Ten Best Presidents
1. George Washington
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. Franklin Roosevelt
4. Thomas Jefferson
5. Teddy Roosevelt
6. Lyndon Johnson
7. Dwight Eisenhower
8. James Monroe
9. James Polk
10. John Adams
Ten Worst Presidents
1. James Buchanan
2. Andrew Johnson
3. George W. Bush
4. Warren Harding
5. Herbert Hoover
6. Millard Fillmore
7. Franklin Pierce
8. Richard Nixon
9. John Tyler
10. Jimmy Carter
I’ll defend my choices in the comments. Here are some scholarly rankings to help you make your own lists.
My stark contrast to most historians and your list for worst President comes from a somewhat irrational disdain, and perhaps because he built a coalition that’s yet to be defeated and has infested our political atmosphere for some decades after he left office and will do so for decades after his death.
Worst President: Ronald Reagan.
I draw a line at 1963. Those before and those after the coup. Carter’s failure (and much of Nixon’s failure) was much to do with the sabotage of the military-industrialists. Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes were in concert with them. So far it looks pretty clear that Obama knows the boundaries of Presidential power, operates where he can and lets Bob Gates and Company handle their domain.
Who is the best and worst President is a little beside the point anymore.
I don’t why James Buchanan was the worst ever. Yes he arguably caused the civil war, but there was no way for the South to stay in that didn’t perpetuate slavery in some way–like Republicans today they whined and threw tantrums whenever they didn’t get their way, plus it’s only because he screwed up so bad that we consider Lincoln so awesome. So points for that too.
who’s your worst?
Should have left the South go peaceably. Then abolitionists could have fed weapons clandestinely into the South to foment the slave uprising they all feared. Resulting in either two nations, USA and Afro-Republic of America, or a reunited USA with all those Republican ancestors dead.
Worst list: take out Carter (who I liked and was waaay ahead of his time with the idea of a carbon tax) and put in Andrew Jackson, if for no other reason than the Trail of Tears.
If the trail of tears would put Jackson on the 10-worst list (and I won’t try to argue that point…I see his killing the National Bank as adding to his ‘legacy’), I’d also argue for placing Grant on the list too…
If the Trail of Tears, was bad, how about the Indian Wars, fought by Sherman and ‘Only good Indian’s a dead Indian’ Sheridan? Grant was a good general…probably the only one we had able to fight Lee, but whatever judgment he had as a general seemed to desert him in politics. Grant’s 2 terms as president were rife with scandal and corruption…much of which were forgotten afterwards when he was diagnosed with throat cancer, was dying, and managed to publish his memoirs (he turned out a decent writer, simple and to-the-point).
Don’t get me wrong–I like Grant…and can sympathise with him having similar faults….but I won’t apologise for what was done during his time in office…he deserves a place on the list, or at least a dishonourable mention…
Killing the bank caused a lot of economic hardship and stunted the growth of the US. I’d put that down as a minus. Wasn’t sure what you meant by quoted legacy.
It is a horrible error to blame those in the past for not adopting the attitudes of today. Jackson was hard on native people, but all presidents before Taft were as well. Why castigate Jackson and excuse Grant? Under Grant, the entire Sioux nation was destroyed, the massacres at hundreds of places were organized, and the reservation system was set up. Jackson is a piker compared to Grant.
Jackson was a pretty good president from a Democratic standpoint.
I’m not excusing Grant, nor do I think he was a good president. All of the “Indian wars” presidents made detestable choices.
I think our willingness as Americans to “forgive” such actions as “stemming from another era” obscures the fact that we’ve never really stopped doing something similarly murderous in every era, including our own.
I think Jackson got a bigger “pass” in this regard, which is probably why I personally find him so reprehensible.
Moral qualms kept Jackson, Truman, and Wilson off my top 10, but they can’t be seen as proper candidates for the bottom 10, in my opinion.
Grant could easily replace Carter, but Carter failed in every single area of his presidency except Israel, and that was squandered by 1982. Carter’s failures cost us so dearly that I put him on the list rather than Reagan.
