Who Was the Worst President In U.S. History? I Nominate This One

Warren G. Harding was one of the worst they say.
His sex scandals weren't even a consideration
By that measure we'd see FDR, JFK, Bill C
and others listed as well.

When it comes to voting for the best and worst presidents in our history, one must first establish some criteria. Currently there's no doubt a large contingent who say there's no point asking the question. Trump is most obviously such an odious president that there's no point in going further with this discussion. C'est la vie.

What triggered this blog post, though, was a book title that caught my eye on Amazon.com with the title: The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. 

Really?

According to the promotional info on this book the author compiles more than 200 "inconvenient truths" to support his assessment including "his shocking abuses of taxpayer dollars; his bitterly divisive style of governing; his shameless usurping of the Constitution; his many scandals and cover-ups; his policy failures at home and abroad; the unprecedented expansion of government power...and more."

Now to be honest, in my opinion many of these accusations could be made against many presidents. Divisive? Abuses of taxpayer dollars? Policy failures? And as regards the last, "the unprecedented expansion of government power" I would suggest that the past 120 years of this nation has seen a continued and ongoing expansion of government power. The past three presidents have made "executive orders" a modus operandi for expanding the power of the executive branch. It's an innovation that frees presidents from bipartisan wrangling altogether. "Let's Make a Law" is practically a new program on The Game Channel.

So, I decided to ask Google and was directed to a U.S. News & World Report page that claimed it was able to identify our worst presidents.

The first listed was Zachary Taylor. His crime? He was a war hero who was utterly forgettable. He died in office and failed to complete his term, so I'm not sure he got a fair shake when it comes to making his mark. There are plenty of presidents who did more damage than that

Herbert Hoover gets the second nod, assuming we're going from worst to first. A poor communicator is his crime, as well as ushering in the Great Depression. Big problems create big opportunities for those who succeed in tackling them. Some of his decisions exacerbated, rather than alleviated, the challenges we faced as a nation. 

USN&WR gives John Tyler and Millard Fillmore a tie for 7th worst. Tyler was a defender of slavery and abandoned the party platform he was elected on. "You voted for me on this, but guess what? I am going to do my own thing now. Sorry, you losers." Fillmore's sins were greater still, beginning with the Missouri Compromise that permitted the spread of slavery. 

Warren G. Harding is tagged as sixth worst in this list. Scandals permeated his presidency I'm not sure he knew what his primary responsibilities were. "When the cat's away, the mice will play." 

William Henry Harrison died 30 days after giving his unnecessarily long inaugural address in the rain. I have a hard time saying he was a bad president. He never really had a chance to get any traction. 

Franklin Pierce. 

Franklin Pierce  is another of those presidents a majority of our citizens would be unable to identify in a final exam. It was his view that pursuing abolitionist would be a threat to the Union. Therefore, he acquiesced to the pro-slavery Southern Dems. "Staus Quo is the way to go," must have been his motto. "Don't rock the boat."

Andrew Johnson takes the #3 slot in this list. He opposed Reconstruction, was an enabler of carpetbaggers and scalawags, among other things. Ultimately there was an attempt to impeach him, but he was acquitted. These were turbulent times and it didn't help that he had a somewhat obstinate personality. Those first years after the Civil War would have been a trial for anyone.

USN&WR lists Donald Trump as #2 in this list of "worst" presidents. Whereas it's true that he never had more than a 50% approval rating, there were numerous presidents with a lower approval rating at the end of their service in the White House. Gallup Polls (measuring only since FDR) show Truman, Nixon, Carter and both Bushes to have the lowest approval ratings at the end of their tenures. In light of the ongoing media hostility toward the 45th president it's quite surprising his ratings were as high as they were.

According the this list, James Buchanan (1857-1861) gets to wear the moniker of "Worst President." He did nothing to stand in the way of the spread of slavery and set the stage for the secession by the Confederacy.

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Personally, I believe Millard Fillmore can't be far behind as an instrument of stupidity with regards to these matters. The absence of Andrew Jackson and his treatment of the Native peoples that resulted in the "Trail of Tears" seems an error somehow. 

You can probably poke a few holes in the inflated importance of Woodrow Wilson as well, in my estimation, the Ivory Tower President who really couldn't grasp the significance of many of the events unfolding in the aftermath of the First World War. His unrestrained use of propaganda to generate a hatred of Germans (our largest immigrant population) and Germany had consequences that extended far beyond his visual horizon. 

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Flashback Friday: JFK Assassinated 56 Years Ago Today and a Few Miscellaneous Loose Ends

"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future." 
--Robert A. Heinlein

This past couple weeks I've been reading Don't Know Much About History and earlier this week read about the Sixties, which was a remarkably disruptive decade. There were two main fronts that dominated the era, civil rights and Vietnam. Vietnam, however, was a subset of a bigger issue that weighed on the nation's leaders. That bigger issue was the fear of aggressive global communism.

So the decade began with an attempted coup in Cuba and the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. For the purposes of this brief post, I will call the Watergate break-in in 1972 the completion of the cycle, even though that incident took a couple years to unravel during which time the Vietnam excursion would come to a much needed close.

Here are some interesting and strange facts that jumped out at me as I read this section of DKMAH.

1. E. Howard Hunt was one of the "plumbers" (along with G. Gordon Liddy and others) who had been tasked by President Nixon with the assignment of stopping security leaks after the Pentago Papers were published by the NY Times. Along with Liddy and others, he was implicated in the Watergate scandal. Four of these others were Anti-Castro Cubans, two were from the Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP).

2. Hunt was also part of the team that worked on the disastrous and misguided Bay of Pigs invasion (1961). Hence his connection with the Cubans later at Watergate.

3. Howard Hunt's wife died in a plane crash later in 1972 with $10,000 in one hundred dollar bills that she was conveying to someone in Chicago as hush money.

4. One of JFKs misstresses was Judy Exner, who was also intimately involved with Chicago mob bosses Sam Giancana and Sam Roselli.

Don Michael Corleone

5. Sam Giancana was murdered just before he was to testify at a Church Committee hearing. The Church Committee was a Senate committee created to investigate abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A primary motive for this exploration of shady dealings included all of Nixon's paranoid manipulations and scandalous activities. Numerous members of the Nixon team did time behind bars.

6.  John Roselli was a Chicago mobster who helped control Las Vegas mob activities and Hollywood. Roselli's decomposing body was found on August 9, 1976, inside a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida.

* * * *

A friend asked if I were watching the impeachment hearings this week. I said no. I didn't watch the Clinton impeachment hearings either. (He was the second president impeached. Andrew Jackson was the first. Nixon was not impeached. He resigned.)

The House of Representatives has initiated impeachment hearings 62 times since the first Constitutional Convention. The impeachable offenses for Federal officers are "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." The House has impeached 19 Federal officers, two of them presidents: Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton. Both were acquitted by the Senate.

In about 30 years we'll read about all the scandals that took place in the 90s through the present and our grandchildren won't believe it.

Hope this hasn't been too dour. I am still trying to process what I went through in my youth.