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

I'll go w/ lbj

putting my realist hat on, i think nixon in china might be the most significant presidential action of any of the dudes listed. i'm tempted to vote for him just for that, all other bullshit considered.

are you fucking kidding me

;)

I dunno, I think you have to do counterfactuals with that one - like, had nixon not done that, not entirely unlikely that someone else does?

My favorite part about Nixon visiting China was Mao and Nixon's mutual admiration for each other's writings.

My problem with honoring Nixon's China move: it's such a who-cares moment. Welcoming a country exiled from the "community of nations" since '49 so that it inevitably/eventually becomes a real market force is not something about which I can get too excited.

I mean, unless you work for Bank of America it's like, "What's it to me?"

billions lifted from poverty, better record on that than LBJ if u ask me. but that credit probably goes to tankdriver Deng and not Nixon anyway...

alfred as a miami thug i thought you'd be cool with severing the communist world in half!! come on

what China gained from Nixon's visit:
- legitimized Mao, and by extension the Communist regime
- seat on the UN Security Council
- legitimization of their claim on Taiwan
- opening of trade, huge influx of cash/investment (that would come back to seriously haunt the US economy in decades to come)

what the US gained from Nixon's visit:
- apart from a huge turd for Nixon to publicly polish in his dotage, nothing

the accounts I've read of Nixon's visit to China paint a seriously laughable picture of the Chinese regime plotting to squeeze everything out of a drunk/out-of-it Nixon and a distracted Kissinger, who were more interested in sampling Chinese hospitality.

x-posts

alfred as a miami thug i thought you'd be cool with severing the communist world in half!! come on

it was already severed in half - Mao and the Soviets hated/distrusted each other

on another note, listen to LBJ flirt with Jackie O:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuq_Z831uk4

billions lifted from poverty, better record on that than LBJ if u ask me

lol have you been to China lately? and yeah would credit this more to post-Mao regimes realizing they had to actually MANAGE the economy rather than routinely starve/massacre the populace, has next to nothing to do with Nixon.

god I forget that she sounded like a ditz.

just like Marilyn eh

Detente is nothing to sneer at

- opening of trade, huge influx of cash/investment (that would come back to seriously haunt the US economy in decades to come)

no way, this is all positive. ok, the coal plants are a problem, but "haunt the US economy" is bs

and no i haven't 'been to china' recently. what are you talking about, year-over-year GDP and living standards climbing like nowhere else on earth, ever? how awful!

My rankings:

LBJ (with considerable unease)
Eisenhower
Bush I
Clinton (really a better Reagan than Reagan)
Reagan
fuck the rest

a country drowning in pollution, people with no political rights to speak of, near slave-labor wages, mass forced migrations = yeah sounds awesome sign me up

but "haunt the US economy" is bs

dude they're propping up our economy by owning all our debt? you think that's a positive economic development?

don't know what to tell you shakey, i don't know how you can look at the history of china between mao's killing fields and today and not conclude it's a huge success in human well-being. even with all the single-party totalitarian bullshit still there! just look at the numbers.

xp US banks in the 19th cent owned all of europe's debt while our exports ruined their craft industries. just roll with it comrade!

The more I read about Eisenhower (and by him; his journals are gripping, if you like this sort of thing), the more I admire his refusal to get more aggressive with the Communists, despite the right's nudges (and the Democrats!).

Thanks to him though we have an empowered CIA, charged with fighting the secret wars to which Eisenhower would not commit the military.

i don't know how you can look at the history of china between mao's killing fields and today and not conclude it's a huge success in human well-being.

it's a normative success, sure, I just don't think you can attribute that to Nixon (of all people). Seems perfectly realistic to me that had Mao not been legitimized by Nixon, he would have been murdered/pushed out and more pragmatic heads would have prevailed even sooner. Maybe even sans all the gangster-totalitarian party nonsense.

also I don't really see how China's success in and of itself is beneficial to the US. cuz in some ways it kinda hasn't been. They own our debt AND destroyed our exports, or have you noticed that everything you are wearing, sitting on, typing on, and living in was probably made in China.

