You know, when they ask these academics to rank the presidents it seems like things don’t change a whole lot over time. For example, in the five Siena Polls since 1982, Franklin Roosevelt has been ranked our best president every single time. George Washington has been ranked fourth every single time. I think what’s really remarkable about our history is how few presidents have been worth a damn.
I mean, when Woodrow Wilson is listed sixth-best in four of the five polls, you’re obviously digging at the bottom of the barrel almost from the outset. I’m not in favor of judging our presidents with anachronistic standards, but Woodrow Wilson stood out as a doughface racist even in his own day. Wilson stands out as one of our finer presidents only because so many of them have been dreadful.
Nixon was the president when I was born. He wasn’t actually that bad of a president except for the impeachable offenses. He was certainly a more competent president than anyone that succeeded him until Poppy Bush took over. Ford was a placeholder. Carter was an epic failure on almost every level (remember that the progressives revolted over his centrism and incompetence and ran with Kennedy). Reagan couldn’t even remember his lines. Clinton was impeached (unjustly) and treated everyone shabbily. And then we had the Chimp.
I mean, the record is so bad that if I had to make a list of just the best presidents since 1900, I couldn’t fill out a top five without gagging. I mean obviously FDR was the best president since 1900. And I can overlook many things to make Teddy Roosevelt number two. But I’m not enthusiastic about naming anyone to that number three spot. I think JFK is incredibly overrated and his record is (through no fault of his own) quite incomplete. LBJ gave us the Vietnam War. Clinton thought it was a good idea to fool around with interns and deregulate the financial sector. Truman created the CIA, was the first and only person to drop nuclear weapons on civilians, and involved us in a war in Korea that is still going on. Who am I going to choose? In reality, I am going to choose Obama. His record is still incomplete, but so far it is better than any of the other candidates.
To round out my top five I am going to pick LBJ for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the War on Poverty. And I’ll go with Clinton in fifth place because he ran a very competent administration, kept the economy humming, and didn’t get us bogged down in any land wars in Asia.
But, Jesus, this is some slim pickings. I’m actually tempted to put Eisenhower ahead of Clinton. In any case, here are my five worst presidents since 1900.
1. George W. Bush
2. Herbert Hoover
3. Warren Harding
4. Richard Nixon
5. William McKinley
Isn’t it saying something that there were indisputably three (Republican) presidents in the last 110 years actually worse than Richard Nixon? How has this country fucking survived?
Here’s my complete list since 1900.
Sorry, St. Ronnie is the worst president ever, just because of his legacy. His presidency isn’t over yet.
Second, you horribly underrated Taft, who was key in creating the income tax and tax on corporations, and enforced the law heavily with regard to monopolies and trusts. Not to mention the 15th amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote. He was very liberal on immigration, and did not allow legislation that forced literacy tests to escape his veto pen.
All of that was done in 4 years, mind you.
I rate you excellent on the St. Ronnie analysis, but you’ve got your amendments mixed up. The 15th was ratified when Taft was 14 years old.
He did have a major role in the ratification of the 16th, though — the income tax.
Woops, my bad. I went to check out Wiki to make sure that I had my history straight on Taft. I saw BooMan’s ranking of him quite low, and I found that strange. So reading over Wiki really fast to double check, I misread:
HA! Complete opposite of what I originally read.
But yes, fuck Ronald Reagan. Worst president ever, not just 1900 and on.
Thanks for pointing that out, btw. It’s a sign that I need to go to bed.
I don’t know what got into you today, Boo, but this may just be your worst post ever.
There are definitely plenty of clunkers among the presidents, but when it comes to the major ones, attempting to rank them in a definite order is about as simplistic as attempting to rank the “top 10 universities.”
Not really. It’s simple. If I lined them all up and said, ‘here, put them in an order of succession,’ you would have to make a list. What list would you make?
Yes, but by what criterion do you rank them? There is no single criterion, and an attempt to average all relevant criteria together would result in a meaningless abstraction.
You inspired me to really sit down and think about and compile my own list. I was surprised to see that I also put Obama in third place, but I also surprised myself by placing Nixon as high as I did, even giving some thought to putting him before Carter and Taft. (As someone who was an active anti-war activist and a big supporter of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign, and then George McGovern’s, I’m a little taken aback by my own ranking!)
That’s a pretty small problem to hang on a person. The moral compass of decision making in war is not easy at the time. I’m not sure how much you know about WWII, but the Japanese were pretty fucking evil. Start with the Rape of Nanking, and the construction of the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Add in the comfort women (god knows how many women put into prostitution hotels for the duration of the war). Add in the horrible mistreatment of civilians, western, eastern, whatever, in Singapore, Malaysia, and so forth. Add again the Pearl Harbor sneak attack. The Japanese shelled our west coast with hundreds of (admittedly ineffecive) balloon bombs, if you did not know.
