Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933 - 1945, Decmocrat from New YorkWe begin the fourth, and final, segment of this series with an examination of the administration of the greatest of all American statesmen in contrast to the second and third segments that began with the forgettable administrations of John Tyler and Chester Aurthur respectively who succeeded to the office via the death of the elected President and did nothing worthy of the office during their respective terms. For those who object to my ranking of Franklin Roosevelt as "great" owing to their philosophical opposition to to his statist economic policies, Ronald Reagan, whose conservative credential (I hope) remain intact despite the rapid rightward shift of the American body politic, considered Roosevelt to be his idol and even claimed to have pattered his administration after that of FDR, "great" in this context rarely translates as "I agree with every thing said person did."
During the 1932 Presidential Election Roosevelt had accused his opponent, President Herbert Hoover of "leading the country down the path of socialism" through his creation of agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in response to the Great Depression, which had driven unemployment to over 20% and resulted in a 25% decrease in the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP, however, Roosevelt did more to impinge on the liberties of the private sector during his famous First One Hundred Days than Hoover had even suggested during his entire four year term. Roosevelt's first act as President was to declare a "Bank Holiday" closing all private banks in the country, pursuant to the Emergency Banking Act, in order to determine which banks were insolvent and needed to be dissolved with the deposits in the remaining banks that were reopened to be guaranteed by the Federal Government in order the ebb the stampede of Bank Runs.
The Bank Holiday was remarkably successful with 75% of the banks within the Federal Reserve system reopening and about 50% of funds that had been "squired under the mattress" during the the panic being redeposited with new Federal gauarnees under the newly created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Of the remaining banks many were merged into larger, more stable banks, however, some deposits were lost though none in their entirety and the value of such lost deposits was to become wildly exaggerated in later years.
Roosevelt then suspended the Gold Standard for valuation of US Currency to stop the deflation which was driving down prices and wages which had been in a state of free-fall since the 1929 Stock Market Crash and passed the Economy Act which placed financing of the Federal Government's operations on a sound basis to buttress tough new financial regulations on private buisness that were being enforced through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Though practical, the purpose of these moves was largely to rebuild confidence in the economy which would stimulate markets who generally responded favorably to these moves assuring that prices would at least not continue to fall.
Roosevelt also took the step which Hoover had refused to take and began providing direct relief to unemployed workers and their families through the creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration as well as taking steps to rescue farmers from certain foreclosure using the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to keep crop prices reasonable, a move highly criticized at the time as the overall effect was to increase food prices at a time when many were starving for want of affordable food. Roosevelt's favorite program to come out of his First Hundred Days was the Civilian Conservation Corps which provided employment while at the same time helping to protect the environment.
Far and away the most popular legislation of the First Hundred Days would have to have been the Cullen-Harrison Act authorizing the sale of alcohol for the first time since ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 which would eventually lead to the Repeal of Prohibition six months later. There appears to have have been widespread optimism that Repeal of Prohibition alone would bring an end to the Great Depression but, as we all know, it didn't quite work out that way.
A second round of financial reforms was undertaken beginning with the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act which contained both stronger anti-trust legislation and created the Public Works Administration to expand employment opportunities. It was also during this early period that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created providing electrification of rural areas of the country particularly in the Mid-South.
Mind you, all of the past few paragraphs covered a period of 100 days from March 9 to June 16, 1933.
Following the success that accompanied the flurry of activity in his First Hundred Days Roosevelt won larger majorities in the 1934 Midterm Elections allowing him to undertake a much more aggressive agenda: creating his most ambitious angency yet the Works Progress Administration which hired millions of Americans and reduced unemployment but has been widely criticized as the projects undertaken were often of questionable necessity, passing the Social Security Act for the first time providing Federally administered old age pensions and disability insurance and the controversial National Labor Relations Act giving workers the right: to unionize, bargain collectively and strike. Roosevelt also created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to to provide real-time regulation of equity markets.
In 1935 the Supreme Court found the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional significantly lessening Roosevelt's control over the economy. Roosevelt had been using the act to fix prices and wages in industry in addition to using it to prevent the formation of trusts and it is largely due to the courts action that the US never degenerated into a Planned Economy.