They own our debt AND destroyed our exports, or have you noticed that everything you are wearing, sitting on, typing on, and living in was probably made in China.

tbh this is capitalism. It woulda happened if, say, Chad had three billion underpaid workers and future consumers.

funny how well a bunch of purported "communists" understood that, eh

(I don't count Mao among their number btw, mostly his successors)

Reaching out to China was more of a let's get things 'normal' thing and a way, following Vietnam and Korea, to open channels of communication w/a regional power. Plus it scared and pissed off the Russians.

Deng is the one who liberalized the economy.

Nixon claimed at the time that "opening a channel" to China would persuade her to stop helping the NVA, which was nonsense -- China had soured on Vietnam for at least three years.

a way, following Vietnam and Korea, to open channels of communication w/a regional power

tbh this is all Mao wanted to begin with - legitimacy - and needling the Americans via those wars was simply grandstanding to this end, akin to the sabre-rattling Kim Jong Il does. He was ACTING like a regional power in the interest of achieving international legitimacy and power. He didn't give two shits whether the North Vietnamese or North Koreans won (and reportedly hated the North Korean regime from the get-go, complained about and denied their requests for greater support, etc.)

And yet, if Obama arranged a secret meeting to meet face-to-face with Kim Jong Il (whose basically like Mao 2.0, only shittier and less powerful) and say "yeah dude, yr okay, let's have some trade and btw you can keep doing whatever crazy shit yr doing within your own borders, what do I care) I dunno if I would view that as a good thing.

(and reportedly hated the North Korean regime from the get-go, complained about and denied their requests for greater support, etc.)

What?!

What about late 1950?!

I've only read a couple books about Mao (neither of which I have on-hand at the moment, one of which is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story, which I know has been controversial) but yeah that's my general recollection, I don't recall specifics at the moment

iirc Mao was eager to use the Koreans as a proxy to provoke the Americans, but he wasn't interested in actually sacrificing precious resources. he promised Jong Il a lot, but he didn't deliver on a lot of it. He wanted to project the appearance of a regional power without having to actually pay any price for it.

Basically, MacArthur thought the PVA wouldn't intervene and was pushing up the peninsula ready to defeat the KPA and take over the North when he ran into the PVA and had to retreat.

That's the problem-- it wasn't a tough decision for Truman. His attitude was "hey, we've got a great new weapon to kill some Japs with."

I've read lots of books on Nixon, and a few on Johnson and Clinton, but I think just one on Truman, the Merle Miller book. That was many years ago, so I have no recollection of how Truman's decision was portrayed. I skipped around a bit on the web, and you seem to be more or less right--he was pretty steadfast in his intent to use it, and never recanted afterwards. About the closest I came to finding some equivocation was this:

Yet to a senator who, after the Hiroshima bombing, had urged continued attacks until the Japanese were brought "groveling to their knees," the president replied: "I can't bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in the same manner." Indeed, after the Nagasaki bombing, Truman reportedly told his cabinet members that there would be no more such attacks because he could not bear the thought of killing "all those kids."

But just because he was adamant in his actions, I have to believe that in his thoughts, if not in his public utterances, he was aware of the moral weight of what he was doing. You make him sound like a kid playing a video game, and call me naive but I just don't believe that.

Also: Truman was shrewd about his give'em-hell-Harry public facade, which Merle Miller does his best to preserve without once probing.

I can't rank Truman very high because, beyond his executive order desegregating his armed forces (rooted in his "inherent" Comm in Chief powers) his domestic achievements are nil. His SCOTUS appointments, including chief justice, were a total joke too.

Nixon definitely the most fun to read about - Nixonland, All the President's Men, The Boys on the Bus, The Selling of the President, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail - but not someone I'd vote for here. Hard to set aside Republican-hate and objectively recognise Reagan's achievements. Conversely, fond of Carter but he was objectively a disaster. I feel that my in-depth knowledge is too localised: mainly 1960-1974 and 1990>

The reevaluation of Truman as a near-great president is a result of presidents stepping into the Oval Office and realizing what super-cool powers he bequeathed them.

