LBJ was the most recent great president. He passed medicare and medicaid. He passed laws promoting civil rights for blacks and managed to do it despite southern democrats being a big part of his caucus. His policies cut the poverty rate in half, from 25% down to 12-13%.
I think FDR, Truman and Eisenhower were all better than any of the Presidents that came after, but still agree with much of Airman Doors’s sentiments. The USPC 2011 survey ranks Nixon 23rd overall out of 40 Presidents. That survey seems quite balanced and intelligent. It rates in five different categories as well as overall. Nixon ranks 12th overall by foreign policy and 16th overall for vision/agenda. However he ranks 40th out of 40 on “Moral authority,” and this drags him down so that he is ahead of only Ford, Hoover, Coolidge, GWB and Harding among post-WWI Presidents.
The 40 ranked Presidents are through GWB; the off by 3 error is due to ignoring Garfield and Harrison (short terms) and Cleveland 24 (same person as Cleveland 22). All post-Coolidge Presidents except LBJ and GWB score fairly well on foreign policy, with Reagan ahead of Nixon but behind FDR, HST, Ike.
There are different types of immorality, including some (vanity, pragmatism, lying, campaign corruption, ruthlessness and perhaps even blackmail) which may be necessary for Presidential success. Other Presidents had their moral faults. But Nixon’s embrace of an almost-criminal ethos seems without precedent. It backfired to result in the Presidencies of Carter (moral but ineffective) and then Reagan (charismatic but reactionary). If Nixon gets even partially blamed for this unfortunate backlash, it’s hard to see how he can be placed high on a list of Presidents ranked overall.
I voted for our adoration of presidents as being mostly empty-headed hero worship.
But I will say that Clinton looks better and better as time marches on, despite the Lewinsky/impeachment fiasco.
That’s an awfully haughty assumption to make in regards to Harding. You have to be reading with your eyes shut to rationalize the “his personal involvement isn’t very clear” sentiment, IMO.
I just have to question some sort of bias toward Truman(?) if you’re willing to take such a questionable stance, stretched to the point of exculpating Harding, in order to garner a conviction of Truman.
No- the reason why Harding’s personal involvement isn’t clear is that Harding’s wife destroyed many of his papers immediately upon his death - provisions for presidential records weren’t codified then.
While we know much of what Truman did because we have records for it, much of what Harding personally did has come to us secondhand or by conjecture.
No more so than Reagan was naive about the Middle East. Stalin may have been a dick, but it was the Soviet Union that won World War II (and, not incidentally, its people who suffered the most).
It’s never easy to see that today’s friend will be tomorrow’s enemy, and when there’s a much larger and more immediate enemy to deal with it may not even matter. I suspect little of our Cold War policy would have changed even if the Presidents of the time knew that the right-wing dictators they were propping up would wind up being (or creating) most of our 21st-century enemies.
I would hope that you’re mature enough and respect the institution of reason enough to not soft pedal the lawbreaking that went on during the Harding administration.
Referring to the evidence we have as mere “conjecture” is an awfully strong classification in this sense: you’re not giving Harding enough credit if you believe the long list of malefactions that took place could have happened without his consent on some level. These were his closest and most trusted friends; to suggest that he had no grasp of what they were doing while inside his own cabinet, would be to suggest that he was unconscious. That is an unfair and naive accusation.
To apply this type of reasoning in everyday society is to say that there is no way to link an overweight gentleman to his own weight gain. Despite ignoring scientific studies that the Diet Coke/Coca-Cola Zero, sitting around reading on an Amazon Kindle, or playing video games as part of his sedentary lifestyle could be causing some of this. Ignorance is never an excuse and if, as you say, Harding did not have a working knowledge of these crimes, he is still every bit as responsible.
good one!
theodore roosevelt has my vote.
I don’t know what you are getting at here, JFfordeFan23. I am not a Harding apologist. His sins of omission and commission by all means are his.
The only thing I have said is that there are a couple problems of corruption in the record of a legitimately great president - Truman. This is just a historical fact, and noting this invites little comparison with Grant or Harding or Clinton. Truman’s record is what it is.
I realize I mentioned Grant and Harding in my post above. The difference, of course, is that some presidents transcend their corruption or that of their administration, while others are defined by it. Truman transcended it. That doesn’t mean that there was no corruption, just that in the end it wasn’t his defining feature.
I have to admit I stole it from Leonid Brezhnev (a figure not normally noted for his dry wit).
must have had a primo bottle or 2 of vodka that day.
It was blatantly obvious to anyone in the early 1940s that with the Nazis and the Tojoists annihiliated, the main rivals for the world would be the US and the USSR.
Calvin Coolidge: last president who ACTALLY cut the Federal budget.
And kept his nose (and the USA) out of other people’s business.
Maybe, but they had to be defeated first.
How did that work out anyway? Any major economic or foreign policy problems around the corner?
Did you even read this before posting it? Neither were the world’s powers before the war. It was certainly not obvious that either would be the world’s powers after it.
By the mid-1940s, with the economies of Europe in rubble, sure. Before that? No.
Um - the United States had supplanted Great Britain as the world’s largest economy around 1880 and has held this position since.
And the real blow for Great Britain as a world power wasn’t WWII but the massive hit they took in WWI - while they survived the war their ability to hold onto their colonies long term was hindered badly.
I meant by the time the US and the USSR was in World War II.
That’s why I said “powers” and not “economies”. Anyway, China was the world’s largest economy before 18[9]0, not Great Britain.
Clinton again.