Just a year ago, in the early evening of Nov. 4, 1980, a good hour or two before he had to, Jimmy Carter telephoned his congratulations to Ronald Reagan. By the next afternoon Carter was telling reporters he was confident "history" would rate his presidency more highly than the election returns might momentarily suggest. This is a theme Carter has pursued with visitors in Plains this year, and it is a fair guess it animates the memoirs he is writing. No President defeated for reelection, so far as is known, has ever felt differently. Even before he lost in 1912, William Howard Taft put it well: "By and by the people will see who is right and who is wrong."
Presidents who win re-election care just as deeply about their place in history. For them it is not a matter of vindication—they have no reason to question the good judgment of the electorate—but rather a reach for the ultimate goal of greatness.
There are some difficulties about a President's appeal to history. There is the unfortunate probability that he will not live long enough to hear what history has to say. But his children will, and "the nation," and that is something.
On the day he leaves office, a President's place in history depends heavily on some history that hasn't happened yet. In midsummer of 1981, for instance, when Reagan had just won his dazzling legislative victories on taxes and the budget, Jimmy Carter—if anybody was thinking about him at all—probably seemed an even more ineffectual President than so many voters had thought in 1980. By November 1981, however, Reagan was beginning to get mussed up on his economic program, and Carter's reputation was up a bit. So it will go all through Reagan's years and on into one or two of his successors' Administrations. As these Presidents do well or badly with inflation, the Soviets, etc., Carter's rating will fluctuate, not all the way off the chart, but somewhere between "unsuccessful" and "so-so but who's done better lately?"