U.S. Presidents - Cold War and New Millennium Edition

right, not sure any of these dudes would have, if they were then and there

But Oliver Stone said Kennedy was just about to get out in JFK. Oliver Stone never embellishes!

back in the day, they used to call Reagan and Reaganism "friendly fascism" for a reason. i see it as a lesson that just because a politician is "likeable" as an individual (and Reagan WAS kind of likeable in a doddering grandpa sort of way) doesn't mean that you should vote for him/her or support what he/she would do if elected.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

George W. Bush 3

joek? weird lurkers?

surprised HW didn't get anything too

not surprised that LBJ and Ike did as well as they did. i would've thought that Truman and Papa Bush would've gotten more votes, though.

Nixon would be thrilled that he pulled off a tie with the great bete noire of his life, JFK. As to how, I have no idea--"wow" to both totals.

LOL at Reagan getting no votes after all the discussion.

I'm almost as shocked by Carter's eight votes. I thought even Democrats were more or less in agreement that his term was a debacle; he's been basically trotted out by the opposition as the Democrats' version of Herbert Hoover (or, projecting forward, W.) every election from '84 on.

he's led a very admirable life since his Presidency. so maybe that good will rubbed off in terms of the votes.

0 reagan votes is sorta interesting though - are there really 0 republicans on ilx or did they non-jokingly vote w?

dan weiner didn't contribute, so I'm the closest thing to a non-dem.

Besides Habitat for Humanity, wat's so admirable about Carter's post-presidency? Genuinely curious. I haven't found any of his post-presidential statements particularly eloquent or original.

No question, although I don't think you'd get much love from recent presidents of both parties--he's had more than a couple of rogue diva episodes. Anway, I took the vote as meaning time-in-office; casting the net wider would certainly help explain the eight votes. (I think Clinton's post-presidency, notwithstanding the '08 campaign, has arguably been even more admirable.)

perhaps his apartheid-it's back! campaign (for some people)?

There's another thread idea: best post-presidential career. I suppose Carter, Hoover, and William Howard Taft would make the final cut.

WHT a frightfully conservative chief justice though.

pre-presidency maybe more interesting imo

As always, Nixon has the most fascinating post-presidency; even as he sits there with David Frost in '77 saying "My political life is over," his mind is feverishly working out scenarios whereby he can effectuate the elder statesman role he feels is rightfully his. And he never stops till the day he dies.

I couldn't find one of the 34 "Nixon's BACK" cover stories commissioned by TIME and Newsweek.

Eisenhower voters - - - I sorta get what the appeal must be here but I have a hard time getting past the foreign policy precedent of "let's topple any vaguely-leftie regime anywhere in the developing world and install thugs" - I mean, Iran, Guatemala, Zaire... aside from directly causing immense suffering in these places, Ike sort of opened up the field for these kinds of tactics under his successors - - Kennedy in Vietnam, Nixon/Kissinger in god knows how many places. Pretty unforgivable IMO.

He probably wins best pre-presidency though.

pre-presidency:

eisenhower vs. ulysses s grant vs. 'bedtime for bonzo'

I give Ike a modicum of credit for never supporting total war. I'm not sure what any president would have done with the superpowers bequeathed to him by FDR and Truman short of abdicating. OF all the Cold War presidents he understood the executive branch's limits.

interstate highway system was the real total war! okay not gonna drag that one out again...

I find interesting is how much historians seem to love to do this presidential ranking thing, cause you'd think they would consider the idea of ranking presidents even more absurd than non-historians?

lol really? you ever talk to a bunch of music critics around december?

yeah I mean I fully understand that geeks will make lists and I am part of that culture, I guess I just expect better of academics and probably shouldn't.

tbh I was almost a historian and I never really liked ranking stuff. I mean I have my favorite guys/things to read about (medical education; shifts in the idea of what a physician was supposed to know and do and be; Lyndon Baines Johnson; Los Angeles; trying to extract cultural meaning from why popular media were so popular at any given time; how communities respond to the presence of sudden epidemic disease; etc etc etc), but there's also all kinds of material that I just don't have any inherent interest in (almost everything in intellectual history and military history, primarily), which kinda forced me to acknowledge that any say I had would be limited to how the thing I was ranking overlapped with what I knew about it. I could never ever rank like 1-44, but I will stan for Washington and FDR and Polk and LBJ, and make my case for pre-stroke Wilson (acknowledging that he was super-racist), and then I can make snarky comments about all the 1850s Presidents being terrible and Grant being drunk and Harding being stupid, but what can you even do with the middle?