After Nixon, Reagan most fascinates me. The ultimate Jay Gatsby: the man from nothing whose soul was a compendium of Reader's Digest anecdotes, Hollywood stories, and some Hayek for spice, with spectacular PR skills. I give him credit for realizing how batshit his foreign policy advisers and trusting Gorby, going so far as to reach an agreement at Reyjavik to categorically -- to the horror of his advisers -- ban ALL strategic nuclear weapons. You should read Reagan's press clippings in 1988 -- the likes of Krauthammer, Gingrich, et al thought he was Neville Chamberlain.n

*how batshit his foreign policy advisers WERE

Have you read Lou Cannon's Reagan biography? An amazing piece of work - equally good on his strengths and weaknesses. Only after reading that did I feel I really understood the man and the presidency. His genuine horror of MAD surprised me, having grown up on the 80s left-wing idea that he was basically Slim Pickens at the end of Dr Strangelove.

Yup. Still the best. I'm very, very fond of Edmund Morris' Dutch though. It got a LOT of flak in the late nineties for basically approaching Reagan as if he were a character in a novel, but the transcripts of the chats b/w Morris and Reagan are hilarious, and Morris still writes beautiful narrative prose.

Apparently the turning point happened in 1983: Grenada, Beirut, the shooting down of the Korean airplane, and attending a screening of The Day After.

The way Cannon describes detente with the USSR makes you realise how much luck was involved. Those 1983 events you described > Chernenko dying and letting Gorbachev in > Iran/Contra driving a lot of the hawks out of Reagan's orbit and letting cooler heads prevail.

so let's see some rankings then

After becoming very interested in presidential politics through high school in the late '70s, I tuned out altogether through Reagan. He didn't hold any interest for me whatsoever. All my favourite bands hated him, but he just didn't register. His inaction on AIDs--I seem to recall in the Randy Shilts book that he didn't say the word publically until deaths had reached 50,000--was probably as reprehensible as anything you can pin on anybody else on the list. (Willful inaction, to me, seems like a more grevious transgression among politicians than well-intentioned action that turns out badly.)

Ehhh. I'm gay and don't think it's as reprehensible as you claim, considering that it took the death of Rock Hudson to mobilize any sort of mass public interest in the disease as an epidemic. Reagan was as blinkered as Walter Mondale would have been; nothing in that generation's DNA suggests they would have bee comfortable discussing condoms, gay sex, blood transfusions, etc (that's why congressman and senators around when Roe v Wade was upheld get a pass from me; do you think FDR's second generation of New Dealers were prepared to discuss a woman's right to an abortion?).

Reagan gets some points for appointing C. Everett Koop, who's as conservative as it gets yet recognized the threat from the get-go (and he made some headlines a few years ago for lamenting the Bushies' inattention to science).

some kind of dimwit convergence going on when liberals are starting to love bush pere and conservatives, clinton.

era of bipartisan consensus iirc

luckily the Clinton years were devoid of partisan sniping

A review of the Poppy doc.

Bush I was "liberal" in some ways from today's perspective, Clinton conservative/corporatist from almost any.

LBJ. Did not expect that.

Fuck the lot of them but fuck Jimmy Carter most of all for the whitewashing of his record.

? why does alfred's link go to this thread?

it's self-referential!

http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/arts/television/41-george-h-w-bush-documentary-on-hbo.html?ref=arts

Jean Edward Smith's new Eisenhower: In War and Peace is so far the best definitive bio on Ike I've read. Thanks to his knowledge of U.S. Grant, Smith is able to compare and contrast the general's performance historically. He's also written the first thorough analysis of Ike's tenure as president of Columbia.

About to start the presidential years.

This looks like fun: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/books/review/ike-and-dick-by-jeffrey-frank.html?ref=review

read "this" a couple days ago: one of the best popular histories I've read (Frank is a novelist). I agree with Russell Baker's judgment: it's impossible to regard Ike's insistent contempt for the young Dick Nixon without feeling a wee bit sorry for the bastard.

IDK if there's a better thread to put this in, but I found this interview with the author of a new book on the Dulles Brothers fascinating:

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/234752747/meet-the-brothers-who-shaped-u-s-policy-inside-and-out

What really struck me was that you had a guy openly saying that the entire goal of US foreign policy at the time was to cynically further the interests of US corporations -- the kind of stuff you'd expect to hear on Pacifica but not on an NPR station.

