Another Clintonesta.
Pretty much the same situation. All three trusted their old “friends” too much when they got into the White House and their cronies used it as an opportunity to grab as much as they could.
As I said in the “Worst Presidents” thread, I think Clinton did a whole lot that’s easy to overlook because he made it look easy.
So I voted for Clinton. Only great of my lifetime, in my view.
Of course not, and I believe Mr. Moto is embroidering any possible Truman transgressions by suggesting that they should be placed in similar categories.
That’s too simplistic of a view, and think that it’s irresponsible to casually imply that these situations were anything less than distant cousins in nature. Harding had cabinet members go to jail.
Now, this goes past merely involving hangers-on. President Truman made decisions about how the investigations concerning the IRS scandal would be handled, and did so in a way calculated to insulate his office and the federal bureaucracy from outside scrutiny - particularly Congress and the press.
Like I said, Truman was a legitimately great president. Recognizing this should not lead us to minimize his glaring mistakes and personal flaws.
This is the “mountain out of a molehill” cliche put to good use. To equate an act of “insulation” to a scandal as opprobrious as the Teapot Dome affair, is, to reiterate, irresponsible. What Harding allowed to happen under his administration: bribery, imprisonment of important cabinent members, et al. resides on a star of shame, which Truman’s “mistakes” could never reach. Comparing the two is a fool’s errand.
The problem here is that I am not arguing that Harding is a great president. And even if we accept that there were corruption problems in the Harding administration, his personal involvement in them isn’t very clear.
Much clearer are Truman’s fingerprints all over the case I linked above - he was criticized for leaving McGrath in charge of investigating his own department and appointed Morris. Morris had no subpoena power and could not compel information from the Justice Department employees. When he tried to press the matter he was fired, and this led to the firing of McGrath and the appointment of McGranery. This investigation amazingly enough made some headway, though it did not fully resolve questions of Truman’s attitude toward corruption at the time.
Predictably, corruption was a major campaign issue in 1952 and this indisputably helped Eisenhower even though there were corruption issues against his ticket as well (see Nixon, Checkers speech.)
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I’m not arguing specifically for Nixon or LBJ - well, I will for one in a moment - but first, I have to object to the implication there that greatness necessarily means a lack of flaws. Greatness can be achieved with flaws. All great men have had flaws; greatness overcomes flaws.
In any case, I will surprise a lot of people and say I think Nixon was a great President. Yes, he was corrupt; he was forced to resign the office, and he deserved to be forced to resign the office.
However, I think Nixon’s successful detente with China is, without question, the greatest foreign affairs and national security achievement in American history during my lifetime, and it’s really quite possible that it prevented World War III. Despite all the chest-thumping and sabre-ratting that followed, the fact is that the Cold War really started to thaw during Nixon’s administration, and because of Nixon’s policies. Making World War III not happen is greatness, IMHO.
I’d otherwise pick a list of usual suspects; Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR. Washington I think is somewhat underrated in a weird way.
It astounds me that as of the time of this post, 79 people think FDR was a great president. He may have been the prez in WW2, but he did almost as much damage to this country as Wilson did.
But if you’re a standard-issue progressive Doper, the New Deal wasn’t damaging and we’re not still feeling its damaging effects today. Quite the contrary, they’d say, and so the large amount of votes.
Hersh charges that Kennedy had been secretly informed of plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and had then accused Eisenhower-Nixon of not being hawkish enough against Cuba, espousing such an insurgency during the campaign. Obviously, Nixon could not counter this in the most appropriate way, by divulging the secret plans.
How much of Hersh’s book is valid, and how much conjectural or even fiction? I don’t know. I’ve asked that question myself, twice, at SDMB. Between responses to those questions, and my own Googling I’ve found much opposition to the book, but very VERY little in the way of substantive disproofs. (I doubt Dopers need me to remind that Hersh is a highly respected prize-winning liberal journalist, not a right-wing hack.)
(BTW, I watched the Nixon-Kennedy debates on TV, but do not remember any mention of Cuba. 
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I can’t believe there are more votes for Reagan than Kennedy. WTF?
I’m not sure if I can give better evidence that the New Deal worked than to note what we were able to accomplish in World War II. We had a high level of industrial might ready to crank up maximum production for the full duration of the war, and no other country can say that.
Teddy Roosevelt. The most recent prez to get his face on Mt. Rushmore.
Kennedy’s nothing but a myth.
Anyway, the correct answer is Richard Milhous Nixon. Aside from his abject paranoia, he ended the war in Vietnam, he opened up relations with China, and he took us off the gold standard (which, after a few years of pain, made this country stupendously rich). It’s really too bad he was such a tragic figure, because had Watergate not happened, who knows what else he might have accomplished. His last two years in office were essentially thrown away over a second-rate burglary that he never should have protected, done for the purposes of winning an election he could not have lost.
Personally, I think his good works far outweighed his bad ones. I still think he was a great President, fatal flaws and all. He was light years better than Kennedy, who did bupkis but keep us out of a war that his previous actions nearly precipitated and deepen our involvement in Vietnam. One can only wonder what might have happened if Nixon hadn’t gone on television to debate Kennedy and gotten elected in 1960.
I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure Aristotle Onassis wouldn’t have married Pat Nixon.
Still a lot of the New Deal was often wasteful not to mention FDR was quite naive about Stalin and he enacted bad ideas like packing the Supreme Court.
Admittedly the New Deal may have been bigger than it needed to be. But you have to realize the Great Depression was a serious crisis - the equivalent of a major war. FDR didn’t poke at it - he threw everything he could think of at it. Then once the worst was over, he started to trim back the New Deal programs that weren’t working out.
As for Stalin, I think Roosevelt was a realist. If the atom bomb didn’t work, we were going to want Soviet troops for the invasion of Japan. Roosevelt figured (and the military agreed) that was a higher priority than protesting about the fate of Eastern Europe. And all we could do about Eastern Europe is make protests - the Red Army was already there and we weren’t going to fight another war to push them out.
The court packing attempt - that was just wrong and it’s a good thing Roosevelt failed.
Possibly a toss-up between Millard Fillmore, who installed modern plumbing in the White House, and Chester A. Arthur, who put an elevator in it. (Many think James Garfield installed the first elevator; he had planned to but was shot before he could follow through.)