Alas, yes. By the end, according to a Time magazine profile I remember, he was personally keeping the schedule for staff use of the White House tennis court.
Not at the end. It was during the first six months that he approved the schedules for the tennis courts. Carter got a little better at time management later:
Thanks for that article. It fortuitously prevented me staying a thread.
Wow, yes, thanks - fascinating article!
The one thing I’ve noticed in all these posts is the concentration on Presidents from "contemporary’ history (the oldest reference I have seen is Eisenhower, IIRC).
And of course, since there were no IQ tests or other good (and I understand that there is debate if IQ or current tests are any good) parameters for evaluating intelligence before that, so the presidents of the 1700 and 1800’s are a bit of a mystery.
One could wonder about the intelligence of William Henry Harrison, who managed to give his Inaugral Speech in a rainstorm and died (IIRC again) about 40 days after taking office. Then you have folks such as Chester A. Arthur, Milliard Fillmore, Tyler, Buchanan…none of whom were notable for thier massive intellects…
And conversely, Jackson and Lincoln did not have ‘proper’ educations, yet I doubt anyone would call either stupid (well, you might try with Jackson, but he’d probably challenge you to a duel and shoot you).
In the end, I think this is one of those questions, as Cecil noted, is probably unanswerable because there is no ‘common ground’ to compare these gentlemen over time.
Makes for one heck of a discussion, however (I tend to vote for either James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson–neither man was really equipped for the job and both made a hash of it, IMHO.
Best pickup line ever!
I was going to say Harding myself. Grant had many failings, but his military genius keeps him from being considered in the stupid list, and he wrote his autobiography himself.
Ahem…The Profumo affair led to political downfall in the early 1960’s because of an affair.
…which brings us back to Macmillan.
Well, as the link makes clear, the scandal wasn’t the affair but the supposed commie connection (as well as the girls supposedly also being prostitutes). Profumo didn’t resign until October 1963, three months after it was revealed that Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five spies, had defected to Moscow. By then official Britain was in a spy tizzy simultaneous with a sex tizzy, with homosexuals supposedly being rampant in the halls of Parliament (as opposed to behind their rampancy behind closed doors like decent old boys. The affair wouldn’t have meant a thing as an affair. Besides it had been over for two years by then. Only the other stuff made it news.
Kennedy is said to have had affairs with at least two spies: alleged Nazi German spy Inga Arvad (she was also an “associate” of Hitler), when he was a Navy officer during World War II (and the son of the US Ambassador to the UK), and alleged East German spy Ellen Rometsch when he was President. Bobby Kennedy ordered J. Edgar Hoover not to investigate the Rometsch affair or else, he, Bobby, would release information about Hoover’s and investigating Senators’ private lives.
That would have been an interesting scandal, since Rometsch’s clientele included large numbers of Republicans in Congress.
But it tends to enhance bup’s point that mere sex was not an issue at the time because it would go unreported unless some outside factor of overriding importance made it public. (The cliched “live boy or dead girl” standard.) Everybody in Washington had been cheating on their spouses for the entire century. They worked together to protect one another.
And therefore it says nothing whatsoever on intelligence.
I forget to link her picture. That’s 60s movie star level beauty. She looks like Julie Christie’s sister.
Bottom line is, nearly every Republican politician is treated as (at best) an affable dolt, regardless of his accomplishments or educational background. And every Democrat this side of Joe Biden is treated as an intellectual, whether he deserves it or not.
Folks, Al Gore WAS George W. Bush. They were pretty much the same guy: sons of prominent politicians, dim rich kids from very prominent families, spoiled pampered kids who got mediocre grades in school and got where they got almost solely through family connections. But Dubya was always portrayed as a moron and Gore as a brainiac.
Adlai Stevenson was ALSO s spoiled rich kid from a prominent family. He was an apathetic student who got into Princeton and Harvard Law School (where he flunked out) through family connections. He never said or did anything to suggest he was a genius, but he was always treated as such- unlike his GOP rival Dwight Eisenhower, who was always portrayed as a grinning dunce.
Ted Cruz, like Barack Obama, was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He’s at LEAST as intelligent as the President. But watch the way he’s treated in interviews, and ask yourself if any reporter would try to embarrass Obama the same way. I don’t think Cruz has a chance of winning the GOP nomination, but if he is? Make no mistake, he will be portrayed as a retard by the Jon Stewarts and Stephen Cole-burts.
As Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.”
As it was shown with the actions made by Gore before and after his public office life his intelligence was not limited, uncurious George continues to look as the person that was borne in third base and continues to this day to think he did it by himself and as Iraq showed Bush could not do his homework.
As for the matter at hand I do think that James Buchanan, Jr. (did not know that he was a Jr.) deserves the title of stupidest president as he influenced the Dred Scott decision (he even managed to do it before taking office) and then slept while the nation was running into civil war.
I still haven’t seen any evidence of Al Gore’s allegedly stellar intelligence. Maybe you could share some facts you possess that I don’t.
But my focus was not solely on Al Gore, but on a general trend. Gerald Ford got into Yale Law School on his own merits and did extremely well. And yet he was invariably portrayed as a dunce while he was President. AFTER he left office, and regularly took potshots at more conservative Republicans, he earned a Strange New Respect on the Left.
Ford’s academic record trounces Adlai Stevenson’s (Ford graduated in the top quarter of an elite law school, while Stevenson flunked out of law school), but which man was always portrayed as cerebral and which was portrayed as a bumbling, dumb ex-jock?
It’s almost a given that the media will treat ANY leading Democrat as an intellectual and any Republican as a dope.
It’s easy to blame the media while ignoring how they portray themselves.
Republicans make a clear and persistent point of distancing themselves from the “elitists” and “intellectuals” of the Democratic party, choosing instead to pursue a “good ol’ boy”, “average Joe” image for themselves. Democrats, conversely, don’t automatically demonize those with fancy educations and extensive vocabularies, so have no problem at all accepting the mantle of “intellectuals” since it isn’t seen as an insult by them.
As for treating the Republicans like Dopes, I’m afraid a lot of them earn those labels themselves. Consider Cruz’s role in the government shutdown - first he went from “We have to do anything to stop Obamacare up to and including shutting down the government!” to “I did everything possible to avoid a government shutdown! I wasn’t filibustering; I was just filling time between votes!” in a remarkably short amount of time. It’s not the media’s fault when they report on actual stupid behavior.
I have no particular views on Stevenson. I agree that Ford had an undeserved reputation, garnered partly by a few unfortunate stumbles and much moreso by his own persona being overshadowed by Chevy Chase’s portrayal of him.
The Democrats DID portray themselves for many years as the Party of the ordinary, working stiff, and occasionally still try to do so. It’s becoming less and less plausible- the Democrats have long preferred rich aristocrats as their Presidential nominees (FDR, Stevenson, JFK, Al Gore, John Kerry).
Democrats do tend to be more intellectual than Republicans, IMO, although that has to do with a type of selection bias. Democrats value intelligence, Republicans value decisiveness. I’m not sure why we can’t get someone who is smart and decisive(FDR was probably the last guy to have both those traits in abundance), but for some reason we only seem to get one or the other.
We’ve never had a true dolt as a President, IMO. Even Harding was admirable in his way because he understood his limitations. But I think we’ve had a ton of Presidents who thought they were smart enough for the job and overthought their way into utter failure. LBJ’s war in Vietnam is a classic example of that. Critics of the Iraq war used to like to say it was like Vietnam, but in one way it was the polar opposite: Iraq turned out the way it did due to lack of planning. The Vietnam war had no shortage of grand, incredibly detailed plans. Some of the greatest minds in the history of our republic applied their brains to that war.
Well, they were the party of the ordinary working stiff in that they had strong links to trade unions. The era of the trade unions as voting powerhouses is long gone, however.
And I don’t recall them insinuating at any point that being educated was anathema to average working-class Americans.