I can’t forgive Truman for unnecessarily dropping the two atom bombs. Ditto the Loyalty Act and Truman’s cave-in to the witch-hunting Right on anticommunism. It could plausibly be said that HST paved the way for McCarthy, sadly.
He also presided over the beginning of the Cold War and all that entailed. A more patient and intelligent, less black-white view of the world, would have led to a less harsh and costly foreign policy posture wrt the USSR, which country had been devastated by WWII and probably could have been, if not a full post-war ally, at least not so much a despised and feared enemy.
As for Carter, I greatly applaud him for the Camp David Accords, as well as the Panama Canal Treaty.
But he was politically tone-deaf on dealing with some key domestic matters, offending key allies in Congress and, crucially, had a tendency to lecture the public about its behaviors (energy, “malaise” speech), instead of taking a more positive approach.
In my book though, better a failed presidency on the grounds Carter gave us, with no wars unnecessarily started and no thousands or millions of lives lost needlessly, than a failed presidency which gave us a major costly war even with all the good deeds done, for a year or two anyway, domestically …
Lyndon Johnson deserves places in both lists.
True.
Best:
Worst:
In defense of Andrew Johnson: He followed Abraham Lincoln’s policies in dealing with the South. The first Reconstruction governors in the South were appointed and were generally Unionists who had been forced to hold their tongues during the course of the Civil War. The first elected governors were generally from the same political background – Unionist Democrats who were willing to seek a new political order. Johnson ran into the same Republican dynamic of corrupt corporatism that Clinton did and with the same results; impeached but not convicted; followed by one of the most corrupt administrations in history. Andrew Johnson’s crime was triangulation just like Clinton’s.
Nixon lied about getting out of Vietnam, but is he all that much different from what will be Obama’s foreign policy legacy in the Middle East?
I also think that Len Colodny’s take on Watergate, that it was a slow-moving coup, is on point, although I don’t think he nailed who was behind it. If one steps back and doesn’t presume that Nixon was in control of all the reins of the permanent government one will see how many of the players in bringing down Nixon had CIA and military intelligence histories. Even Bob Woodward.
I wish I would have seen this comment sooner. Are you really trying to look into a crystal ball and predict a future Obama failure so you can save Nixon’s reputation? And let’s remember who was at the helm during Watergate. It was Nixon, and he may have been nutty, but he was still in charge.
totally agree with your Worst list.
yes, Nixon needs to be at the top.
reagan and the bush’s simply continued/expanded on the clownservative philosophy which got Nixon elected– we can see now where that got us.
Shouldn’t Bush be at the top of that worst list?
Bush didn’t manage to let the country deteriorate into Civil War before he left office, so the top spot is safe with Buchanan. It doesn’t help that Buchanan was probably easily as incompetent as Bush, if not necessarily as corrupt.
I might take issue with Booman sticking Andrew Johnson above W, though. Johnson was pretty much responsible for killing Reconstruction and causing the post-war country to slide into a state of apartheid that we didn’t get out of until almost a hundred years later – that’s pretty damn bad. On the other hand, W was so incompetent/corrupt/ridiculously vile in so many areas – foreign policy, domestic policy, crony corruption, mismanagement, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, torture, secret prisons … the list goes on and on. The argument of whether the depth of Johnson’s lousy Presidency is better or worse than the breadth of W’s lousy Presidency is debatable, but I think a case can be made either way.
I don’t think he effed things up quite as badly as Buchanan and A. Johnson.
Nixon “the night creature” needs to be much closer to the top of the worst list.
did Fillmore, Hoover, or Harding get us into an unnecessary war where 52,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were killed?
Nixon didn’t get us into that unnecessary war; Eisenhower and Kennedy did.
And LBJ made the critical decision to escalate it in 1965.
Nixon didn’t get us into the war (that was Lyndon) but he did unnecessarily prolong US involvement for another 4 yrs causing tens of thousands of American servicemen to die for no good reason.
