted earlier, the determination of a presidential legacy is often related to one's perception. In the case of Clinton, the task is doubly difficult, because he has been such a controversial figure. There seems to be no gray area with regards to him, people either love him or hate him.

The sign that hung in the campaign war during the 1992 campaign will most likely stand as the lasting legacy, "It's the economy!" Therefore, the main message of Clinton's legacy for Indonesia today is, "It's the economy, President Gus Dur!"

The writer is the Second Secretary at the Indonesian Embassy in Moscow