Who in your reckoning are the most underrated leaders* for various countries and why?
George HW Bush. Handled the end of the Cold War and the Soviet collapse skillfully. It could have been much more untidy than it was.
John Major. Okay, he looks saint like in comparison with Anthony Charles Lynton Blair but the led the UK economy out of the recession into strenghth, started the final settlement of N Ireland, handled the Soviet collapse, stayed the hell out of the Euro.
Richard Nixon: Possibly the last US President to date to take the initiative rather than react to events, the opening up of China, getting the US off the gold standard, attempting healthcare reform etc.
The chosen leader(s) must be out of power and have been out of power for at least 10 years.
*Leader means a head of state or government of a nation state or equivalent political entity. No sub national leaders please.
Eisenhower seems underrated to me; moderate conservative, anti-McCarthyism, interstate highways, implemented desegregation of the military, the Little Rock Nine, economic boom, and appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court.
I’d vote for him if he were alive and eligible today.
I give some small credit to George I for not totally fucking up the end of the cold war, but he all he did was sit on his hands and as result did not direct harm. I suppose that’s pretty good as things go in his family.
Eisenhower does not get enough credit. Building the interstate highways was a stroke of brilliance. I don’t care if he had military purposes as a motivation, modern America was built on those highways.
Johnson is the sad case. He had the potential for greatness, but wasted it by getting enmired in Vietnam and pushing through the over ambitious Great Society.
Jimmy Carter is underrated. The times dealt him a lot of hands of bad luck; he handled it all at least as well as Ford or Reagan would have in his shoes. And he brought Egypt and Israel together.
I actually came in to mention Eisenhower, I’m guilty myself of under rating him for most of my life. I was born during his Presidency, but my perception of him as a President had always been that he was a more or less mild but unremarkable President who rolled in on the backs of his amazing military career.
In retrospect I think Eisenhower is possibly the greatest Cold War President (from Truman until Bush I is the span I’m counting as Cold War.) Eisenhower has a nice list of domestic achievements but also on foreign policy in many ways he handled the Soviets better than anyone. Eisenhower was vigilant in preventing any wars with the Soviets but did so with strength and not capitulation. Essentially all other Cold War Presidents aside from Carter are guilty of some ultimately unnecessary and harmful military adventurism. Eisenhower effectively worked against the Soviets without starting any wars.
The Atlantic had a good article that’s adapted from a recently released book about Ike that is a good read.
OTOH, and on that same note, it was Ike who got us into 'Nam – not only by sending “advisors,” but by refusing to allow an all-Vietnam national election (which Ho Chi Minh certainly would have won) as provided in the Geneva Accords.
He made other foreign policy mistakes. We’re still suffering from the installation of the Shah in Iran. The advisors in Vietnam was a pretty minor thing by itself. But without him we would have never become the economic powerhouse whose laurels we are still resting on.
It’s not pleasant to admit but backing the Shah was probably the right play at the time and in truth I think whatever government Iran would have had during the Shah’s rule would have eventually fallen to radicals. Maybe not as spectacularly and not with so much accrued animosity for America, but we’d have still almost certainly had the theological state we have there now.
But backing the Shah meant Iran’s government was not aligned with the Soviets during that period. But Vietnam wasn’t really an Eisenhower mistake, and the advisors were not the start of us fighting a war.
Eisenhower very specifically rejected the concept, advocated by many in his military and diplomatic leadership, that you could effectively handle Communist expansion by fighting limited wars. He also strongly felt limited wars basically could not really exist, that wars have their own legs. He feared because of that any wars could eventually result in us on one side and the Soviets on the other, and he was not comfortable with risking that escalation.
Backing a coup in Iran is an example of how Ike would use “hard power”, as is his involvement in Vietnam. Nothing Ike did committed us to any military engagement in Vietnam nor would Ike have fought a full war there. Johnson far and away bears the blunt of the blame for that war, with Kennedy sharing a much smaller slice of it for expanding the scope and size of our activities there. Full war in Vietnam basically went against every decision Ike made while in office…so blaming him in any way for the Vietnam war is simply inaccurate in my opinion.