LBJ, somewhere in the bottom 15 of presidents in my book, arguably did something worse than even Junior and Iraq: he sent in the combat troops knowing full well (as, e.g., phone conversation with senate mentor Dick Russell) that it was all probably unwinnable, a quagmire in the making.
LBJ told Russell that he feared impeachment (!) if he failed to hold the line against the commies in Nam, but this is a ridiculous and overblown assessment of the political situation in 64 or 65 as Congress was divided on the issue.
Interestingly, re the final decision-making in 65 to massively escalate, LBJ greatly relied on the counsel of the massively overrated Ike — and Eisenhower, author of the absurd Domino Theory, strongly advised Lyndon to send over the boys, lest all of SE Asia go Commie.
If not for Vietnam, LBJ would probably be fourth on my list. One thing you realize when you do this exercise is just how awful most of our presidents have been. We’ve really had five that are worth a damn.
Awful or mediocre or disappointing, for sure. Certainly Jimmy Carter falls into the latter category.
As for LBJ, and I concede I hold some pretty jaundiced views about him, the more I read about him, his great personal insecurity, his simplistic cold war attitudes, his firm determination not to be the first president to lose a war, etc, the more I suspect that had VN not been on the table, he would have found another part of the world to prove his toughness.
Frankly, I don’t think Lyndon had the proper temperament — i.e., I believe he was too emotionally unstable, not to mention incapable of being honest with the public — to be entrusted with the presidency. We had back-to-back presidents there for about a decade — Lyndon and Tricky — both of whom had problems telling the truth and both of whom had some serious personal issues.
Btw, his great biographer Rbt Caro, the guy more than any other who has been trying to get the truth out about LBJ, said last week on Charlie Rose that Lyndon’s advisor Bill Moyers has totally refused to cooperate with him — for yrs now — in the research for Caro’s next volume, on Lyndon’s vice presidency and presidency. Curious. Even the most loyal Lyndonistas, except for Lady Bird, have all talked with Caro over the years. Even Lyndon’s biggest public apologist, Jack Valenti, talked with Caro.
I agree with all your points about LBJ but we also have to weigh that against what he accomplished and what he put on the line to accomplish it.
did Nixon (the night creature) get us out of the war?
did Nixon authorize the bombing of Cambodia without the permission of Congress? yes, he did.
gimme a break. don’t pretend Nixon is innocent of murder & genocide.
I think I’d replace John Adams with William Jefferson Clinton. And put W as number 1 or 2 on the worst list.
Concur.
The Alien & Sedition Acts were appallingly repressive, anti-democratic, and unconstitutional as they served to shield a would-be dictator Adams from criticism and fostered a noxious strain of anti-immigrant sentiment in the land. McCulloch’s greatly influential book — from what I have read about it — apparently severely underemphasized this crucial part of the Adams presidency.
Bill Clinton I would consider putting as high as #10, contra nearly all establishment historians, especially for the 8 yrs of peace and prosperity and for surviving politically, and maintaining the support of a fair-sized majority of the public, against 8 yrs of unbelievably hostile attacks from a determined and organized oppo party and their many propaganda outlets in the MSM.
Wish he could have done more progressive things but, unlike FDR and LBJ, he didn’t enjoy an overwhelming working majority in Congress and he didn’t govern in a liberal time.
He also made it respectable to be a Democrat again.
I’d like to nominate my favorite forgotten-how-bad-he-was for the list of worsts.
Woodrow Wilson
Issued an exec order forbidding the hiring of African-Americans and the dismissal of those already hired.
Ordered the Army segregated
Invaded Haiti after the fairly elected govt tried to institute land reform – in addition to returning to virtual slavery it set Haiti on the course to the hell hole it is today.
all of which engendered the spirit that lead to a wave of lynchings.
Also usually ignored for worst – but mentioned above & deserving of your consideration is Jackson. The start of his genocidal pogram against the natives involved his ignoring a USSC ruling. “How large an army does the Chief Justice command?” was his reported reply to their finding against his removal of Indians from GA.
Still all these ugly bastards will pail when history looks at the mess that is W.
I agree with you about Jackson and Wilson, and I love the last line in your post. Is that quote an original with you?