In 1936 Roosevelt was reelected in a landslide over Gov. Alf Landon who only manged to win two small New England states. Shortly after the election Roosevelt took on his most ambitious and controversial pursuit ever by introducing the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937 to prevent further judicial interference in the New Deal by have Congress grant him the ability to appoint up to six new Justices to the Supreme Court (the US Constitution did not specify how many justices were to serve) which he was not successful in getting passed but which did send a message to the court who never again overturned any provisions of the New Deal during Roosevelt's time in office.
Roosevelt was more successful in securing passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing a minimum wage. However, his high-handed attempt to control the judiciary in the "Court Packing Scheme" cost him his Filibuster-Proof Majority in the Senate during the 1938 midterms with the result that FLSA would prove to be the last New Deal program Roosevelt would manage to get passed.
Roosevelt was reelected to a heretofore unthinkable third term in the 1940 Presidential Election over utility company executive Wendell Willkie who had never held public office, had been a friend and supporter of Roosevelt and had only come to oppose the New Deal when the Tennessee Vally Authority began to come into competition with his electric company. Willkie had some success running against Roosevelt's seeking of an unprecedented third term with his catchy slogan "if one man is indispensable, then none of us is free" but was unable to overcome the Democrats counter-slogan "Wendell Willkie you've gotta be fucking kidding me" or words to that effect.
Having promised during the 1940 campaign to do everything possible to keep the US out of World War II Roosevelt, nevertheless, began rearmament of the US in preparation of the inevitable conflict which became evitable with Japan's Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 "A Date Which Will Live in Infamy". Within only a few days of the attack Germany and Italy declared war on the US drawing them into the conflict both in Europe and in the Pacific, in February 1942 President Roosevelt ordered the establishment of Japanese-American Internment Camps perhaps the darkest stain on his administration and the Nation.
In 1943 Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference and the negotiations he undertook there have quite rightly subjected Roosevelt to much criticism. Stalin had already shown imperialist designs with his Annexation of Eastern Poland in 1939 which he had undertaken in circumstances of unusual cruelty and at Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill granted him control of most of what would become the Eastern Bloc setting the stage for the Cold War and essentially replacing one genocidal dictator in the region with another. It does need to be remembered that the overwhelming majority of fighting done up to that point in the War was on the Eastern Front and that, had the Soviet Union crumbled as Russia did in World War I, it was unlikely that the Allies would have prevailed as thoroughly as they did in the European theater.
As with the First World War twenty-five years before, by opening up another front in the conflict that diluted Axis-power resources, US participation in the Conflict proved decisive for the Allied forces culminating in the Allied Invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. While the bloodiest fighting of the War was going on Roosevelt faced his toughest electoral opponent yet in the 1944 Presidential Election in Gov. Thomas E. Dewey who, in spite of being a horrible phony and a complete douchebag, manged to score 100 electoral votes (more than both of Roosevelt's previous opponents combined) in a campaign where he most just said the word "unity" over and over while stroking his cheesy mustache.
The last ditch efforts of the Nazis failed in the epic "Battle of the Bulge" where lager than life Gen. George S. Patton pulled off one of the most amazing maneuvers in military history detaching his Third Army from an engagement 100 miles away relieving a German siege and sending the Nazis into full retreat in subzero weather and with only twenty-four hours notice.
On March 22, 1945 American and British troops crossed the Siegfried Line into Germany which was completely conquered in a little less than six weeks.
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 less than one month before Victory in Europe Day. Historian polls always rank Roosevelt in the top three usually at or around number two above President George Washington but below President Abraham Lincoln making him one of the three "great" Presidents.
Harry S. Truman 1945 - 1953, Democrat from MissouriGive 'em Hell Harry is viewed today as one of the strongest Presidents ever to grace the White House but he left office with the second lowest approval rating of any President in history (bet you can guess who had the lowest approval rating in history), why? No President since Andrew Jackson or perhaps since George Washington transformed the Executive Branch of Government as thoroughly as Truman did and many of the trappings of Truman's time in office: the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US Air Force (USAF) and Department of Defense (DoD) remain with us today, however a lot of these initiatives took place in the culture of paranoia surrounding the Cold War and at a time when Americans trusted their Government to a degree subsequent history doesn't appear to justify.