Agree with most of the above selections. In particular Bush Sr. was the one who actually did most of the NAFTA negotiations even though Clinton gets credit for signing it.
Lyndon Baines Johnson-I’d say even taking Vietnam into consideration, LBJ was one of America’s greatest Presidents having created Medicare and Medicaid, and via the Voting Rights, and Civil Rights Acts along with the 24th Amendment ensuring civil rights for blacks. Virtually none of the other post World War II Presidents can compare to him in domestic achivement. The real liberal heroes are not JFK and Bill Clinton but LBJ and Harry Truman.
James Knox Polk-Gained vast amounts of territory for the United States guaranteeing its future as a two-ocean power.
Friedrich Ebert-Suppressed both right wing and left wing extremenists (including the quasi-communistic faction among his fellow Socialists) and made sure the Weimar Republic made the transition from monarchy to democracy. Too bad it didn’t last…
But can you count all that but ignore the massive corruption, abuse of power, theft, and so on? Plus, a few months ago there was a ton of talk about Nixon pretty much committing treason.
It had already started. It wasn’t the right thing to do, but it didn’t put the situation on a trajectory leading to the massive US involvement that would follow.
Blaming President Eisenhower for the Vietnam War is brutally unfair. At the time he left office the US only had about 600 troops in Vietnam which went up to around 6000 under Kennedy.
LBJ was the man responsible for Vietnam not Kennedy or Eisenhower.
LBJ is the man that made the decisions after Kennedy, but Kennedy began the serious escalation, and Johnson was following that lead. It was up to Kennedy to see that Eisenhower’s ideas weren’t working and get us out of there. Had he not been killed it would have all been on his head. That does nothing to reduce Johnson’s or Ike’s responsibilities, but JFK shouldn’t get off scott free.
I’m not saying that Kennedy didn’t make mistakes, but I don’t think that a full scale war involving two million American soldiers was inevitable due to Kennedy’s actions.
In fact, while I’m no Oliver Stone, and it’s a subject of anther thread, had Kennedy lived and been re-elected I think he most likely would not have taken the actions of LBJ.
Saying Ike is responsible at all for the Vietnam war is like saying Clinton is responsible for Bush invading Iraq. Ike’s responsibility for our major military activity in Vietnam is essentially none whatsoever. It was explicitly not Ike’s policy to ever get involved in pitched wars to stop the spread of communism. He deliberately rejected that concept repeatedly throughout his Presidency in arguments with military and diplomatic advisers.
We had small numbers of military forces all over the world during Ike’s Presidency, trying to link a major war in Vietnam to a small contingent of advisers simply does not make sense. There was a serious war going on in Vietnam during Ike’s Presidency, if it had been his desire at all to involve us in that war, he could have gone full in. There’s really no evidence he wanted a military commitment in Vietnam and thus independent decisions subsequent Presidents made in that direction really can’t be ascribed to Ike.
Kennedy made the decision to apply greater resources to advance U.S. goals in Vietnam, and in LBJ’s defense (the only defense I’ll give him on this issue) his decision was “reverse the course Kennedy set, or follow its path.” But the buck stopped with LBJ on that one, and he and he alone bears responsibility for the level of war we became engaged in there. Kennedy may or may not have continued his policy of escalation there, we’ll never know, but we know that LBJ escalated it into a “major war” from the U.S. perspective.
As for the coup in Iran being about oil, that was certainly the motivation for the British involvement there. However Ike had little reason to stick his neck out for British oil concerns and in fact during his Presidency he proved that British oil concerns were not enough to get him to go along with British desires. Churchill successfully made the argument that Mossadeg was on a collision course in which he had spurned the West and would naturally, given his socialist policies, eventually move toward the Soviets as allies despite earlier statements against Soviet style communism. He certainly would not be the first leader in the Cold War to move toward the Soviet sphere. Whether it would have happened or not I do not know, but it seems a lot more likely to me that that is the argument that swayed Ike.
During Ike’s Presidency America was still a big dog in the oil world so we didn’t need overseas oil entanglements right then, and it was going to be the British who would be the biggest beneficiaries of reversing the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry.