If it turns out that there was sometime between 2001 and 2009 when global warming hit the point of no return, when humanity was doomed to extinction or a marginal existence because we made the planet uninhabitable, and that we could have saved ourselves if we had acted before that point, but that nothing could save us after we passed it, then we would know that George W. Bush was the worst President ever. Of course, we wouldn’t know it for very long before we expired, but at least we’d know it. Barring that, I don’t think we can consider Bush as bad as at least two of his predecessors.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a thread where people listed their choices of the six best Presidents. That’s all well and good, but as a glass half empty kind of guy, I prefer to focus on the worst Presidents. Moreover, I was taken aback that the two worst Presidents snuck into several of those lists of the good guys. So, to set the record straight…..
Presidents who get us into needless and catastrophic wars go to the head of the list. Bush, of course, meets this criterion, but there were worse… much worse.
1. The worst President, by a clear margin, was Woodrow Wilson. After campaigning for re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Wilson wasted no time after his re-inauguration in getting us into that war that he kept us out of. The war that was only the worst and most pointless bloodletting that the European continent ever indulged in. Then, for good measure, he inflicted on the nation the most flagrant suppression of civil liberties of the 20th century. Speaking out against the war was a ticket to prison. See under Debs, Eugene V.
Wilson, though, was not just a bad war President. He was an even worse peace President. He went off to Paris in 1919 to become one of the principal architects of the Peace Treaty that paved the road to the hell that was most of the rest of the 20th century.
2. The second worst President was Lyndon Johnson. While the Vietnam War turned out not to have unleashed the sorts of world-historical cataclysms that unfolded in the aftermath of WWI, it was quite horrific enough in its own right. And, like Wilson, Johnson got us deep into the war only after winning re-election by cynically campaigning as the peace candidate.
Of course, there was the Great Society, there was the civil rights legislation. But those who argue that this exonerates LBJ are missing the point. The mid 60s represented a unique moment in American history. The inspirational leadership of JFK and Martin Luther King, combined with the legacy of the New Deal and the Marshall Plan, helped to create a liberal supermajority. This was at just the time when a demographic bulge was coming of age, a generation that was better educated, more idealistic, and more commited to public service than previous generations. The opportunity was there to transform American society. And far from harnessing that opportunity, Lyndon Johnson smothered it in its cradle.
There is also Johnson’s role in the cover-up of the truth about the Kennedy assassination. We now know that on his first full day on the job, LBJ received information from J. Edgar Hoover that almost certainly indicated that a conspiracy was behind the assassination. (Hoover told Johnson that the FBI had tapes of someone impersonating Oswald who visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in September.) So Johnson established the Warren Commission and got Allen Dulles and Richard Russell (among others) to work from the inside so that the country would not know the truth. A thoroughly despicable Presidency.