Best and Worst Presidents

[Lionel Mandrake]

How do scholars (historians and political scientists) rate US Presidents? They pretty much agree that the three greatest were Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. Also highly rated are Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Truman, and Ike. (Yes, I know some of them were Republicans, but they were nothing like today's Republicans.)

Near or at the bottom are James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, George W. Bush, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, and John Tyler. All five scholarly surveys conducted since 2008 ranked George W. Bush in the bottom 25%. This puts "W" in a very select group, the only other members of which are James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, and Millard Fillmore. The consensus among today's scholars is that these are the worst of the worst.

If present trends continue, I believe that "W" will be in a class by himself in a few more years.

Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear Lionel Mandrake!

I'd rather put it this way:

George W. Bush is the second best President ever.








All the rest are tied for Best.

[Thinkingabout]

3. K & R

Thanks for sharing, will be passing this information to RWers, they need some reality.

[First Speaker]

2. Bush was dreadful...but Wilson was the worst...

...Woodrow Wilson's reputation among certain liberal scholars is a constant source of astonishment to me. He was a total clusterfuck from beginning to end...a flagrant racist, the closest thing to a true dictator the US has ever had, who lied to the people about getting involved in the War, which--mythology to the contrary--they virulently opposed, even after we were in it, then bungled the War--victory was an illusion--and totally bungled the peace, all the while sliding into paranoia and megalomania. He discredited both the idea of American internationalism, and the Democratic Party, for a generation...and indeed, it took the Depression to recover the party's fortunes, and Hitler and the Japanese to drag us back into the world scene, something the people were overwhelmingly opposed to, since they quite sensibly didn't want another war like World War One... Interestingly enough, JFK--who knew his American history--was contemptuous of Arthur Schlesinger's admiration of Wilson, and astonished by it...

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. Really! Wow, do I disagree.

I am currently reading "Wilson" by A. Scott Berg, a noted biographer, and I am riveted. This author does not gloss over Wilson's racism (it was a product of the time) or anything else. What Berg does do is give a very thorough telling of Wilson's life and work.

He was an amazing and very talented President.

Clusterfuck, my lily white ass.

[First Speaker]

13. I hate the thought of disagreeing with you...:-(...

...so maybe I'll just say what, basically, I base my opinions on--Walter Karp's *The Politics of War*, and Thomas Fleming's *The Illusion of Victory*...one is a radical, the other a moderate conservative, but they have surprising agreement on the basics...Mencken has also strongly influenced my feelings towards Woodrow--as indeed Wilson's own writings and speeches have...

[CaliforniaPeggy]

18. No worries! Disagree all you want.

But you should really look at Berg's biography. It is excellent.

[Aristus]

15. Before posting my response, CalPeg, you know I love and adore you.

But I've heard the argument about racism in otherwise admirable people, and its dismissal with the phrase: "They were products of their time."

I try to point out when I hear that that people who opposed racists and racism, and supported equal treatment for all, were also 'products of their time'.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

19. And I love and adore you too, my dear Aristus!

OK, maybe I'm off base about the product of his time meme.

Still, I think he was an excellent President.

[Retrograde]

20. Berg's "Wilson" struck me as a mass of contradictions

the person he depicts, that is, not the book. He's a Southerner who spends most of his life in the North, an academician who manages to survive in politics, a progressive in some matters, a regressive in others. He believed in letting his Cabinet heads run their departments their way, which is how Berg explains his setting Civil Rights back a generation. He was also in very poor health during most of his presidency, probably as a result of high blood pressure, and his second wife acted as gatekeeper for the last few years (his first wife died while he was in office). His first appointment to the Supreme Court was a vehement anti-Semite; his second was the first Jewish justice, so go figure.

[Lionel Mandrake]

5. Thanks for sharing your views on Wilson.

I don't know enough about Wilson to argue about his place in history. Maybe some Wilson scholars can jump in to this discussion.