I do not blame Truman 1 IOTA for the Hiroshima attack. After all, who knew how many would be killed? The weapon, like many other weapons in WWII, was untried until it was tried. Nagasaki was POSSIBLY a slightly more culpable situation. Only slightly. It took place 3 days after Hiroshima. Did they know the result of Hiroshima? Dunno.
The bombs were dropped in the days after the invasion of Okinawa. In this invasion, of a small outlying island of the core Japanese group:
To the best of my knowledge, today, 2010, the Japanese admit little culpability about WWII, in which they attacked us, but continue to harp and whine about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are to blame for the involvement of the US.
So, do I have problems with the bomb? None whatsoever. Truman was an OK president. Your place of 8th is probably OK. But the bomb is not a bad decision – it was a good decision.
The point of Okinawa is that, if this was the result of a battle over an island 1/50th the size of the full mainland, who knew how many we would lose on the 5 main Japanese islands?
As a person whose dad was in service at the time, I believe that many hundreds of thousands of American lives were saved by the bomb. And when you are at war, as Patton put it, “Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make that son of a bitch on the other side die for his.” That is the ethos of war.
This justification for Hiroshima & Nagasaki was what was trotted out by Truman & the military in 1945, and their apologists ever since. It’s both irrelevant and morally repugnant, for at least two reasons:
1) There’s plenty of documentary evidence that the Japanese were poised to surrender before Hiroshima, and certainly before Nagasaki, that Truman knew it, and that his superfluous use of the A-bombs was intended as much or more as a message to Stalin as to force the issue with Tokyo.
Even more importantly,
2) WWII is notable for being the first major war in which the other side’s civilians were considered fair game. You have the Nazis and the rape of Nanjing, but you also have the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, horrific war crimes forgotten because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and because the side that committed those crimes (us) was the one later running the Nuremberg Trials and making all those pious declarations about crimes against humanity.
In just about every war on the planet fought since then, civilians have taken the brunt of the casualties – on average now, about 90% of all casualties. Your logic is a major reason why.
It was the Japanese government that was evil. And Japanese soldiers, by the logic of war, were by extension fair game. 150,000 people who happened to have a bad government they had no control over were not fair game, any more than, say, the victims of 9/11 were culpable for American foreign policy. (If anything, less so, since we at least nominally live in a democracy.) They weren’t a “son of a bitch on the other side” unless you want to argue that it’s an imperative of war to kill as much of your opponents’ civilian populations as possible. That sort of rationalization, as we’ve seen in the 65 years of near-continuous genocides since, is a very, very slippery slope.
FWIW, my father fought in the Pacific Theatre (US Navy). My ex-wife’s did, too — for the other side, and she lost two civilian uncles in Hiroshima. I lived in Japan as well. And while the Japanese government is still too often subservient to the various reactionary elements in Japanese politics that are WWII chauvinists, a far larger percentage of Japanese people are horrified by their country’s past crimes than you’d find among Americans aware of, say, two million dead in Indochina. (Let alone the depradations of the “Good War,” or all the other US foreign policy crimes of the Cold War or since.) Your appealing to the spectacle of Japanese nationalists to rationalize killing hundreds of thousands of people makes me wonder what people in other parts of the world wish for us when they read about the views of our tea partiers. Too many of them, unfortunately, no doubt think like you do.
The bombing of civilians as fair game started by accident with the German bombing of London. The British, not realizing the Germans had simply botched the mission, ordered retaliatory strikes against Berlin, which in turn infuriated Hitler. From then on, the orthodox opinion was that bombing population centers would undermine resolve to continue the war amongst the bombed. It turns out that the effect was the opposite of what was intended. But they didn’t know it at the time, and hence followed atrocities like Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It’s also worth mentioning the criminal treatment of our prisoners of war under Japanese captivity, which was well known in the States in the summer of 1945. The Japanese regime was criminal, the aggressor, and American citizens were simply not interested in mercy for Japan if it meant losing more sons and husbands than we already had. In that sense, Truman had no choice — if news of the existence of the bomb had leaked, and Truman had chosen to end the war by conventional means sometime in 1946, with heavy American casualties, he would have been impeached and removed from office, the most hated man in America. On this I have zero doubt.
