At last, we’ve put behind us years of a divisive presidency in the person of a man with thin qualifications for high office who admitted he had no foreign policy experience. For reasons entirely of ideology, he launched a war in a faraway country that posed no direct threat to the United States. The war was a disaster, in no small part because of a failure to send enough troops. In the aftermath, he refused to shoulder responsibility for the war gone wrong. He proposed a foreign affairs doctrine that he framed in noble language—”the policy of the United States [is] to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” but the scandals that rocked his administration put the lie to this lofty-sounding ideal. Meanwhile, he supported the Zionist entity.

In the eyes of many, he was a war criminal.

The economy was a nightmare, and he left it in shambles. He departed office with a famously low approval rating; at one point barely one in five of those polled approved of the job he was doing as president. There were calls for his impeachment in the Senate.

He gathered around himself cronies, some of whom he appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “he is unfit, morally and mentally, for his high office…. The American nation has never been in greater danger. It is led by a fool who is surrounded by knaves.”

But now that Dwight Eisenhower has taken office, we can all sleep easier and put Harry Truman behind us.

In recent weeks, knives have been dulled dissecting George Bush’s legacy, a solipsistic endeavor given that legacy can be determined only in the future, when the outcome of events is known and passions have cooled. Today, Harry “the Buck Stops Here” Truman is one of our most revered presidents, the common man with the common touch who guided the nation through the early years of the cold war when Americans lived in fear of communism and a nuclear-fanged Russian bear.

So it’s almost comical when contemporary politicos and others invoke the name of Truman. My purpose is not to trash Truman. Quite the opposite. He, like every president, bore a crushing burden in an office that’s bigger than any one man.

But it’s salutary to bear in mind that Truman, like Lincoln, was despised and the target of vitriolic personal attacks. Still today, bleeding hearts regard him as a war criminal and perpetrator of genocide for nuking Japan. The postwar period was one of roiling economic turmoil, including crises in the housing and credit markets and strikes in key industries. He high-handedly tried to corral the steel industry until the Supreme Court yelled “Whoa” and reined him in. Much of the anticommunist hysteria of the postwar years was fostered by his administration; with his connivance, thousands of Americans were investigated under suspicion of communist sympathies. The Korean War was a shambles. The U.S. landed on the Korean Peninsula to entangle itself in a civil war with inadequate equipment and not nearly enough troops. Thirty thousand Americans died in a period of only about two years, and the war resolved nothing. His sacking of Gen. Douglas McArthur was the last straw for many, and impeachment cries went up.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Admittedly, the parallels are not perfect. Few such parallels ever are. The reasons behind U.S. entry in Korea were different from those that led to the war in Iraq. But that’s not the point. The point is that Harry Truman was the target of vicious opprobrium. Now he’s not. Go figure.

In the 1990s, comedian Conan O’Brien launched a recurring sketch, “In the Year 2000,” featuring humorous prophecies about the future. It was a signature bit, so he’s continued it even after the turn of the millennium. Those who lay claim to foreknowledge of Bush’s legacy are, like Conan, looking back to the future. Such an arrogant exercise makes accusations of arrogance by Bush ring hollow.

So let’s stop already with the legacy thing. The past is prologue. Let’s see how it plays out—maybe in the Year 2000.

The above is an editorial column written by Michael J. O’Neal for his local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Idaho. O’Neal is the author of Crazy Bett, a novel about Civil War espionage available at www.crazybett.com, or from Amazon.