It is ironic that Wilson ran in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of the war." There's no question that public opinion was against our participation in WW1. And the 20s were a period of "Republican Ascendancy", in the words of John D. Hicks.

[ProfessorGAC]

14. A Democrat Was Elected 12 Years After He Left Office, And. . .

Held the POTUS seat for another 20 years. How is that a discredited democratic party "for a generation". 12 years is a generation?

You mention the Depression so you know the chain of events, but i think your calendar is missing some pages.

[StevieM]

24. If you want to look at racist presidents, then Andrew Jackson should be at the top of the list.

The man was genocidal. I hate his high rankings among historians.

[truebluegreen]

26. Andrew Johnson was no picnic either.

Pretty much single-handedly derailed Reconstruction

[StevieM]

32. I completely agree. It is interesting to ponder what might have happened if Lincoln

hadn't been killed, or at least if he had been succeeded by a fellow Republican.

The difference is that Johnson is almost universally regarded as a failure, whereas Jackson is remembered as a near great president. It is hard to think of worse human being that has ever occupied the White House.

[truebluegreen]

35. Very true. nt

[TheKentuckian]

41. Jackson sprung out as missing from the list but I guess if you out can put genocidal madness

aside a different picture can present.

Don't give me any internment camp shit either, this is orders of magnitude territory.

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Worst, James Buchanan, no question.

Best? FDR or Lincoln.

Most overrated: Reagan, Kennedy.

Most underrated: LBJ.

[Lionel Mandrake]

7. LBJ's Achilles' heel was, of course, Vietnam.

LBJ knew that our war in Vietnam was a big mistake. If he had managed to extricate us, his rating would be much higher than it is.

I suspect RayGun's current ratings are due mostly to the efforts of conservative think tanks to canonize him.

I'm not sure why so many people love JFK.

[truebluegreen]

27. Because he was assassinated

before the verdict was in....the wanton destruction of possibility skews our vision. If he had completed a full term, or two, and then left office our judgment would be much more honest.

[StevieM]

30. Here is why I love Kennedy

First of all, we didn't all get blown up during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I understand that some people don't think he deserves credit simply for not doing something disastrous. I disagree. Human beings almost always find a way to do the wrong thing, even the crazy thing. And Kennedy also had to make sure that Krushchev wasn't prompted to do something crazy. I remember seeing a documentary in which someone recalled JFK being advised to do something and being told: "It wouldn't be logical for them to respond." Kennedy replied "It wouldn't be human for them not to."

I also think it is important to remember how huge an event the Moon landing was in human history. Kennedy was primarily responsible for that. There is no reason to believe that it was going to happen without him. The Apollo Space Program IMO makes JFK one of the top 3 U.S. presidents in world history, along with Washington and Jefferson. Notice I didn't say he was one of the top 3 presidents in American history. But if we were to rank the 100 most influential people in the history of the world, I think Kennedy (along with Washington and Jefferson) would make the list, whereas Lincoln and FDR would probably not, even though they were greater presidents.

[Lionel Mandrake]

37. Your points are well taken, but I have some reservations.

1. The danger in the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't from Kruschev. Kennedy knew that the Soviet ICBM sites weren't yet operational, and Kruschev knew he knew, since we had the technical intelligence (i.e., pictures) to prove it. The danger was that in a naval confrontation, the captain of a single ship could have started World War 3. It didn't happen, but that was pure dumb luck.

2. As for the Apollo program: Kennedy made the big speech, but LBJ (who was always a supporter of space exploration in general and the Apollo program in particular) made it happen. I think they deserve joint credit. I hate to say it, but even Nixon (whom I hated) deserves some credit for his support of the Apollo program.

[Spider Jerusalem]

46. Kennedy caused the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Bay of Pigs, though.

And there were US missiles in Turkey on the Soviet border. (And Kennedy himself said he didn't give a damn about going to the moon; what he cared about was beating the Soviets.)

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. I'm no expert, but I've seen Harding consistently rated worst.

And LBJ had some high highs (civil rights act) but also some low lows (Vietnam).