My chief regret about the selection of Hiroshima in particular is that the same point could have been made to Tokyo by nuking a purely military target. However, the fact that the Japanese failed to surrender between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the guilt that implies, is solely on their heads. Once the first one was dropped, there was no political space in the US for not continuing to use the A-bomb until the war was over, and they should have known it.
ALL THAT SAID…
This is like comparing the moral implications of stabbing someone to death as opposed to beating him to death with a baseball bat. The best answer in moral quandaries like this is simply to avoid war altogether by any means possible. People need to see their counterparts around the world as other persons, not as faceless components of hostile regimes. Perhaps the time for the nation-state model has run its course. In a way, I hope so.
“The first major war in which civilians were considered fair game”. Possibly I have read statements which are less informed by history than that statement, but I cannot remember when.
Civilians are ALWAYS involved in wars. It might be more accurate to say that “WWI was the first war in which attempts were made to not involve civilians”.
Throughout history, war involves civilians. A siege, one of the most ancient war techniques, targets civilians. The method of retreat by burning all crops and material support for the enemy, is again involving civilians and is as old as war itself. Notable recent example: Russians in the face of any invasion (Napoleon, Hitler, etc), and they did it to themselves.
All wars involve civilians. Some do it less than others. I do not find this a credible complaint in the slightest.
One other point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 100,000. On Okinawa, which ended about 5 weeks before Hiroshima, 1/10-1/3 of the population died, or more than 100,000. That was on a small island. A reasonable person would assume that this many would die on the main islands.
And as for the unsupported contention of the Japanese “readiness to surrender”, that sounds like more Japanese whining about Hiroshima. What is the evidence there?
Hiroshima was fully justified and reasonable in wartime. I refuse to bow down to Japanese whining on this point.
I don’t think Hirsoshima was necessary. Truman knew or should have known (he knew, iirc) that the Japanese wanted clarification on our “unconditional surrender” terms, the sticking point being keeping the Emperor. Had we quietly relaxed terms on that one point, they would almost certainly have surrendered then and there. Instead, Truman acted tough, didn’t give an inch, and in the end we allowed them to keep the Emperor. Stupid.
Then the issue of the Russians deciding in that time period to launch their military assault against Japan from the East. It’s believed by some historians that Truman didn’t want the Russkies to gain any advantage, territorially or politically, and so acted quickly to use the bomb to keep the Russians from sharing in the victory.
As for Truman, I think later, judging by some of his comments, he might have regretted having used the bomb, certainly on the 2d occasion. He made some interesting remarks during Korea, first that he wouldn’t rule out use of the bomb, then quickly backtracked noting how we shouldn’t be a country that kills innocent civilians unnecessarily in war.
Regardless of the morality of the bomb in Hiroshima (which I will not rehash), it was quite clear that, 5 years later, we were in a very different situation. We were not in a war with a moral character understood by all – Korea was much like Vietnam, although the WWII “the government is right” spirit still prevailed. After 5 years, the bomb was now understood to be an inappropriate tool for a war like Korea which did not threaten our home. So, I think that the calculus was much more rational at that point, and much more informed by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki long-term results.
If you want a single moment in which the assaults on civilians were re-introduced into modern conflict, that would be the rape of Nanking on the date Dec 13, 1937 and continuing for a month. Rapes, wholesale slaughter of civilians, the assault on a civilian target as a war goal, all re-introduced or perfected by the Japanese at Nanking. More than 350,000 Chinese CIVILIANS died in this. How many were raped? How many children were raped? No one knows. On the 70th Anniversary, did you see the Japanese prime minister there making amends and saying how terrible the actions of his country were? No, you did not.
I refuse to call Hiroshima AND Nagasaki ANYTHING other than actions of a country at war. In a war, bad shit happens. Through a relentless propaganda campaign, Japan has retrospectively branded these bombings “more reprehensible” than any of its own actions. That marketing campaign has been successful, but it’s all crap to me. I do not regard the bombings as out of line, unusual, or different than any other wartime action.
When Japan says “Nanking was the most barbaric action of the WWII period, far surpassing Hiroshima/Nagasaki in horror and outrage” I will then consider Truman’s action. Until Japan shows the moral fiber to atone for ITS hegemonistical outrages, I find NOTHING that we did worthy of special note.
The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as horrific as they were, were LESS destructive than the fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Personally, I would rather go in a nuclear instant than be roasted or boiled to death in a firestorm, but that’s just me.
I don’t think any American President would have made a different decision. And given their record, I seriously doubt the Japanese government would have hesitated for even a second had the situation been reversed.
As to the Japanese being ready to surrender, that may have been true for a faction of the Japanese government, but certainly not the Army. As it was, there was an attempted coup after Hirohito made his announcement. And the occupation government spent a lot of time and effort confronting reactionaries that took to the hills and refused to surrender.
