From a reader:

Jonah
[Mattson writes]
“In the postwar era, there was a generation of historians–like C. Vann Woodward, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, and Schlesinger himself–who were consummate professionals and engaged in the important matters of the day.” As Edmund Levin recalled in the Weekly Standard (11/15/2004): It can’t be said that Ronald Reagan ever had many fans in American academia. After he declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Henry Steele Commager sneered: “The worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in full wise-man mode, decried the president’s “crusading anti-communism,” his “messianic conviction,” and his view of the Soviet Union “as unchanged, unchanging, and unchangeable.”
On Iran-Contra, Vann Woodward is quoted in the June 6, 2004 NY Times:
“Mr. Reagan was not brought to court, but he faced the judgment of history. The historian C. Vann Woodward said in an interview that he knew of ‘’nothing comparable with this magnitude of irresponsibility and incompetence.’’
Mr. Woodward observed: ‘’This is not simply the self-serving of a politician who was using illegal methods. This involved the country’s policy and its foreign relations and reputation.’’
Consummate professionals? More like consummate partisans whose historical wrongheadedness has “nothing comparable with [its] magnitude of irresponsibility and incompetence.”

Me: This is a favorite point of mine. How much historians get right about the past rarely has a strong correlation about how much they get right about the present.