[JaneyVee]

8. FDR is 1st, Andrew Johnson is last.

W Bush 3rd from last, Obama currently at 16th, according to presidential scholars.

[Archae]

9. Why does Buchanon usually get the worst?

In my lifetime...

Eisehower - Let the CIA have too much leeway, and supported too many far-right dictators.
Let too many crises get out of hand domestically too.

Kennedy - Flash and style, not enough substance except for a few exceptions.

Johnson - Vietnam.

Nixon - 'Nuff said.

Ford - Brains of a tackling dummy.

Carter - Iran and "stagflation."

Reagan - Iran-Contra and blowing the deficit out of proportion while cutting needed social programs.

Bush I - Iran-Contra pardons and religious bigot.

Clinton - Monica.

Bush II - So corrupt he stank on ice, and had a VP who was even worse.

Obama - NSA.

[Spider Jerusalem]

12. For being spineless and doing absolutely nothing when the southern states seceded.

Buchanan's inactions made the Civil War inevitable. He had no leadership ability whatever when it was badly needed.

And LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. That alone would make him rank with Lincoln if not for Vietnam. And he may have been the only person who could've gotten it through Congress. When Kennedy was assassinated? Every bill of his legislative agenda was hopelessly stalled in committee and had been for months. The Southern segregationists who controlled key committees weren't going to pass the budget until the civil rights bill was withdrawn. So what did LBJ do? He said "this is what we're going to do", even though all his advisers told him not to piss away his political capital on a lost cause like civil rights. His response was to say "what the hell is the presidency for, then?" and to make it a centrepiece of his new presidency in his first address to Congress. He went to work and browbeat and cajoled and politicked and made deals and promises and threatened humiliations until the bill was released from committee. He organised a "discharge petition", requiring the signatures of a majority of members of the House, to get the bill released from committee; he got the signatures by arm-twisting and promising funding for specific states or districts, and by publicly calling on moderate Republicans as the "party of Lincoln" to sign; he got the budget bill through by promising Harry Byrd he'd bring it below a hundred billion, and made cuts to get it down, by going over every department and seeing where a savings could be made...and got that bill out of committee, and passed, so that the civil rights bill was the last item of business. That's something that ranks with FDR's First Hundred Days as a display of what the presidency is capable of in the right hands and for the right cause.

[Art_from_Ark]

23. So what should Buchanan have done when the South seceded?

Start a war against them? The South seceded because Lincoln was elected President, not because of Buchanan. In fact, most of the South voted for Buchanan's Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, in 1860.

[OmahaBlueDog]

17. Yes, but

Eisehower - He's the first President to identify the dangers of the MIC. He also sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce Brown v. Board of Ed.

Kennedy - Set the goal of getting us to the moon.

Johnson - Got the Civil Rights legislation passed that Jack Kennedy couldn't get passed during his lifetime.

Nixon - Went to China and met with Mao. Got the SALT treaty signed.

Ford - Proved that, indeed, the Constitution does work.

Carter - Brokered Mideast Peace

Reagan - You got me. I got nothing.

Bush I - Supported and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act

Clinton - Brought the budget to surplus and oversaw a period of unparalled low unemployment.

Bush II - Again - I got nothing.

Obama - The ACA, but it's hard to judge a Presidency until we've left it for five years.

[jmowreader]

29. Oh come now...

Bush II signed the Do Not Call list. Now I only get 80 percent as many telemarketing calls as I did before the Horseman of Famine was in office. Good on ya Dubya!

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

11. I'm hearing Jefferson shouldn't be up there because he flip-flopped once he became President...

It came as a surprise to me because I just accepted what the historians were say, but here's the knock on President Jefferson.

Jefferson hypocritically violated his lofty rhetoric of liberty.

The Louisiana purchase was a brilliant move, but Jefferson made a major mistake when he permitted the new territory to own slaves.

