Ranking Presidents Since 1959

Jimmy Carter’s passing has got me thinking about the Presidents that have served during my lifetime, which began at the end of Dwight Eisenhower’s second term.

I have great respect for Carter. He may have been one of the very best human beings ever to occupy the White House. But how does he stack up as a President, which has more to do with effectiveness than goodness? Here’s how I’d rate the Presidents of my lifetime from best to worst.

Lyndon Johnson. Yes, he lied about Vietnam and that is horrible and it will always justifiably taint his legacy. But there was no President in my lifetime who understood how to make things happen and who was more genuinely passionate about improving the lot of poor Americans than Johnson. As his best — and most unsparing — biographer, Robert Caro, has pointed out, LBJ was ruthless in pursuit of personal power. But every time he achieved it he tried to use it in the service of the kind of desperately poor people he had grown up with in the Texas Hill Country. As just one example, the historic civil rights act of 1964 had been stalled by the incompetence of John Kennedy’s arrogant and clueless aides. Johnson knew just how to work the levers of Congress to get it passed. Nobody else could have done it. Moreover, he understood full well the political costs for doing the right thing. When he signed the bill he told aides that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation. He was only wrong about the duration.

Ronald Reagan. Yes, Ronald Reagan. Reagan understood the battle between Western style democracy with its free markets versus closed societies governed by Communist autocrats. He realized that a military buildup would push them over the edge and he was right. He’s more responsible for the fall of the Iron Curtain a few years after he left office than anyone. And domestically, let’s face it, by the 1980’s the old New Deal order had ossified. The country needed a jolt of free market energy to pull us out of stagflation and malaise. And, by the way, who supported and signed the last sweeping liberalization of our immigration laws? Yep.

Bill Clinton. Clinton understood where the Democratic Party needed to go — which then as now is to the center. He famously declared the era of big government to be over. That was untrue in reality. Americans love their government services and benefits while they want to pretend that they’re rugged individualists. But in order to restore the viability of his party it was necessary for him to say this to a public that wanted to believe it. Clinton’s accomplishments were less about what he did than they were about how well he could hit the right tone. Abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” America should work for anybody who “works hard and plays by the rules.” Those are still the kinds of prescriptions his party should get back to.

Barack Obama. Like Clinton, Obama was good at saying the right thing at the right time to capture the mainstream public mood. Obamacare is his major accomplishment and no small thing. And his administration was pretty much scandal free in a Washington that turns over every rock every day.

Dwight Eisenhower. Solid. Steady. He sent Federal troops to back up the Supreme Court order to desegregate schools in Little Rock. He was the country’s most famous general and yet he left office warning of the “military-industrial complex.” Still, he hated Joe McCarthy but didn’t have the guts to stand up to him when it mattered.

Gerald Ford. Ford was a man every bit as good as Carter, but he liked to ski and play golf instead of build houses for poor people and fight diseases and so he doesn’t get Carter’s good press. But he provided the country with the needed dose of humility, decency and common man sensibility that we needed post Watergate. And even Woodward and Bernstein agreed in retrospect that he did the right thing by pardoning Richard Nixon.

Joe Biden. He was actually very effective in a highly polarized political environment. I’d place him close to LBJ in his ability to understand how Congress works. His infrastructure bill will be his greatest accomplishment. My problem with Biden is that he didn’t understand where he was in the history of the country. His only job was to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and he failed. He failed because he followed the power in his party way too far to the left. He is a politician who thinks instinctively only about winning the next election and staying in power.

Jimmy Carter. Good men do not necessarily make the best Presidents. Carter was probably a little too good for the office. He came off as too preachy, too moralistic, too holier-than-thou for my tastes. Yet, his most recent biographer, Jonathan Alter, in his sympathetic book His Very Best, makes a case that he had a better sense of humor in private and was actually a more accomplished leader than is generally assumed. Over and over again, he did what he considered to be the right thing as opposed to taking the politically expedient course. Well, okay, but a little bit of that goes a long way. I’m not looking for Gandhi. I prefer real politicians.

Richard Nixon. Like LBJ, Nixon was a real politician who understood how government worked. But he was less interested in domestic policy than in seeing the world as a big chess match in the struggle between Western style open societies and Communist closed societies. He saw where China was going and so warmed relations with that country. The old cold warrior reduced worldwide tensions and made the world a safer place. He was paranoid, but with good reason. In 1960 it’s likely that John Kennedy really did steal the election and Nixon was urged by Republican leaders to dispute it. But he decided that that would tear apart the country and so he gracefully accepted the results. Nixon was bitter that the Washington establishment held him to account for every foible while it swooned over Kennedy and ignored JFK’s personal and policy recklessness. He was right. An excellent biography is Being Nixon by Evan Thomas, which borrows heavily from Nixon’s own voluminous notes to himself on yellow legal pads housed at his presidential library. Like Caro, Thomas is no apologist for all that his subject did wrong. But those notepads show a complicated man struggling to be a good person and to do the right thing for the country. Nixon would be much higher on my list if it weren’t for one thing — and it’s not Watergate. Just before the 1968 election, LBJ had worked out a peace agreement in Vietnam. Realizing how this might help Hubert Humphrey, Nixon worked back channels to scuttle the deal. He wasn’t President at the time, but this was inexcusable and it cost thousands of American lives.

George H.W. Bush. He was also, generally speaking, a good man, though more experienced in the ways of Washington and more of a real pol than Carter. He presided over the end of the Cold War, but that was largely set up for him by Reagan. He didn’t make a lot of mistakes. He was steady. Yeah, he looked at his watch during a debate. Who cares?

John Kennedy. When he was running for President one weekend in 1960, his wife and daughter were away. So, Kennedy invited his mistress, Judith Campbell, to stay with him at his Georgetown home. At the end of the weekend he presented her with a suitcase and asked her to deliver it to a special friend. The suitcase was filled with $200,000 in cash, provided by his father, and intended for distribution to preachers, sheriffs and other influential local officials in the hotly contested primary state of West Virginia. And those distributions would be made through a mutual “friend” of Campbells, the mobster Sam Giancana. Also during that campaign, Bobby Kennedy flat out lied about his brother’s Addison’s Disease, which could impact his judgement. Those stories from Chris Wallace’s excellent book, Countdown 1960, describe this man’s character. And as a President he brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and found his whole domestic agenda stalled in a Congress controlled by his own party. This unserious former Senator never bothered to learn how his own institution worked even as he dismissed Johnson’s advice. Why is this guy buried in a place of high honor at Arlington?

George W. Bush. His operatives worked the system to steal the election from Al Gore. As a result, we lost our last chance to head off the worst impacts of climate change. He invaded Iraq on false pretenses, ousting a horrendous dictator but not doing much of anything to improve stability, much less promote peace, in the region. He overplayed his hand in response to 911, thus squandering a brief moment of world sympathy for America. Much like Eisenhower and McCarthy, he clearly despises Donald Trump and yet stops short of disavowing him. He’s a likable person and he offered Michelle Obama a mint at Ford’s funeral. So, well, there’s that.

Donald Trump. A combination of an awful human being and an awful leader. A thoroughly horrible, corrupt, ignorant, incompetent, self-obsessed, lying, crude, criminal authoritarian. And I’m probably giving him too much credit here.

Well, that’s my take on it. I don’t care much about party or ideology. As a rule, I like real pols who have a sense of where they are in history and what the country needs at that moment and who ultimately use their power for the greater good.