You have to remember that this was war. And in war people die, often horribly. It was also, on the US side, a just war. We were perfidiously attacked by Japan. The Japanese started down that slippery slope from the beginning of the war. They did not follow the rules of war, which they considered “Western”. They killed civilians indiscriminately. States following the law of war as it existed at the time were thus allowed to suspend their own application of the rules violated by their opponents.
That being said, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets (an Army base and a Naval base & harbor). The Japanese dispersed their war industry into the residential areas of all of their cities, with people doing “war work” in their homes. War industry is also a legitimate military target. The Japanese were also preparing a “levee-en-masse”, the arming of the entire civilian population, including women, children, and the elderly, to resist invasion.
Excellent post, and I agree entirely. My father served with Eisenhower, and always argued that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was absolutely unnecessary and was a show of force and power to the Soviets.
Martin, you are **way** too easy on Nixon, IMO. I won’t presume to tell you a bunch of stuff you probably already know, but just by making acceptable so many things that were previously unthinkable, he shoots almost to the bottom of the list.
You’re also too hard on Jimmy Carter. I think he saw the realignment on the wall when he had to work hard to unseat Gerald Ford, and governed as far to the left as he could. Think of all the policies he tried to set in motion that would have saved us from so much misery today if only they had survived Reagan.
I also think that LBJ was actually two different Presidents serving simultaneously. With that sentiment in mind, here’s my list:
Reagan comes in dead last for authoring the orthodoxy that is destroying the republic as we write. Thirty long years, the cancer of Reaganism has been tearing down everything FDR built in 12. We’re left now with an effectively destroyed Gulf of Mexico, toxins injected into groundwater in the name of gas drilling, a permanent aristocracy and underclass, and an overriding sense that nothing can ever be done about any of it. Now that is an evil legacy that not even James Buchanan can touch.
Carter is underrated imo
Oops, I forgot to include the Bad LBJ. Rate him one spot above Nixon, or maybe tied with him.
Lot of disagreements here.
LBJ was not a despicable human being. A despicable human being would not have called George Wallace into the oval office… well, I’ll let PBS tell the story:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/video/lbj_18_qt.html#v243
Lyndon Johnson was a giant of a man with a huge heart and enormous character defects. A Shakespearean figure. He should have been our greatest President, and very would would have been had he trusted his early instincts about Vietnam. But, as in every Shakespearean tragedy, he was undone by his own flaws.
I should also add that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 never would have happened without LBJ. Think about that: it took a senator from segregationist Texas to shepherd that bill through. I don’t think I’ve seen a more courageous moral stand taken by a Senator since.
Lyndon did plenty of despicable things in his lifetime, and that’s an assessment even some of his loyalists, who knew him well, would agree with. A man whose dark side was at least the equal of any good side he showed.
Unnecessary war in VN leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese. Lying about it to the American public, starting with the bogus Gulf of Tonkin Res, which he knew would later be used deceptively as a basis to ramp up the war w/o further action by Congress. Going into war eyes wide open, knowing it would likely lead to a long bloody quagmire. Not having the political guts to square with the people, then not having the guts to tell them they would have to pay for it with added taxes.
As for the 57 bill, not much that courageous about a toothless bill that doesn’t really do much to advance the cause of CR in the South — a fact he stressed to his fellow racist southern Dems, who understood the game being played and who knew LBJ was lining up his liberal bona fides for a 1960 run for the WH.
I agree with you about LBJ. He had his demons, but his demons didn’t have him. Had it not been for Vietnam, he would probably be ranked as one of our very greatest presidents, for civil rights and Medicare alone.
On Harding… I’ve never seen any reason to believe he had bad intentions. He was just a notoriously lazy and incompetent President, whose hands-off approach to the job was copied by Coolidge, who simply didn’t care about the disaster that was building under his watch.
Hoover, at least, was a good progressive. His orthodoxy on fiscal policy was inappropriate for the crisis that landed on his head, but much of FDR’s early work was merely extending and expanding programs that Hoover had already put into place. Hmm, come to think of it, Obama in some ways is very much copying what Hoover did. Ugh.
Agree no bad intentions re Harding, but disagree he was just lazy and incompetent. He did enjoy a couple of afternoons/wk for golf, but made up for it later, as one journalist allowed inside the WH reported. Too trusting for too long about certain people he’d appointed to high office, yes. But, to his credit, when he find out about an official or admin insider not acting properly, he took action to remove him.