As President he ran an embargo against all US foreign trade in late 1807 and then instituted the equivalent of marshal law to enforce the embargo. People were starving by 1808 due to the embargo. The Embargo Act allowed for searches, seizures, and arrests without warrants and only on suspicion that the person was going to export a good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embargo_Act_of_1807

He set the precedent for relocating Indians into "empty western land" and violated the constitution by purchasing France's claim to the Louisiana Territory with out congressional approval.

Before Jefferson, the U.S. paid tribute to the Barbary Pirates to prevent them from attacking U.S. ships and taking citizens prisoner. Jefferson initially refused to pay the tribute, which was a good idea because the tribute to the pirates was 20 percent of the U.S. Treasury. When the pirates attacked U.S. ships, Jefferson sent the marines & made alliances to fight the pirates. Jefferson's mistake occurred when the U.S. was on the verge of victory, Instead of letting the forces win, Jefferson accepted a deal with the corrupt leader of Tripoli. betraying the allies who helped our forces to gain victory, and requiring the U.S. to pay a ransom to the pirates to get back prisoners the pirates had captured.

Jefferson cut the navy by two-thirds and built small gunboats instead, saying they “are the only water defense which can be useful to us, and protect us from the ruinous folly of a navy.” His successors followed the same policy, and in the war of 1812, Britain’s navy brushed the gunboats aside and burned the White House in 1814.

Source:
Regarding the Louisiana purchase, see the Louisiana Purchase article on Wikipedia, which cites Herring, George. "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776". p104. Oxford University Press, 2008.

The information on the cuts to the navy was found at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aeb_12780...

For Barbary Pirates information, see the Wikipedia Articles on the Barbary Wars and the book, Pirate Coast by Richard Zacks.

[StevieM]

33. From what I understand, Jefferson was far more supportive of slavery than Washington was.

Washington at least seemed to be a little embarrassed by it, and understood that he was on the wrong side of history.

[OmahaBlueDog]

16. I'd argue Lincoln was the best; I'd probably go Warren Harding on the worst, but it's close.

Fillmore/Pierce/Buchanan collectively represent a group that fiddled-while-Rome-burned in terms of not dealing head-on with slavery.

The post Civil War presidencies of Johnson and Grant (I'm surprised he didn't make the list) are corrupt, cruel in the extreme to Native Americans, and generally ineffective in addressing a host of social ills. Tyler is an accidental President -- much like Gerald Ford.

Hoover gets a bad rap to the extent that he's really saddled with problems caused by Harding and Coolidge's failed policies. He didn't have any good ideas on how to end the Depression, but there weren't any really good precedents, either. People forget that FDR didn't solve the Depression overnight, and the economy really didn't fully recover until the run-up to WWII started.

George W. Bush starts two wars and wrecks the economy. Nixon has scandal. Warren Harding, however, gives us both. Despite the relative brevity of his presidency, we have corruption & scandal, a failure to embrace the League of Nations (helping to sew the seeds for WWII) and horrid economic policies.

John Adams, John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter are really good men and deep thinkers who were, on balance, pretty ineffective Presidents.

Lincoln is faced with the worst crisis in American history and solves it. He made mistakes, and committed rights violations that would appall John Yoo, but he kept the nation together and ended slavery. I can certainly accept arguments that FDR is the best, but I think Lincoln faced worse challenges. LBJ could have been our greatest President, but Vietnam seriously mars his legacy.

[StevieM]

42. On a slight change of subject, I see that you are coming up on 10,000 posts.

Congratulations!! I hope you make your 10000th a good one!!

[OmahaBlueDog]

43. Thanks!

I will work to make it worthy!

[Nye Bevan]

21. Wahsington and Jefferson owning hundreds of slaves knocks them down the list for me.

They didn't exactly walk the walk on the all people being equal thing. Unlike John Adams, for example.

[Retrograde]

22. I'd like to know more about Taft

Reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's latest book, he comes across as an able administrator (according to her, people in the Philippines actually liked him since he treated them as humans) and he carried on a lot of TR's policies, but he never seemed to have his heart in it.

