Truman
Here’s how I count 'em so far:
Jefferson 7
Polk 7
Truman 3
Eisenhower 1
Lincoln (are you f***ing kidding?) 1
Very tight race! Looks like the great expansionists are next to go.
Haven’t been following this that much, althoguh I understand the jist of the game. I’ll put in my vote for Eisenhower now - mainly because he really shouldn’t have lasted that long, what makes him greater than those that got eliminated and are about to be?
Also trying to save Jefferson here, he seems like a pretty cool Prez, wrote the Declaration and seemed to be the Bill Clinton of his day, with Sally Hemmings playing the part of Monica Lewinsky.
Jefferson. As others point out, he was a great American and a President, but not particularly a great President.
If Jackson were added to these Final Eight, I think they might form my personal Final Nine.
Only two Presidents remain from my lifetime; I wonder if it’s meaningful they were both relatively non-political. Ike, I think, never ran for any office except President. Truman’s elections, I think, were based more on his relationship with the Kansas City Democrat machine than Truman’s own political skill. I’m glad to see Eisenhower last this long! Some say he “did little”, but I doubt that preserving peace and prosperity for 8 years is “little”. Contrast Eisenhower with his successor who, in less than 3 years, mangled the Bay of Pigs, effectively helped assassinate a foreign leader who was trying to mend his country’s civil war, and brought the world to brink of nuclear war just to play a showmanship game with obsolete missiles. That JFK is idolized while Ike almost forgotten shows an emphasis on flash over substance.
I agree with your assessment of Ike (and you didn’t even mention the Interstate Highway System) but he will get my next vote once Jefferson is gone. Him or Polk, anyway. The competition is getting too stiff.
I’m not entirely sure why Ike gets a pass on the Bay of Pigs, given that the whole thing was his idea and that it happened all of three months into Kennedy’s term. Yes, the buck stops with Kennedy but Ike ordered it and the CIA screwed it up.
Might as well blame Clinton for 9/11 then. We do not know what Ike would have done with the plan or if he would have stopped it. We do know JFK gave the go ahead.
OK. I’m going to claim ignorance here. What are you talking about?
The point isn’t that I’m giving Kennedy a pass; the point is that I’m specifically not giving Eisenhower a pass.
And 9/11 is something that was done to us, not something that we did, so it’s not quite the same thing.
I’ll quote from Seymour Hersh’s Dark Side of Camelot. Perhaps the otherwise-credible Hersh has “flipped out” in this book, but …
" … [a reason] Kennedy decided Diem had to go: in the months before his murder, the South Vietnamese president had begun to talk settlement secretly with North Vietnam. Diem was looking for a way to get the Americans out – before the Kennedy administration took him out.
"… The NLF [had support of noncommunist opposition … but] there was no challenge on the editorial pages or in the universities to the Kennedy administration’s avowed policy of saving South Vietnam from communism.
"[Charles Bartlett quoting Kennedy:] He said ‘I can’t let Vietnam go to the communists and then go and ask [American voters] to reelect me. Somehow we’ve got to hold that territory through the 1964 election … But we’ve got no future there. [They] hate us. They want us out of there. At one point they’ll kick our asses out of there.’
“[Daniel Ellsberg quoting General Lansdale after meeting with JFK:] Kennedy did not use the words ‘kill’ or ‘assassinate’ in connection with Diem. But Lansdale told me he was in no doubt that this was what was being discussed.”
I realize many who respected Hersh turned against him after this book. Like the rest of my generation I admired JFK greatly and would love to learn that Hersh’s book is just lies. Is it?
I think Hersh got it wrong.
President Diem was an autocrat and a religious bigot (a minority Catholic in a largely-Buddhist country). His government was dominated by his cronies, including his sister-in-law Madame Nhu and his brothers, and was entirely unresponsive to popular demands for reform. JFK and his advisors, including Amb. Lodge in Saigon, had realized that Diem would never be the true partner they needed to keep the Vietcong from making inroads in the civilian population. The war had both military and political dimensions, and Diem was both incapable and unwilling to do what needed to be done. Lodge talked to Diem until he was blue in the face, and Diem kept putting him off.
Any Diem talk of a settlement with North Vietnam was a mere negotiations ploy, intended to get the Americans to back off; Diem knew it would never work, and that he’d probably lose power if he entered into such an agreement. Frankly, by mid-1963, the Kennedy Administration would have welcomed a settlement in Vietnam if it meant that the South maintained its independence and the U.S. would not have to escalate militarily. (The U.S. had brokered a similar deal in Laos a year or two earlier). That just wasn’t going to happen in Vietnam, though; the North knew time was on their side.
The coup itself was badly handled, but I wouldn’t shed too many tears for Diem: Ngo Dinh Diem - Wikipedia
Also see Lawrence Freedman’s Kennedy’s Wars and Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days for more info.
True enough. But isn’t it hypocritical to intervene to help a “friendly government” and then work to overthrow that very government? And if the Charles Bartlett quote is to be believed, JFK didn’t expect to prevent VietCong victory; he just wanted to delay it until after the 1964 election.