Harding, for his time, was good, even approaching courageous at times, on civil rights for blacks. I’ve previously noted here his little known 1921 speech in Birmingham, AL, to a segregated large audience, where he spoke rather well on equal rights for blacks in education and in the economic sphere, while stopping short of course of acknowledging their being the whites’ full equal in some respects.
WH also advocated for an anti-lynching bill, which passed the House and fell just short in the senate. Iirc, FDR dodged this issue entirely a dozen years later.
Harding, also little known, was pro-women’s right to vote at a time, as senator, when Pres Wilson was resisting it.
He also pardoned the Socialist leader Eugene Debs, convicted and imprisoned by the Wilson admin for his antiwar attitudes during the Great War.
Harding has been wildly dismissed by historians as among the worst. He deserves better.
The most critical moment of the century was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything was at stake… literally. The world was at the brink, and Kennedy steered us away from the brink. Surely saving the world should get you higher than 7th place.
Very well put. Instead of lauding him for his cool leadership in that crisis, historians tend to coolly note it and then coolly place it as a mere “positive” next to the negative of the Bay of Pigs, as if both were of equal importance. Too many historians of late have been rather unjustifiably cool towards Kennedy, and have also failed to consider the more recent disclosures of the record on his VN withdrawal decision in late 63.
About LBJ. There is no worse sin for a President than to lead the nation into an unnecessary war.
Again, check. Went in with eyes open knowing the risks, fully briefed on both sides of the issue; lied about getting in to the public, then stubbornly refused to change course and get out for 4 long years — leading, as you said, to a huge opening for Nixon. And speaking of despicable, how about LBJ’s tapping the phones of his own VP Humphrey in the 68 election, while possibly privately favoring Nixon to win? (see Dallek, v.2 of his LBJ bio)
LBJ stayed the course and upped the ante in Vietnam partly because he was weighed down by the dead hand of JFK. If he was president on his own right, would he have done that? We’ll never know, but the JFK legacy of policy guidance was important.
Now Obama is doing the same thing. Time and past time to get the fuck out of Afghanistan: Declare victory and leave. If he does not do that, 2012 will be all about Afghanistan and the thousands of dead.
Actually the record suggests LBJ knew that JFK was about to withdraw from VN. See, for instance, his phone conversation, ca Feb 24-5, 1964, with McNamara, months before the Tonkin res, a year before he would formally begin escalation.
He basically tells McN that he didn’t think it was wise for Pres Kennedy to have decided to pull out — that it demoralized SVN and sent the wrong message to our allies elsewhere in the world. He instructed McN to go out with a statement to the press that, while not going too far and not being too specific, would underscore our nation’s commitment to that country and that we would uphold our treaty commitments in that region.
The clear impression is that Johnson is instructing a rather taken aback McN that a new course was being set — one that would reverse his predecessor’s final decision to withdraw, but one which would have to remain for a while in a holding pattern as the political campaign played out.
LBJ was also personally inclined, as a Typical Tough Texan (roughly the description of him by Mike Mansfield, who was anti-US involvement in VN) to show the flag over there. He always talked about Munich, and how we needed to be tough — tougher than Kennedy was showing, he implied — else the Commies would be landing in San Francisco.
Johnson had a crude, simplistic understanding of the Cold War and Communism, a confrontational tough guy attitude more in synch with with his fellow hawkish southern Democrats and the hawk wing of the Repub Pty. He badly overlearned and misapplied the lesson of Munich (something he also associated with Kennedy, a man he had mostly negative feelings about as president, at least in foreign policy) and was temperamentally the kind of personality who needed to flex US muscles somewhere (to make up for his own personal shortcomings, unimpressive WW2 war record, and physical cowardice, well documented in the record going back to his youth).
Ditto your view on JFK. If he had not handled the Cuban Missile Crisis as adroitly as he did, and sternly resisted the military demand for an invasion of Cuba, I doubt very much that we would be having this delightful chat. A nuclear war with the Soviets would have pushed those who survived into a new dark age. For that deed alone, JFK deserves the highest ranking.
Likewise Johnson and Bush for their despicable actions in leading our nation into aggressive and unjustified wars liberally salted with deception, deserve the lowest rating on the scale. LBJ, however, did have a few redeeming factors (Great Society Program, Medicare, 1964 Civil Rights Act. Bush II had none.)
about Obama. He’s been a monumental failure. Who else could have turned the country back over to the party of Bush in two short years?
He lost the biggest opportunity of my lifetime by pissing away the entire first year of his term on a shitty healthcare plan. He continues the Bush legacy in Afghanistan. He supports offshore drilling that is threatening to destroy not only our wildlife but our entire economy.
