There’s an old saying that applies here: if your mom had balls she’d be your dad. He escalated the war into one far more disastrous than the one we have now and then he quit because he couldn’t handle the mess that he was responsible for creating, leaving it for others to clean up.
His Great Society was nothing more than what Kennedy intended to do anyway, he just had the sympathy clout after the assassination. LBJ was a horrible president in almost every respect.
The “Great Society” wasn’t even Johnson’s idea. It was Michael Gerson’s.
I’ve always thought that Ike’s greatest contribution (but one that has largely gone unheeded), was his warning about the creation and unchecked growth of the military-industrial complex. Like Washington’s warning about becoming intangled in foreign alliances, it made for a great soundbite, and would have made great policy, but no one was listening.
Give Johnson credit; he walked the walk while Kennedy just talked the talk. If Kennedy had lived he would have been content to continue paying lip service to black civil rights while effectively doing very little to change the situation. Johnson actually pushed through significant legislation that accomplished things. And that includes the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which he got enacted as Senate Majority Leader, before he or Kennedy was in the White House.
Folks may dislike Nixon for Watergate, but he truly has one of the greatest legacies for any modern president (as historians are beginning to realize). His foreign policy accomplishments – opening China, establishing detente with the USSR, and ending the Vietnam war – are what he is usually credited with, but he was equally as significant on domestic affairs. He desegregated Southern schools with much greater efficiency and much less resistance than Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson; he launched the war on drugs; much modern environmental legislation dates from his term; he took the U.S. off the gold standard; and most Great Society programs were significantly expanded and strengthened by him.
For accomplishments in both foreign policy and domestic policy, Nixon has to be rated quite high.
That’s the negative: Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a peace platform. (My Dad, serving in Vietnam at the time, persuaded my Mom to vote for Nixon for that reason.) But he was lying. He never really intended to end the war on any terms that could not be considered an American victory. That being impossible, the war dragged on until Ford was president.
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I’d give Reagan the nod for best, although by the time he took office, his liberalism had become watered down considerably.
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:dubious: For Og’s fucking sake, will you please stop using the word “liberal” when you mean “libertarian”?
If by “domestic civil unrest” you mean the urban race riots, I don’t see how Johnson could be blamed. If you mean the anti-war movement, I guess he could be – but that “civil unrest” didn’t do the country much damage, did it?
No, Nixon ran on a platform of peace through victory. I don’t think anyone in 1968 thought that Nixon was proposing to pull the troops out and let S. Vietnam fend for itself. To give Nixon credit, throughout his first term he gradually pulled out most U.S. troops and finally signed a peace accord with N. Vietnam near the end of that term. He ended the war in Vietnam in 1973. Fighting resumed between the North and the South that ended in 1975, but U.S. troops weren’t involved.
:dubious: So he did, but are you sure you want to claim that for him as an achievement?
This is a whole debate in itself, whether or not it was ‘impossible’. I’ll just say that I don’t believe NIXON thought it was impossible. It certainly seems he tried to end the war using the carrot and stick method. Ultimately he was unsuccessful, but expecting him to end a war that had gone on so long, and that was still raging full blast, after only being in office a year, is a bit unrealistic. And expecting any president to simply come into office and unilaterally pull US forces out of a war we had been in but that was still going on is beyond unrealistic.
What would you have had Nixon do in 1969 BG? At any rate, its your list and you are entitled to it…I just don’t see this as one of Nixon’s negatives myself. I see it more as a continued negative for Johnson. YMMV
-XT
He played zero role in any of that. He just happened to be the guy in office when it happened.
Hell, as a libertarian I disagree with pretty much everything Nixon did, either domestically or overseas. However, he did do a lot. It always kills me that liberals hate Nixon so much, since he, more than any other president since FDR, presided over the expansion of government in ways that liberals love. He was certainly the most liberal president since FDR if we judge by his accomplishments and not his rhetoric.
In August 1969, Kissinger began secret peace talks in Paris with North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war#Opposition_to_the_war I would have made sure those talks ended in peace, defined as the end of U.S. involvement, which would have been politically sellable at home in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive.
As for the president with the greatest legacy – the obvious choice is George McGovern.
Shut up! McGovern beat Nixon by a landslide in 1972! He made America the groovy, peace-loving country it is today!
I think Ford is the biggest non-entity by far. Bush Sr. at least won a war on his watch.
I believe that Clinton’s legacy will grow as overall competence, popularity and administrative performance (especially economically) will stand out far more in retrospect than the blow job. I believe that Clinton’s impeachment will come to be regarded as the capricious, partisan stunt that it was. Clinton had greater domestic and foreign success than Reagan and was a consistently more popular president, and unlike Reagan, Clinton had no legitimate scandals.
Nixon has a large legacy because of Watergate and has become almost an iconic exemplar of corrupted power.
Carter will be another relative non-entity. He’ll be one of those guys like Pierce or Buchanan who’s just a name on the list but no one will remember anything else about him in 100 years.
GWB will be remembered as one of the very worst presidents in history. Monumentally corrupt, amoral and incompetent. The way Lincoln has come to be the standard for great presidents, W will become the rock bottom demarker for bad ones.
Your capacity for self-delusion is astounding. It doesn’t matter whether you think it was legitimate or not. It was a monster scandal that affected every part of government and continues to do so. That legitimizes it in and of itself.
UIt was a phantom scandal created for entirely partsan purposes. There was nothing legitimate about it. If there was a scandal at all, it was the abuse of power by Starr and the Republicans who wasted untold amounts of taxpayer money pursuing any excuse to impeach a president simply because he had cleaned their clocks in two elections.
How?
Who is reputed to be running for President in 2008?
Who isn’t? Jeb Bush, John McCain, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum. You name it. What does that have to do with blowjob gate?