Regardless of JFK’s motives, Hersh’s book makes a case that the Kennedys’ arrogance led to flawed foreign-policy methods.
SVN was a friendly government, but institutionally it was much more than the Diem family, which JFK and his aides came to see (correctly, IMHO) as an obstacle and not an asset to stopping a Communist takeover. Unfortunately, none of Diem’s successors was much better, for various reasons. JFK gave an interview with Walter Cronkite in the summer of '63 in which he noted the limits of American power and influence in SVN, and said very candidly that it was, in the final analysis, the SVN government’s war to win or lose; it was their country, after all. If the war was to be lost, of course he would prefer it not happen until after his reelection; he still remembered the GOP assault on Truman over “who lost China.” But JFK had not written off SVN before his death.
And I don’t see JFK as arrogant - self-confident, certainly, sometimes unduly so, and I’m sure his ego took a battering over the Bay of Pigs. But by 1963 he had a nuanced, skillful grasp of foreign policy and was making progress on virtually all fronts: laying the groundwork for lessened tensions with the USSR, setting up the Hotline with Moscow, holding NATO together despite DeGaulle’s intransigence, passing the Limited Test Ban Treaty despite strong conservative opposition, starting the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, and pursuing IMHO an appropriate mix of diplomatic, military and economic initiatives in SVN. There is quite a bit of scholarship (as discussed in a recent cover issue of Newsweek) suggesting that a smart, sustained counterinsurgency effort there (the JFK approach) might’ve led to a different outcome than a massive conventional military buildup (the LBJ approach).
Jefferson
Morning vote count:
Jefferson 9
Polk 7
Truman 3
Eisenhower 2
Abraham Lincoln 1
This reminds me of when we first moved to Tennessee and my wife and I took a tour of Fort Donelson, an old Civil War era fort overlooking the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.
As it so happens, there were a bunch of re-enactors there that day, and a guy dressed up in a Confederate uniform talking to all the visitors and answering questions about the life of a Confederate soldier in the war and at the fort (before it was captured by the Union, of course).
But any question that was asked, he turned into an attack on President Lincoln. The war was his fault, it could have been avoided, the South just wanted peace, he was a tyrant, etc. For me, my wife and my parents who are all from the North, it was quite entertaining to see him embrace his character so thoroughly.
After living in the south for 10 years, I’m no longer sure he was talking in character.
I think at this point only the Roosevelts haven’t gotten any votes (even joke ones) - there was definitely a joke Washington vote in the early rounds.
Polk
Vote count:
Jefferson 9
Polk 8
Truman 3
Eisenhower 2
Abraham Lincoln 1
A truly great political thinker, diplomat, writer, and founder, Thomas Jefferson has been voted out.
George Washington (None, 1789-1797)
James Polk (Democrat, 1845-1849)
Abraham Lincoln (Republican, 1861-1865)
Theodore Roosevelt (Republican, 1901-1909)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat, 1933-1945)
Harry S. Truman (Democrat, 1945-1953)
Dwight Eisenhower (Republican, 1953-1961)
Eliminated Presidents:
- James Buchanan (Democrat, 1857-1861)
- Franklin Pierce (Democrat, 1853-1857)
- Andrew Johnson (National Union, 1865-1869)
- Warren Harding (Republican, 1921-1923)
- Millard Fillmore (Whig, 1850-1853)
- Richard Milhous Nixon (Republican, 1969-1974)
- Herbert Hoover (Republican, 1929-1933)
- Ronald Reagan (Republican, 1981-1989)
- Andrew Jackson (Democrat, 1829-1837)
- Rutherford Hayes (Republican, 1877-1881)
- Ulysses Grant (Republican, 1869-1877)
- John Tyler (Whig, 1841-1845)
- James Earl Carter (Democrat, 1977-1981)
- James Madison (Democratic-Republican, 1809-1817)
- Martin Van Buren (Democrat, 1837-1841)
- Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-1921)
- Calvin Coolidge (Republican, 1923-1929)
- John Adams (Federalist, 1797-1801)
- Benjamin Harrison (Republican, 1889-1893)
- Gerald Ford (Republican, 1974-1977)
- Zachary Taylor (Whig, 1849-1850)
- George Herbert Walker Bush (Republican, 1989-1993)
- John Quincy Adams (Democratic-Republican, 1825-1829)
- Chester Arthur (Republican, 1881-1885)
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Democrat, 1961-1963)
- William McKinley (Republican, 1897-1901)
- William Howard Taft (Republican, 1909-1913)
- Lyndon Baines Johnson (Democrat, 1963-1969)
- William Jefferson Clinton (Democrat, 1993-2001)
- James Monroe (Democratic-Republican, 1817-1825)
- Grover Cleveland (Democrat, 1885-1889, 1893-1897)
- Thomas Jefferson (Democratic-Republican, 1801-1809)
James K. Polk; of the remaining presidents, all had significant achievements to their name, but Polk, in making no effort to deal with the problems of slavery and the division of the country, ducked out of grappling with the single greatest danger facing the nation.
Voting closes Monday at 2 PM.