You need to take off those rose-colored glasses.
I don’t think Obama has been a monumental failure. Not yet, anyway. I think he is doing quite well especially considering the colossal set of problems he walked into and the almost dysfunctional congress.
What I find absurd is rating Obama third of all presidents since 1900, or giving him any rating against past presidents, frankly, after year and a half in office.
That’s like ranking a ball team in third place for the season when they haven’t even played the first half of the season. As I said above, I don’t even think it makes sense to rank the major presidents in a definite order. Although I do agree about FDR, and I do think JFK was a lot better president than Booman thinks he was. I recommend the book JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass.
Obama is the most progressive president we’ve had in the past forty years (maybe more) and so many still shrug and say ‘jury’s out’. How strange.
Obama Derangement Syndrome in full force.
Oh I so love the application of anachronistic standards. And the application of conventional wisdom.
Do you judge from having lived through the times or from the perspective of history? Actually most people do both at the same time even when they lead to opposite conclusions.
Take Richard Nixon. I judge him having lived through those times in my twenties. That experience is so intense that I have difficulty looking at his historical place. But as for long shadows, consider this. Every one of the folks who screwed up in the Bush administration — Cheney, Rumsfeld, and so on were either in the Nixon administration as junior staffers (some not so junior) or were too young to remember government before Nixon. And he gave us Pat Buchanan, Howard Phillips, G. Gordon Liddy, and a host of folks in the media machine that has hobbled American democracy.
Or Woodrow Wilson. I’m old enough that I judge him in the afterglow of FDR’s completion of Wilson’s work in setting up the United Nations. Say what you will about the UN but it has proved more useful and more enduring than the League of Nations. In that, Wilson was ahead of his time. But in other things, Wilson was a product of his background. He was a Southern Democrat, born in the Great Valley of Virginia and raised on stories of Stonewall Jackson’s and John Mosby’s battles during the Civil War in that geography. No doubt, being 39 at the time that the South decided that segregation and legal discrimination were the solution to “the Negro problem”, he was a supporter of this policy. But the shame for this needs to be laid squarely at the door of Rutherford B. Hayes, who bargained for the presidency by giving “home rule” to the very conservative Confederate wealthy class that started the Civil War. Wilson’s presidency was a mere 20-some-odd years after the policy was introduced with the acceptance of folks outside the South and with a Supreme Court decision ruling it constitutional. (By some of the same justices who ruled that corporations were “persons”, by the way.) And Wilson completed McKinley’s imperialism with forays into a variety of Central American and Caribbean countries and the continued holding of the Philippines. And Wilson created the national security state in the US through the appointment of Mitchell Palmer as Attorney General, whose legacy was carried forward by J. Edgar Hoover. From a historical perspective, Woodrow Wilson was a transformative president in international and national security affairs (much of it the work of the naive Edward M. House), and as you said we are struggling with his legacy.
And the Carter administration. That was when the rules of politics changed. Carter got elected in part because of the rising power of the national media and its increasing focus on trivia. The media portrayed our first unelected president as a stumblebum — that was before he liberated Poland in the presidential debates. And the media portrayed Carter as fearful and unsure; remember the fixation on the “killer rabbit”. And like today, the Democratically controlled Congress was so compromised by business interests that it could not pass significant environmental and energy legislation but could pass deregulation of several industries. And it was not Carter, but a federal judge who broke up AT&T. Finally the alliance of the Reagan campaign and the revolutionary Iranian Islamic government pinned Carter in the White House for most of the critical campaign year of 1980. And his response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was ridiculed by those who would not have countenanced stronger action. Finallly, the US military was a hollow shell with fierce inter-service rivalry that was exposed as failure of the first joint-service small operation–the attempt to liberate the Americans held hostage in the Embassy in Teheran. Because the communications equipment could not interoperate. This problem was exposed again in Grenada when a sailor used his phone card to call in an air strike through the action of the White House. (I don’t know whether it was ever fixed.) But Carter’s presidency left unfulfilled commitments — energy independence, human rights, a resolution to conflict in the Middle East. One wonders what a second Carter term could have accomplished, and what we would have avoided. As for the progressive challenge, Teddy Kennedy was as short-sighted in his criticism of Carter as some progressives are in their criticism of Obama, both ignoring the limits that Congress imposes. And Kennedy thought that it was time for another Kennedy to be president. It seems every political family seeks a dynasty. But it is Carter’s vision that still points the direction to resolution of some thorny American problems. That is historically significant.