Also whenever you rank Presidents you end up having a couple of inevitable arguments about whether you punish the older dudes for being obscenely but appropriate-for-the-time racist, and whether it matters more whether a guy did what he set out to accomplish or whether the things he accomplished were actually good things. Like I think James K Polk may be the most successful President of all time at having a plan and achieving it, but that plan involved taking a whole shitload of land from Mexico; if a President pulled that kind of crap today they would be pilloried. But I like reading about James K Polk and am very happy that California ended up in the United States. Plus it is impossible to measure the added degree of difficulty of being a post-WWII President compared to being a 19th century President.

otm

looking at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

truman and jfk get more love from historians than they do here

oh and reagan, which I always found o_O

but I guess they're all trying to be the 'did he accomplish his goals' historians. also strange how his ranking seems to be improving over time.

ages ago, i would've been a Woodrow Wilson stan too (kinda hard not to be if you grow up around Princeton and are reminded almost daily of the fact that he was the President of the university and shit). even then, i knew he was kinda racist but i wrote that off to his being a man of his times. it was only later that i found out just how over-the-top his racism was even for his times -- and then there was his self-destructive streak regarding the League of Nations.

also, i don't think that people here were simply voting on the basis of "did he accomplish his goals." no-one would deny that Reagan was very damn effective at getting shit done -- it's just that no-one here seemed to LIKE the shit that he did (and rightly so from my point-of-view anyway).

Right, but the racism is the fourth or fifth most offensive thing about him, far behind manipulating public opinion into a senseless war, another quasi one in Mexico, and signing the Espionage Act. We owe him for the FTC, the Federal Reserve, minimum wage legislation, and a couple of other bones tossed at liberals, but he was a self-righteous prig too.

what was the senseless war woodrow wilson manipulated the public into supporting?

put differently: do you mean ww1?

World War I!

On this day...

1974 – The Watergate scandal: Richard Nixon became the first (and to date only) President of the United States to resign from office.

Surprised that LBJ outshines JFK so thoroughly here compared to what the historians tend to say. Is the backlash so well-established that the former most overrated president is now seriously underrated (at least itt)?

Historians seem to rate Bush Sr, too - still not sure why.

That Wikipedia page makes me want to read a lot more about US history.

JFK's accomplishments are minor and almost entirely cosmetic.

I agree, but what do you think is at the root of his support on those lists? must be his 'image'?

He was expert at stroking the egos of journalists.

Write-up for his number 11 placing in the London Times poll doesn't seem v persuasive:

Kennedy had a troubling and not entirely successful foreign policy record that included the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the escalation of the Vietnam War.

His radical domestic reputation was built on intervention in Alabama to uphold desegregation, his civil rights speeches and rhetorical support for the space programme. He had actually passed very little in the way of funding or legislation when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, leaving him just shy of our top ten.

"Restored the romance." Ben Macintyre, writer-at-large.

"Restored the romance." Ben Macintyre, writer-at-large.

^^ says it all, doesn't it.

He looked real purdy.

Part of a leader's job is to inspire, right? So if Kennedy inspired a generation to the degree that they still swoon over him 50 years later--rightly or wrongly--I wouldn't just discount that as cosmetic. To me, that's a real achievement.

And, to be fair, I have to cross my fingers, hold my breath, and give Reagan credit for the same thing.

So if Kennedy Reagan inspired a generation to the degree that they still swoon over him 50 years later--rightly or wrongly--I wouldn't just discount that as cosmetic

haha -- yeah. Didn't see your post.

a lot of this inspiration comes from the fact that he was assassinated / died young, but that really isn't an achievement. if he had a 2nd term + vietnam fully on his back I can't imagine he'd be any more of an 'inspiration to a generation' than lbj was

JFK inspired people all over the world, Reagan inspired no-one outside of the US - apart maybe form the occasional Central American death squed. And please don't try to tell he inspired anyone in Eastern Europe.