When Truman succeed to the Oval Office, upon the death in office of Franklin Roosevelt, he had been Vice President for less than three months and his predecessor had done nothing to prepare him for the completion of World War II or the demobilization effort underway at home. Also the bureaucracy created by Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal legislative agenda was too young to run itself and thus a sturdy hand was still needed at the tiller to steer the ship of state safely to shore, Truman would prove up to the job.
Germany's surrender on V-E Day occurred less than a month after he took office but the Pacific Theater remained in doubt. In August 1945 Harry Truman became the only world leader in history to detonate a Nuclear Weapon as an act of War and he did it twice.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a quick end to the the most destructive conflict in history and Truman's use of Nuclear Weapons upon civilian targets is widely defended to this day by persons who calculated that a full-scale invasion of Japan would have cost hundreds of thousands of more lives than were lost in the bombing. History is a bit of a fickle mistress at times, however, and, while these calculations may be accurate for all I know, it must be stressed that American participation in the Pacific Theater had peaked in 1942 with the Battle of Midway Island and Japan had seen tremendous setbacks in China in the intervening years with very limited American involvement due to Roosevelt's wish to concentrate on the European Theater. It is understandable why Americans would want to believe that the dropping of two nuclear bombs with no notice on densely populated civilian targets "actually saved lives" but history tells a different story and I'm afraid those bombs were dropped on an already defeated Japan.
With the War concluded the US had to contend with a painful period of demobilization where unemployment shot up to its' highest levels since the Great Depression and shortages of housing and consumer goods as well as inflation were becoming rampant owing to the return of several million US soldiers who had been serving overseas with only limited plans having been made to adjust the nation back to a peacetime economy. In perhaps his greatest blunder Truman responded to a railroad strike by nationalizing the railroad and threatening to draft striking workers into the armed forces an unpopular move that is widely blamed for the Republican's midterm election victories in which they took majorities in both houses of Congress beginning a two year long standoff between Truman and what he termed the "Do Nothing Congress".
Apart from passing the Taft-Hartley Act, severely reducing the influence and negotiating power of labor unions, over Truman's veto, the President's euphemism for the 80th Congress was largely accurate. Truman, however, faced an uphill battle in his reelection campaign where he ran on extending Roosevelt's New Deal legacy with a bevy of new social programs he termed the "Fair Deal" and to this end, in 1948, Truman signed an Executive Order desegregating the Armed Forces. This resulted in Gov. J. Strom Thurmond running against Truman in the 1948 Presidential election skimming off the States of the former Confederacy, an event which many thought spelled doom for Truman's reelection prospects.
The Election of 1948 has become legendary due to the upset, come-from-behind victory and in 1992, President George H.W. Bush emulated Truman's "Whistle stop train tour", even giving speeches off the back of trains although railroads had been largely abandoned for commuter use in the US decades before 1992 making the President look awkwardly out of touch and the Senior George Bush's reelection campaign was famously unsuccessful. Truman's opponent, Thomas E. Dewey was a major douchebag and had been nominated on a liberal platform that Truman knew the GOP had no intention of ever passing, a bluff he called by by calling Congress into special session and daring them to pass their party's platform to the sound of massive chirping in the hallowed halls of Congress, nevertheless polling was tight on election night prompting the Chicago Tribune to run with the headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN much to the delight of Truman who held the paper aloft in a photo op the next morning when results had been tallied giving Truman a two million popular vote and 114 electoral vote plurality and another term as President.
Truman's second term was primarily occupied with foreign affairs prompted by Soviet Union's acquisition of nuclear weapons setting off the Second Red Scare highlighted by the rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy who would ruin the life of many innocent an person accused without cause of harboring Communist sympathies. To the end of containing real Communism Truman helped to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which would provide a military defense for Western Europe which was to serve as a counter to the Soviet Bloc that had come to dominate Eastern Europe and was beginning to threaten the West and undertook the Korean Conflict under the guise of a UN Peace-Keeping Mission without consulting Congress.
The object of Truman's Korea policy was the conquest of Communist North Korea but the conflict quickly became a stalemate causing Truman to bicker with his Generals and his popularity to sink. In 1951 Truman's popularity was further undermined by his unpopular decision to fire Gen. MacArthur for insubordination when it was revealed that MacArthur had been using his political connections to undermine Truman's containment policy and to promote the engagement of Communist China which had come under control of Mao Zedong in 1949.
