Lawrence O'Donnell did a story on his show the other night concerning Nixon’s profound racism. A barrage of Nixon racial slurs were heard on the most recently released Nixon White House tapes. It led O’Donnell to conclude Nixon was the worst president in American history. Nixon is the most reptilian, but he is not my worst president ever.
O’Donnell got me thinking about ranking the presidents. Who is the best, who is the worst? The entire list is too long for me to accurately rank. There are too many average men in the middle, so I can’t rank the entire list. However, I started kicking around the ideal of ranking the President’s in my lifetime – worst to first.
I was born in the last year of the Truman administration, so HST is my cutoff point. Add your worst to first list in comments.
The first two on my list are the worst presidents of all time.
W – Worst of all time! Nuff said.
Nixon – Watergate was an unbelievable crime against the citizens of this country.
LBJ – I’ll probably get some flack on this one. If LBJ were ranked on domestic policy alone he’d be a great president, BUT there is Viet Nam. War can destroy a presidency and it did destroy LBJ’s. Look at it this way, if LBJ had pulled out of Viet Nam in 65 that war would not have torn apart America. And Nixon would probably not have been elected in 68. The two most corrosive events of the last half of the 20th Century – Viet Nam and Watergate would not have happened. America would be a much different country today if those events had not happened.
Reagan – Reaganomics is voodoo economics and we are still experiencing tremendous suffering and harm from this half-baked ideology.
Ford – Pardoned Nixon.
Bush 41 – Kind of one of those mushy middle presidents.
Clinton – Some horrible economic policies, triangulation, and Monica probably caused Gore to lose the election resulting in us having to suffer through the term of the worst president ever.
Obama – Not as transcendent as some thought. I’m in the disappointed camp.
Carter – Jimmy doesn’t get enough respect. The Camp David peace accord remains a significant accomplishment.
Eisenhower – Ike was right for the zeitgeist of the 50s. Some brownie points for doing his 5 star bit to win WWII.
Truman – I would have preferred he hadn’t immolated two Japanese cities, but my Dad was a carrier pilot in WWII and I might not be here if Truman hadn’t ended the war with the A-bomb. Harry navigated the county through a time when it was experiencing a rapid change in how it had to interact with the rest of the world.
JFK – Is first on my list primarily for one reason – he moved all the right chess pieces in the Cuban Missile Crisis. A misstep on his part in that crisis and none of us would be here.
That’s how I rank the presidents in my lifetime - worst to first. What’s your worst to first list?