I have a soft spot for Hoover because he lived in my town. He was great with relief efforts in Europe after WWI, and in the Mississippi Valley after the floods of 1927, but he just couldn't get a grip on the Depression. One biography I read claims he thought that since he believed in charity and put his money where his mouth was, other well-off people would do likewise.

From what I know of Garfield, I think he would have ranked medium to high if he had had a chance to do anything in office.

[Douglas Carpenter]

25. The most important contribution of Eisenhower that might make him the greatest President involves

something that didn't happen - global nuclear war. During Eisenhower's time the Pentagon was very much dominated by a click of evil madmen lead by General Curtis E. LeMay who were determined to bring about global nuclear holocaust. The domestic perception and politics of the time made it highly possible and perhaps even probable. Anyone with less military gravitas than Dwight D. Eisenhower may have not been able to keep those these evil lunatics under control during that particularly dangerous era.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”

― Dwight D. Eisenhower

[truebluegreen]

28. +1

[sakabatou]

31. How long until he's at the very bottom every time?

[First Speaker]

34. The best was JFK, for a simple reason...

...he prevented the world from being blown up in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The pressure on him to invade Cuba was overwhelming, led by the madmen in the Pentagon, especially LeMay. Even so-called doves, like Fulbright, supported invasion. And if he had, it's quite clear that it would have meant war with the Soviet Union, and the destruction of civilization. The transcripts of the White House meetings show that Kennedy was cool, determined, and above all not prepared to give in to the hard-liners. Anyone else--certainly including LBJ and Nixon--would have given in to the pressure. Kennedy didn't. And because he didn't, we're all still here. Compared to that, any other Presidential achievement is secondary, to put it mildly.

[Lionel Mandrake]

40. Another post made a similar claim for Ike.

And let's not forget Vasili Arkhipov.

On 27 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba. Despite being in international waters, the Americans started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, so those on board did not know whether war had broken out.[5] The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.[6]
Three officers on board the submarine – Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov – were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch.[7] Although Arkhipov was only second-in-command of submarine B-59, he was actually commander of the flotilla of submarines, including B-4, B-36 and B-130, and of equal rank to Captain Savitsky. According to author Edward Wilson, the reputation Arkhipov gained from his courageous conduct in the previous year's K-19 incident also helped him prevail in the debate.[3] Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. This presumably averted the nuclear warfare which could possibly have ensued had the torpedo been fired.

Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

[kairos12]

45. k/r. Sadly, not a well known story.

[WatermelonRat]

36. Andrew Johnson was worst in my opinion.

The civil rights movement could have come to fruition much earlier if he hadn't botched reconstruction. His incompetence set the stage for the Klan, Jim Crow, and all associated ills to emerge from the South. Even Dubya doesn't hold a candle to him in damage done to the country.

[dmosh42]

38. If we had a fair and partial congress, GW Bush would be convicted as a war criminal. No president...

ever put himself down so low in any lifetime. There are still the families of over 3,000 vets who lost their lives for a phony war with the only goal to enrich the oil industry and no purposes to explain those deaths.

[Token Republican]

39. My best and worst

Worst:
Andrew Jackson

The trail of tears remains a stain on the United States to this day. The Cherokees were one of the first native american people to be removed by force. They were unique in that they actually tried to resolve their oppression without force, and sued their way all up the Supreme Court, where they won.

Andrew Jackson blatantly ignored the Supreme Court, resulting in the trail of tears

Best:
William Henry Harrison

He was president for 32 days, dying from some horrible disease he caught. Contrary to popular belief, this illness was probably not the result of his long inaugral speech given in the rain.

He gets my vote since he never had a chance to do any harm to our Country during his brief time as president.

[llmart]

44. My thoughts....

If it wasn't for W, Reagan would be at the bottom But hands down, W is the worst president ever in my lifetime or all time for that matter. We are still undoing the damage he did and will be for decades and probably long after I'm dead and gone.