My wife and I visited family and friends in Ohio during the week before this recent presidential election. During that time, I talked to a lot of people about the candidates, and wrote down much of what they said in a photo essay. I provide a link to the photo essay below.
Warning: I unearthed nothing new or surprising during our week in Ohio, and my conclusions are commonplace to the point of banality. But at least I got a good shot of the tomb of Warren G. Harding.
https://johnbreithaupt.exposure.co/swing-state-sojourn
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…often tops the list of worst Presidents among historians. I suspect that’s about to change.
The corruption was likely under his nose rather than at his order. He dined with Eugene Debs and pardoned him, a candidate unconstitutionally jailed by the overrated Wilson, and he was the first president to call for anti-lynching laws. He refused to speak before segregated audiences and was a women’s and civil rights progressive. Very bad economic and foreign policy. So mediocre might be better. The antebellum presidents between Polk and Lincoln were certainly worse.
Thanks for the information about Harding — I hadn’t known that about him, but I have long thought that he was far from being our worst president.
He didn’t get us into any pointless wars. He didn’t persecute his enemies. He was ashamed rather than defiant when the corruption in his administration was brought to light — the response of a decent man.
If we gauge presidential “badness” by harm done to the country and its people, the bad presidents are the ante-bellum ones that you mention, and recently, LBJ, Nixon, George W. Bush, who waged tragic and pointless wars. And now make room for Trump.
JFK gets a pass?
In the fall of 1963, superhawk McGeorge Bundy filled his diary with despairing notes about the President’s decision to withdraw all our forces and advisors from South Vietnam. If what Bundy wrote was correct, JFK can’t be blamed for that seminal disaster, the Vietnam War.
We also know from papers released through Glasnost that had JFK invaded Cuba to remove the Russian missiles there, Russia would have attacked the US with nuclear weapons — believing that the American attack on Cuba was the immediately prelude to an attack on Russia. JFK went against the unanimous recommendations of his military advisors in choosing to end the crisis through negotiation.
And his American University Address, delivered in 1963, shows just how far he had outgrown the Cold Warrior ethos of his Inaugural Address.
Yes, give JFK a pass.
…a lot closer to the top than the bottom of the list IMO: Medicare, Medicaid, Voting Rights, Civil Rights, all of which prove in addition to the merits he knew how to get stuff done. Plus I’m probably less knee-jerk anti-Vietnam than some. He falls comfortably in the net positive column for me.
Yes, LBJ did good things, too. A fantastically complicated character. When I win the lottery and can quit my job, I’m going to reader Robert Caro’s biography of him, which those who have read it say is a classic work of history.
n/t