And given the inability of the Obama administration to turn the clock back to 1999, George W. Bush’s foray into the porcelain shop, wrecking the dinnerware, will be seen as a transformative presidency. As the GOP’s triumph in undoing the New Deal and the consolidation of executive power. As the recognition and celebration of a state of endless war and the reconstitution of America into a garrison state. And as the logical consequence of Harry Truman’s reform of national security institutions in 1947 in order to pursue a Cold War with the Soviet Union instead of the World War III that conservative Republicans demanded.
We have had 44 presidents. A normal distribution would say that there would be 1 president with a grade of A and 1 with a grade of F. There would be 6 presidents with a grade of B and 6 with a grade of D. And 30 presidents with a grade of C.
For the 20 presidents since 1900, there is a 50-50 chance there are none with a grade of A and none with a grade of F. There would be 3 with a grade of B and 3 with a grade of D. And 14 with a grade of C.
So grading on the curve.
A – FDR
B – Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower
C – Barack Obama, LBJ, JFK, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Woodrow Wilson, Gerald Ford, William Taft, Poppy Bush, Ronald Reagan, Calvin Coolidge, William McKinley
D – Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon
F – George W. Bush
Altogether better than the fickle American voter deserves. And by the end of his first term, Barack Obama very well could swap places with Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms. And the times and challenges are such that by the end of his second term, it is possible for Obama to rank in the same category as FDR.
I think FDR is a bit overrated myself.
Compared to whom?
Who would you rate above him? And why?
Excellent analysis but re the times and challenges facing Obama (like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sputtering economy, the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the failure to close Guantanamo, the growth of the military/defense complex) might result in his achieving a failing grade. He might end up with Harding, Hoover and Nixon and if the dollar goes pop along with a depression and never ending wars in the Mideast together with more environmental degradation, he might even give Bush II a run for the bottom rung. God forbid that these awful events occur, but I am starting to suspect that President Obama may be unlucky. If so, we are all in trouble.
Tarheel, in re Carter and Teddy, a few comments. I think TK was angry that Carter hadn’t gone forward aggressively to pursue health care legislation, as Teddy probably rightly believed Carter had promised him. I think it was also a personal thing — Carter had on several occasions deliberately snubbed or otherwise insulted TK upon winning the election (“I did it w/o having to kiss Teddy’s ass” — J.C.), and taking office (an early meeting with Ted had Jimmy going all out to show how much better informed he was than TK on one issue — missile weaponry or arms control, iirc — and Kennedy resented the unnecessary, in-your-face display).
Carter, in addition to botching things with cong’l Dem leaders in his first year — not just Ted but insulting Speaker Tip and Sen Bobby Byrd during WH visits — also made stupid unforced errors elsewhere when he should have been making political gains despite the corp media pushback. The ridiculously unnecessary action in asking for the resignations of a number of cabinet members following his unusual, but well-received, “malaise” speech sent Carter’s approval numbers again spiraling downward. People began to wonder whether he was in control of all his faculties.
Then the appallingly risky US hostage rescue attempt, the one which would have needed about 20 things, at least, to be accomplished perfectly, and despite some heavy odds against, in order to have a chance to be successful. It was badly planned out from the outset (made too much in haste), most famously for not taking into account local severe weather conditions in the desert area at that time of year. SoS Vance quietly submitted his resignation as Carter signed off on it, and Vance’s fears were borne out. A Bay of PIgs-like stupid, and fatal, military exercise that should have been nixed early on for its very high military SNAFU potential, and which made Carter look foolish and made the country depressed as hell for months.
One could add also stupidly underestimating the candidacy and appeal of Reagan — something Pat Brown did in 1966 but about which Carter and his people seemed to have been ignorant. That was still an election, despite the economic situation and the hostages, that was Carter’s to win. Instead, he failed to loudly call for more than one debate and put Reagan on the defensive about dodging them, failed to directly confront Reagan on the spot for his blatantly rehearsed one-liner debate performance, and generally failed to seal the deal with the public with a strong, but positive, argument for his own re-election.
Smart man who came to office with some high expectations from those, like myself, who voted for him. But he didn’t govern wisely as consistently as he needed to, and failed to even be able to bring someone like a liberal Ted Kennedy — not actually eager to expose himself and his family to yet more assassination fears with a presidential run, contrary to your suggestion — to his side when it mattered. He lost Teddy, some of his backers, and probably most of the nearly 7% of voters who went for Anderson that year but who probably would have stayed with Carter if only Jimmy had done a better job and taken care of some of the easy things, like not insulting leaders from the base of his party.