In 1950 a congressional investigation led by Sen. Estes Kefauver brought to light a series of financial scandals in and around Truman's administration forcing the resignation of 166 IRS employees who had been accepting illegal gifts and Truman himself is known to have taken gifts though it is unclear that he actually used his influence to benefit any of his benefactors. Finally, Truman faced his most startling setback in the Supreme Court decision in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer which found that his taking control of the Nation's steel mills during the 1952 steel strike to have been both unconstitutional and unlawful.
Having left office the most unpopular President in history, Truman remained very active in Democratic Party politics until his death in 1972 at the Age of eighty-eight. Historian polls consistently rank Truman in the top ten but almost never in the top five which is sometimes called the "near-great" range with an overall raking of seventh just ahead of President James K. Polk and just behind President Andrew Jackson, not bad for a bankrupted haberdasher from Independence Missouri.
David D. Eisenhower 1953 - 1961, Republican from PennsylvaniaPresident Eisenhower's first name was David but he was known as Dwight from childhood so as not to be confused with his father who was also named David. Eisenhower owed his victory in the 1952 Presidential Election and his reelection in 1956 over "eggheaded" Gov. Adlai Stevenson far more to his defeat of Hitler a decade before than to any policy initiative articulated by him during the campaign.
Throughout his two terms Eisenhower primarily concerned himself with foreign affairs allowing domestic policy to be hashed out by his cabinet. The only serious legislative endeavor undertaken personally by the President was the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 which created the Interstate Highway System.
Eisenhower succeeded in bringing the Korean Conflict to a successful stalemate signing an Armistice Agreement in 1953 which left the border of North and South Korea mostly untouched from the start of American involvement in the conflict which, though America's goal had been conquest of North Korea, was not a complete loss since North Korea did not accomplish their objective of conquering the South. Eisenhower took a harder line on the containment of Communism than Truman had particularly in the Middle East and in 1953 a CIA backed Coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and replaced it with a hereditary monarch, the Shah and in 1957 he articulated the Eisenhower Doctrine in which the US reserved the right to use military force to fend off any Communist aggression in the Middle East. Eisenhower also sent advisors and military aid to South Vietnam who were being invaded by Communist forces from North Vietnam but did not directly involve the US in the conflict.
Eisenhower also took an exceedingly hard line on Civil Rights in the south most famously sending Federal troops to enforce desegregation orders issued by the Federal Courts to public schools in the south, most dramatically when the Little Rock Nine were permitted to attend a public school in Arkansas after Eisenhower took control of the Arkansas National Guard and sent armed and uniformed army troops as escorts for the nine African-American students. In 1953 Eisenhower created the Cabinet-level Department of Health, Education and Welfare to administer the scattered array of social programs created by President Roosevelt's New Deal legislative agenda in the 1930s and showed no interest in dismantling the New Deal.
Eisenhower's administration is remembered as a time of peace and financial prosperity, however, while marked by low inflation Eisenhower also experienced three recessions on his watch. Also, it was during Eisenhower's term that American and Soviet Nuclear Proliferation began in what would become a three decade long Nuclear Arms Race consuming many of the resources of both nations and causing great political instability around the globe but which also, on the positive side, resulted in the creation of NASA.
Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969 at the age of Seventy-Eight. Historian polls are exceedingly kind to Eisenhower placing him in the top ten so-called "near-great" range ranking tenth overall just below President James Madison.
John F. Kennedy 1961 - 1963, Democrat from MassachusettsJack Kennedy is another one of those larger-than-life, iconic figures whose ghost would ride at the head of every political initiative undertaken for the next generation. Though Teddy Roosevelt was slightly younger and Franklin Pierce slightly more handsome, neither man had the advantage of living in the age of television and the Kennedy years are widely remembered as a golden age of Camelot.
With all the reverence given the martyred-savior-prince one might assume that Kennedy's administration was successful and that Kennedy was strong and effective President, but that's what happens when you assume. Kennedy's Inaugural Address set forth an ambitious program he called the "New Frontier" which included: education reforms, Medicare and Medicaid, an end to racial discrimination and putting a man on the moon, all to be paid for by cutting taxes. None of this passed Congress during Kennedy's term in office, however, as I said, the ghost of Kennedy rode shotgun as these and many more programs were passed by his successor Lyndon Johnson as part of the Great Society which would seek to eliminate poverty and racial injustice through a volume of legislation which would leave the New Deal in the dust.
