A list

On another site, completely unrelated to politics in any way, there was an off-topic post asking opinions on the best presidents since 1900. I couldn't resist.

It's been years since I studied presidential history, and I think if I refreshed my memory a little better this list would probably change, but here it is, for discussion purposes:

T Roosevelt
F Roosevelt
Eisenhower
Truman
Reagan
Wilson
L Johnson
Kennedy
GHW Bush
Ford
Taft
Carter
Clinton
Hoover
Coolidge
Harding
Nixon

I always think the proper question for ranking presidents is, how badly did he damage the country he was trying to serve? I didn't rank the current [insert slur here] because it's not customary to rank a sitting president. Given current trends he'll be in the bottom third of my list, but he has time to turn that around. I also left out McKinley, who I know little about and who only served one year and eight months in the 1900s.

Nixon, in my view, caused the greatest and most lasting damage to the country with his shenanigans. Yeah, he opened China and gave Henry Kissinger a job, and kudos for that, but the stink of Watergate still infests the political swamp and probably always will. You can trace American distrust of government right back to Nixon if you want.

The five fellows ranked above him are all in a little muddle--I could move them around within that group and still be happy with the outcome. Most of them lose points not for deliberately doing bad things, but for missing opportunities to do good things, perhaps Clinton's biggest failing and certainly Coolidge's. Carter and Hoover found themselves grossly outclassed by the office, despite the fact that they were among the brightest individuals to serve in the office in the last century--and Hoover, in particular, had shown great brilliance in public life before his election. Sheer brainpower isn't enough for the White House (as Reagan proved). Harding probably did the most direct damage to the country, mostly through neglect and befuddlement, but I understand recent scholarship has viewed him a little more favorably. (I'd like to point out, by the way, that I bought a box of Diamond matchbooks, 40 of them, which were supposed to have pictures of all the presidents--and every matchbook, every single one, has a picture of Harding.)

It's almost unfair even to rank Gerald Ford, who didn't serve long enough to do anything and succeeded in that task. He pardoned Nixon which, though unpopular, probably needed to be done. Taft and GHW Bush are basically the same man in different bodies (although Taft was at least good at being Chief Justice, while Bush was primarily good at being Daddy), and at least in my view were benign if unspectacular.

Kennedy ranks ahead of them (by a fairly wide margin, too), because he was an idea man, and neither Taft nor Bush were. Kennedy's ideas inspired the country in a way few other president's have, and frankly that's something a president needs to be able to do. He also showed a real ability to learn from mistakes: the difference in his leadership style and results between the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis demonstrates that. Had he survived and served a second term I suspect Kennedy might have ranked at the top of any list of presidents, but as it was it fell to his vice president, a self-indulgent, thieving, racist prick named Johnson, to carry on the legacy. That Johnson somehow managed to do that despite his enormous personal faults amazes me; you may not agree with the Great Society or the way he led the country, but he got a lot of what Kennedy wanted done, done. He deserves more credit than he usually gets. That said, he was an absolutely dreadful war president, worse even than the current one, probably in fact the worst one ever. So, I could drop him down a few notches, or more, and still feel comfortable.

I could mix and match the next three, Wilson through Truman. Overall I think Wilson's idealism in foreign affairs has had a lasting influence on our leaders, though not always a positive one; he loses points for doing more to reduce the influence of the vice presidency than probably any other single president (though his VP, Marshall, is more memorable than most, having given us the quip about the country needing a really good five cent cigar). Wilson also deserves some blame for the current state of the Middle East, because he let Kemal Ataturk threaten the victorious allies after WWI and forced them to redraw the map of the Middle East. Look it up if you don't believe me, but the Kurds had a country, the Greeks owned Constantinople, and most of the borders were much more rationally drawn. Reagan delegated well and deserves credit for seeing what many others didn't see, namely that the Soviet Union was not going to be brought down by attrition or by military action, but by making the place wreck itself. I don't think anyone else saw that. I don't think anyone else would have. Granted, Reagan nearly bankrupted us in the process. Truman probably deserves to be at the top of this group, but I've just forgotten too much about his presidency to be sure about my ranking.

Eisenhower, in my recollection from my studies, strikes me as among the closest in history to my personal view of the ideal president--he was a strong leader who presented good ideas and worked to carry them out, collected intelligent and capable people around him, and led the country successfully without attempting to expand the power of the executive branch.

If I was to be irresponsible, I'd put FDR much lower on the list because he so greatly expanded executive power and size of the bureaucracy, and instituted my least favorite social program of all time. I have to give him credit, though, because I don't think very many people--possibly he was the only person--who could have led the U.S. through the 30s and into WWII as well as he did. His economic policies did not bring us out of the Depression, and he gave too much away to Stalin, but given the times in which he served I don't know how FDR did it. I wish his bureaucracies had been allowed to die with him, and I wish he had done more to restrain Stalin. But who could have done much better?

Teddy Roosevelt might have been able to. What a fantasy, huh, TR in his prime winning the election of 1936? I'd like to have seen that. Brash, bold, the most American of American presidents. This is the guy I think GW Bush wants to be, but he lacks that certain something that made Teddy such a fantastic leader. Roosevelt handled an activist and deeply divided Congress, maintained a very active role in world and particularly hemispheric affairs, and managed without pissing off everybody he met. TR had such a terrific force of personality, something GW seems to lack, and his integrity was entirely above reproach--something GW also lacks.

So that's my list of 20th Century presidents. Any thoughts?