On health care: there was a fundamental disagreement given the state of Congress that was not much different from the debate last year. Kennedy wanted to press forward a plan similar to the one he walked away from during the Nixon administration. Carter, counting noses in Congress, wanted a incremental approach. They could not come to an agreement. Neither plan was taken up in Congress.
I can find no source for this oft-repeated quote:
Nor can I find evidence of his publicly insulting Byrd and Tip O’Neill. What they said in private is subject to sourcing biases of the media and they all knew how to play politics (even Carter) where insults are part of the game. Indeed it seems Carter had his Rahm Emmanuel (yes it is an unsourced Wikipedia sentence):
The feud was over Carter’s intention to fulfill a campaign pledge by canceling 19 pork barrel projects.
But I did find this from and unbylined article in Time magazine’s June 25, 1979 issue, in an article about the conflict over the health care plans.
It’s a long time ago, and I am curious as to where Toby Mofett stood with respect to Connecticut’s major industry–insurance. It is exactly the sort of apocryphal story that Politico specializes in today, although it appears Time attributed it to Mofett and Brodhead.
On misjudging Ronald Reagan: Almost all Democrats did not take Reagan seriously as a threat. It was like a prologue to not taking W seriously in 2000. And it should warn us about Sarah Palin and other Republicans who are spouting the stupid.
While Ted Kennedy might not have wanted to run, the Naderite wing of the party promoted his candidacy almost from day 1 (the day that Carter pardoned all Vietnam war resisters who broke the law; think about the political consequences of that). And the media, who still considered the Kennedy family as America’s royalty pushed Kennedy and also fanned the conflict between Carter and Kennedy. Needless to say, that media included George Will and other familiar faces who have refined their attacks over time.
Carter was the prototype for the delegitimizing of Democratic presidents. It was motivated by payback for Watergate and it became more blatant, more deceptive, and more vicious with each successive Democratic president.
Well, I didn’t say “publicly” insulting Tip or Byrd, but insulting them or snubbing them in private. Some examples from historian Barber (and, no, the insults and snubs didn’t just involve the threat to cancel pork):
Barber also recounts an incident where Sen Muskie, Budget Comm’ee Chair, one Dem Rep and the Treasury Sec’y all defended publicly a Carter tax rebate scheme, which they privately opposed. Sec’y Blumenthal went before the Nat’l Press Club to express his support, but hadn’t been informed by Carter that the president had already withdrawn his plan. All 3 public supporters of the plan learned of Carter’s switch from reading the papers. All 3 of course were privately furious at Jimmy.
There is more at James D. Barber (my 4th ed, pp 437-8). One of Carter’s favorite historians, btw.
As for Carter misjudging RR: this is why I mentioned the Pat Brown (1966) example — it happened only 14 yrs earlier (Pat might even have been still around for further consultation on why it was unwise to underestimate the Reagan appeal), well within even the political lifetime of JC. That campaign, and the debate, should have been done better by the Carter camp. Including, possibly, being more vigorous in pursuing the old hardline RW trail of Reagan opposing Medicare — apparently Carter’s team failed to track down by the time of the debate that old record LP of Reagan fear-talking about Medicare and Socialism.
Re Teddy and his decision in 1979, I actually don’t disagree with him that there was adequate basis for considerable discontent from the liberal side about Carter — though I do disagree with his decision to run. And I don’t think your comment about the media wanting Ted to run jibes with the Roger Mudd CBS interview — which ended up nearly killing the candidacy before it was even officially launched.
Otherwise, we agree on the media’s treatment of Carter — all the endless grief Clinton experienced at the hands of the SCLM — pseudoscandal mongering for nearly 8 yrs — can be tracked back to at least the post-Watergate backlash time of Carter and the early days of the Bert Lance business.
And we agree that in retrospect Ham Jordan’s style of working with the Georgia legislature was not the appropriate approach for the leadership in Congress. The outsider’s problem is not to know the unwritten status rules of the folks he is dealing with.
On the campaign team’s failings. A lot of it had to do with the focus on dealing with the running of a government and dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis at the same time, a crisis that the Republicans politicized early and then prolonged to ensure Reagan’s election.
“How has this country fucking survived?”
We’ve got all the time in the world to destroy our country, and seem to be making rapid progress.
The Best:
Truman’s great leadership strength was knowing who to put in charge of key programs and who to negotiate with in Congress. Without Marshall for example, Truman would not have been successful in quelling the Republican drums of a new global war against the Soviet Union and “godless communism”.
That’s interesting, I thought presidents would be judged by their accomplishments not by their philosophies. Not that Obama hasn’t accomplished a lot already. But in the end, we don’t really know what he has or has not accomplished.