^^^Yeah, the NYTBR piece on that Dulles book last week began "If you want to know why the US is hated across the globe," read it.

The critic also wrote that Truman abjured interfering in/toppling foreign govts, but Ike was gung ho -- I guess that's true. So fuck rehabilitating the general.

Ike in essence empowered the CIA. It got him out of invading Iran, Hungary, and so on.

some fairly harsh commentary on ike (and a p disturbing story in the initial post) in this LGM thread:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/03/eisenhower-2

https://graphiq-stories.graphiq.com/stories/5037/ranking-presidents-least-most-conservative#13-Overall-Ideology-Comparison

that chart has some v strange results -- clinton and even carter as 'more liberal' than LBJ is hard to figure.

omigod I was just about to post this

re the Ike link.

I don't agree with this:

When you say you like Eisenhower, a lot of what you are saying is that you would have preferred to live in the 1950s, even if you are doing that unconsciously and only mean it in terms of the issues you are considering.

ha yeah as i think someone said in the comments, i like FDR but that doesn't mean i want to live during the depression.

man I went full ham on IKe in this thread, eh?

haha and apparently back in 2010 i voted for ike in this poll! not really sure who i'd go for now.

still think he's the least worst, and that anecdote cited in LGM has been refuted in a few places; Earl Warren and Ike did not get along.

If you re-polled this with Obama...my guess would be third, but I still don't know how Jimmy Carter got 8 votes, so who knows. Carter's presidency was not successful by almost any measure, starting with the simple fact of a serious challenge within his own party and losing in a landslide.

I bought this as a remainder when I needed something to read with coffee (the two are inseparable, and I'd left whatever I was already reading at work). Started it, but because of its length, I wasn't sure I'd keep going.

http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441042033l/14821639.jpg

Excellent, as it turns out. It's an overview starting with Teddy Roosevelt, one chapter per president (Harding and Ford and a couple of others get folded into other chapters), with the central point that the modern presidency--the power accrued to the presidency--returns (with a vengeance) with TR, after a parade of non-entities post-Lincoln. Probably well known if you're American; I'm not. I remember Frank Kogan once derisively nicknamed another rock critic (he's still around, so I'll leave his name out of it) John "Overview" Smith--loved that, but overviews have their uses. Leuchtenburg writes with a lot of humour, or at least summons forth lots of funny anecdotes and quotes (Truman's "Senator Halfbright"). And you can spot just about everyone from the recent past 60, 70, 100 years ago: "That's Palin...that's Obama...that's Clinton."

I read it last summer and agree with the thumbs up. Check out his brief Hoover bio published in 2009.

I thought some of the funniest stuff had to do with the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover sequence. "Keep Warren at home. Don't let him make any speeches. If he goes out on a tour somebody's sure to ask him questions, and Warren's just the sort of damn fool that will try to answer them"--Palin! I came away liking Taft and Harding, two guys who clearly didn't want the job.

the roaring 20s!

I knew Eisenhower had a poor civil rights record--alluded to that in an early post on this thread--but I thought that was primarily a matter of misguided inaction, of just hoping the issue would magically go away. But going by Leuchtenburg's book (which seems to me to be about as even-handed as these things get), he was much worse than that--his inaction, his actions, his words and attitudes.

No rhetoric for Ike, just following the law, and he let Nixon and LBJ take the lead in getting the '58 civil rights bill through the Dixiecrat-dominated Senate. One of the frustrations of Ike is how he never risked his enormous popularity on anything noteworthy.

Something I've never come across before: Oliver Jensen, around the time Eisenhower was leaving office, recasting the first two sentences of the the Gettysburg Address into Eisenhower-ese. I realize deadpan wasn't invented yesterday, but there's something about the tone here that feels very modern. As funny as Tina Fey as Palin:

I haven’t checked these figures but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals, and the point is naturally to check up, by actual experience in the field, to see whether any governmental set-up with a basis like the one I was mentioning has any validity and find out whether that dedication by those early individuals will pay off in lasting values and things of that kind.

(Leuchtenburg cuts the excerpt off there; there's more at http://powellhistory.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/if-eisenhower-had-given-the-gettysburg-address/.)