At one time I heard a discussion of evidence to support the idea that the war with Japan would have ended almost as soon without our dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and that Truman may have had reason to consider that. If that were true, it would rank very high.
And certainly, I agree with Freddy-the-Pig that Roosevelt’s Japanese-American internment was a terrible blunder. I can’t imagine why any historian would leave that off the list but add Clinton’s follies. (Or if I were going to put Clinton on the list, I would leave Monica’s name out of it and indicate that it was his perjury that was the blunder and that it resulted in his impeachment.)
We can’t really evaluate the impact of an action until its consequences are better known. The consequences of this action might not be known for another 50 years.
I will predict, though, that as time passes this one will be rated as a real corker.
I think you’re basically right, although I think the cutoff is a little more arbitrary than that—after all, Clinton’s blowjob wasn’t that far in the historical past either. From what I can find out about the Presidential Moments conference, it discussed “Presidential Moments” of the 19th and 20th centuries only. The Bush II presidency, being a 21st-century event, simply isn’t considered.
I have a hard time believing Truman knew anything about the willingness to surrender on the part of the Japanese cabinet and the Emperor, especially since the cabinet was bitterly divided over whether to surrender and there was a coup attempt on the part of some military officers when they found out about the Emperor’s intention to surrender on the night of August 14.
While it was terrible, the internment was sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, unlike the other blunders on the list. Additionally, it had a relatively positive outcome in that we now look upon it with shame and won’t be likely to try anything like that in the future. Any lessons that were learned in the other blunders are less clear.
I wouldn’t call it a blunder. The country was really at risk of coming apart, with not only the southern states leaving, but also Kentucky and Missouri not really giving much support. There were southern sympathizers in many of the northern states. In extraordinary times you have to resort to extraordinary measures.
In today’s legal climate, anybody who has sex with a subordinate employee on their work premises and expects it to remain “private” is a jackass.
But of course I wish Clinton’s “blunder” had been left off the list, as it was a blunder in the political sense only, with minimal consequences for the country.
Having already agreed that the “Monica Lewinski scandal” doesn’t warrant comparison with the other blunders on the list, I do think there is a reasonable basis for its inclusion - if you believe that the uproar and impeachment proceeedings set in motion by his peccadilloes had one or more of the following effects:
Created sufficient distractions to prevent the Clinton Administration from developing and pushing through major initiatives in key policy areas - i.e. energy dependency, health care, Social Security, foreign policy etc.
Poisoned relations between the major parties and ideological opponents enough to greatly hamper bipartisan efforts to solve America’s problems.
Re #1, I’m unconvinced Clinton had significantly more untapped potential for doing these things by the time WhoopieGate reared its head, and for #2, it’s hard to imagine the absence of Monica-related mudslinging resulting in a much less nasty atmosphere than what we have now.
Who actually created those distractions? Whose lack of responsibility toward the nation was revealed most clearly? A solid majority of us understood at the time, and there is no real swing in opinion the other way since, not given their performance once given full power.
After all those years of investigation into finding something to get him for, you nevertheless place the one thing they found at the *source * of poisoning bipartisan relations rather than its effect? You do need to learn more about Newt Gingrich’s role.
I do agree that to rank the Clinton persecution ahead of, well, virtually the entire Harding administration and most of Grant’s as nation-damaging blunders looks more like an attempt to avoid partisan criticism of the lefty ivory-tower eggheads than serious consideration.
The comentary I read on the Supreme Court decision was that the court ducked the issue by merely deciding that the internment was done in accordance with the executive order without ever getting to the legitimacy of the order itself.
You can say this in the despite the support for our government’s actions right now?
Leaving aside the fascinating Clinton discussion, it seems like there are three different criteria that are (or should) be used for a list like this.
If it’s worst damage to the country from a presidential blunder, then Hoover’s response to the Great Depression and Nixon’s War on Drugs are in there- as Iraq may be, eventually.
If it includes moral damage to the country, I’d say Indian Removal, Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese Internment, and restoring discrimination to the Civil Service. Bush’s abuses of executive power (Patriot Act, warrentless wiretapping) and/or the torture scandal may one day join that list.
I like your definitions and selections, Dragoness, but under “Moral damage” as well as physical damage there just has to be room for the continuation of slavery somewhere, and the most-likely place to look would be the feckless Buchanan administration that contributed much more than any other to making the Civil War inevitable. It isn’t popular to criticize Jefferson, as already noted, but his own refusal to actually comply in any way with any of his high-flown moral pronouncements on the subject contributed, by example, immensely to slavery’s prolongation as well.
Majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States:
It should be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes pustify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can. 323 U.S. 214, 216 (1944).
In the light of the principles we announced in the Hirabayashi case, we are unable to conclude that it was beyond the war power of Congress and the Executive to exclude those of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast war area at the time they did. 323 U.S. at 217-18. (The Hirabayashi case upheld a challenge to the constitutionality of the president to impose curfews on individuals of Japanese ancestry in “military areas” as authorized under 18 U.S.C.A. § 1383 and Executive Order 9066).
As previous posters have noted, since this list only covers the 19th and 20th centuries, whatever is going on now is another matter. While the Bush administration was heavy-handed in cracking down on the slightest immigration and visa-related offenses post-9/11, very few notable people seriously suggested rounding up all Muslims or people of Arab ancestry and putting them in internment camps. Despite some initial bad press (Operation Infinite Justice, Bush’s reference to the war on terrorism as a “crusade”), Bush has publically stated on a few different occasions that the war isn’t against Islam itself and that all Muslims aren’t terrorists.
True, but since it was a blunder sanctioned and approved by all three branches of government, it somewhat reduces Roosevelt’s responsibility as the primary blunderer.
I meant to say that the Hirabayashi case upheld the constitutionality of curfews for individuals of Japanese ancestry. In doing so, the Court affirmed the conviction of Hirabayashi for violating the curfew.
Perhaps the commentary I read referred to a failure on the part of the court to look at 18 U.S.C.A. § 1383. It’s been a long time since I read the comment. As I keep saying, this sort of thing is a ratchet with constantly a increasing power being given to the government a little bit at a time in times when people are so afraid that they are willing to give up a little freedom for security. I regret that Lincoln wasn’t stopped in his suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.
I was referring to your statement that we would probably never go down that road again. And of course we can absolutely believe that GW believes everything he says. And we also can believe that a frightened populace will pay any attention to qualifiers placed on actions by political leaders.
Don’t forget, he lied to the American people about it (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”), comitted perjury, then about 30 seconds after he was acquitted he goes on national TV to confess. The real blunder was to lie, cover it up, and take a relatively innocuous event and let it blow up into a national scandal and impeachment (similar to what Nixon did about Watergate).
I’m thinking of a President who had an extended extramarital affair with a woman over whom he held a position of authority. The nation found out about it, and scandal ensured. Subsequent genetic evidence proved that he did, indeed, have the affair alleged. Of whom am I thinking?
Here’s a hint: The story broke over two hundred years ago.
I don’t necessarily object to putting a presidential affair on the list (way down after all of the wars and such), but even in a list of presidential affairs, Clinton’s might not break the top 10.