Presidents, poor things, are forever seeking solace in the idea that “history” (meaning some version of us 10 or 50 or 100 years hence) will give them the breaks to which they feel they are entitled. But they shouldn’t be so optimistic, since we, right here and now, are history so far as all our dead and gone presidents are concerned, and the example is not encouraging. We tend to deal with our past presidents either by suppressing and ignoring their faults so we can count them saintly, or uncovering those faults and deciding they obliterate all the good the benighted fellow ever did. Which is to say that, just as it is with our contemporary presidents, so we seem always to insist that their long-gone predecessors were either heroes or villains, successes or failures-never, say, a little of each and a lot in between.

There are a couple of national habits in evidence here. One is a weakness for either/or, which is the easiest, if least reliable, way of organizing information and opinion. People in Washington are forever asking each other (and being asked by friends who come to town) what they think of the president in office, and the answer is expected to be a thumbs up or thumbs down. These are people who would not think of appraising their own conduct or that of their family members or friends in a similarly categorical way. But we seem to have a need to view our presidents in this check-one-box manner. Much of what is called historical revisionism concerning the activities of former presidents ends up working the same way: the new information and perceptions do not merely enlarge or deepen the picture of a complex figure, as they should; on the contrary, the fellow simply goes from good to bad or bad to good, as the case may be.

Harry Truman is an example. When he became president on the death of FDR in 1945, even a mouthy 14-year-old like me felt entitled to make jokes about “that fool.” True, my Uncle Dan, in whose hearing I was stupid enough to render this judgment, gave me a dressing-down I will never forget; merely recollecting it makes me squirm to this day. But the issue for him was not Harry Truman’s virtues, but rather my own smart-alecky lack of respect for an elder and a newly ensconced president at that. For Truman, the immensely interesting and engaging figure we have since come to know in the literature, was widely derided throughout his presidency, especially by the Republicans who now profess to revere him, as a caricature of the mentally and morally limited machine politician. Now, largely through the agency of David McCullough’s fascinating biography of him, Truman’s rehabilitation is a kind of nationwide phenomenon; candidates fight over which of them (none, I would say) can rightly claim to be his modern incarnation.

But what struck me as most important about the Harry Truman in this compendious account was not his perfection, but rather his imperfection, the fashion in which serious human failings and shortcomings were interwoven with a kind of stunning moral clarity and even valor. Mostly we find it impossible to talk about all this at the same time or even acknowledge it. Truman, who was a fighter against racial injustice and religious persecution, who was a pioneer, and a politically brave one, in desegregating government institutions and helping to guarantee the existence of the newborn state of Israel, routinely used words like “nigger” and “kike.” Probably today he could not survive the nomination process with the revelation of such things. But then, probably FDR couldn’t either, or most of both of their successors. From continuing sexual promiscuity to wiretapping opponents to outrageously lying in political dealings, many of these officeholders got away with behavior which, in today’s environment, could have cost them their ambitions.

So it’s not just that we insist on seeing our presidents as being either good or bad and deny their complexity as well as the possibility of their doing good in many respects and being bad or at least not so good in others. It’s also that our own ideas of what constitute right behavior and a proper sensibility change. If we were to try to purify our history as well as our literature on the basis of how we see things now, there would hardly be anything left to read or anyone left to read about. Go back and browse through even gentle, warmhearted liberals of the recent past such as James Thurber and you will be dumbstruck by the racial jokes in some of the pieces. Consciousness changes. The big struggle that has resulted from these changes, of course, is over the values of larger than life historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and the other slaveholding founders of the American state, not to mention the men and women who fought and displaced the natives in the West. Some denounce them, declare all their positive achievements null and void on account of their moral failings and wish to pull down their statues more or less in the manner that the huge stone likeness of Lenin crashed in Moscow. Others try to rationalize and temporize the unpalatable aspects of these figures’ lives away: it didn’t quite happen … words didn’t mean the same things then … they were secretly unhappy about what they were doing … and so forth.

In fact neither way will do. We can’t become Soviet-type consigners of historical giants to nonmemory; we can’t revise their great acts downward to make them compatible with a heightened understanding of what they did wrong. And we can’t fake it either or deny the reality of weakness, error and vice. We should look at these people whole, stop trying to force them into either saintly or diabolical models and recognize that they did some good and some ill, that many who did great good had some pretty bad habits and notions and that many who did much bad were in their way (and their motivation) quite nice guys. If we could bring ourselves to be a little steadier and more realistic in our appraisals of the presidents from the nation’s past-who knows?-in time we might even start judging the live ones by a realistic measure.