Kennedy's foreign policy was a bit more successful than his domestic agenda but was still mixed. Early on he faced fierce criticism for the Bay of Pigs Fiasco, an Eisenhower era plan to provoke an uprising that was intended to topple the Communist regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba by arming and training 1,500 Cuban exiles and having them invade the Island and inciting a revolt but Kennedy failed to provide proper air-support for the ground forces who were quickly overwhelmed creating an international incident as Kennedy was forced to negotiate with Castro for the release of the surviving exiles that had been taken prisoner. Eighteen months after the Bay of Pig went sour Cuba showed up on Kennedy's plate again when aerial photography exposed Soviet missile silos being constructed on the Island only seventy miles off the coast of Florida prompting Kennedy to construct a Naval Blockade surrounding all of Cuba which was followed by a tense few days as both the US and the Soviet Union began considering going to war but which was settled cordiality thanks to a last minute, face-saving, diplomatic solution hatched by US Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson who suggested a deal whereby the Soviets would remove the missiles in exchange for the assurance that the US would never again invade Cuba in addition to the US removing some obsolete ballistic structures near the Turkish-Georgian border. This was a success for Kennedy but Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was not so lucky, clownish and bullying though he was Khrushchev was not a hard-line Stalinist and the weakness he exposed in settling the Cuban-Missile affair was soon used by harliners within the Kremlin to depose him in 1964 in favor of Leonid Brezhnev, a hardliner.
It was also during Kennedy's presidency that the Berlin Wall was constructed to stop the mass exodus of East German residents that were escaping Soviet oppression to West Berlin. This would become the most enduring symbol of the Cold War as well as a constant reminder of the prison-state that Eastern Europe would become and these sentiments were expressed very elegantly in Kennedy's famous I am a Jelly Doughnut Speech at the base of the Wall in June of 1963 to uproarious applause. And, yes, for the conspiracy minded among us, it was the Kennedy administration who oversaw the installation of the Ba'ath Party government of Iraq in 1963 who the US would have to expend considerable resources deposing forty years later. On the positive side, however, Kennedy also signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty prohibiting the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.
As I said Kennedy's domestic agenda was not passed in his lifetime, however, he was a vocal supporter of expanded Civil Rights legislation both for African-Americans and for women and had asked Congress for $25 billion in funding for the Apollo Moon-Landing Project which would be accomplished in 1969.
According to the Warren Commission report Jack Kennedy was assassinated by gunfire at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone, on at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963, however, very few Americans find the Warren Commission credible though no two Americans can agree on any particular detail that contradicts the Report's findings and the much touted Deathbed Confession of E Howard Hunt (who also said that Watergate Scandal was set up by state-informant John Dean to cover-up a Washington DC prostitution ring run by Dean's wife) involving a mafia hit and a jealous husband remains uncorroborated. In Historian Polls Kennedy generally ranks well-above average with an overall ranking of about thirteenth tied with President John Quincy Adams of whom Kennedy is known to have been a great admirer.
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963 - 1969, Democrat from TexasThere's a great story about President Johnson, though it is undoubtedly fictional, when he was running for the US Senate in 1948 he and an assistant were filling out Voter Registration Cards from a list of names that had been copied of from headstones at a local graveyard when Johnson announced, "wait, isn't my grandpa buried in that graveyard?" The assistant explained to Johnson why his staff felt it would be inappropriate to which Johnson is said to have replied "bullshit, my granddaddy has the same right to vote as anyone else in that graveyard." Again, there are many apocryphal stories of President Johnson but I think that one gages the character of the man very well, he was an election thief and he did stuff ballot boxes to win his Senate seat in 1948 but he was also a very egalitarian election thief and there are a great many ways that all Americans are better off as a result of his having stolen that election.
Having been Inaugurated Under Unusual Circumstances aboard Air Force One Johnson's first undertaking was to push for and pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination on the basis of race in: voting, government, employment and public accommodations, effectively ending legalized racial Segregation in the Nation, but mostly in the South. As I said in the blurb above this regarding President Kennedy, Johnson used the overwhelming national grief that Kennedy's assassination had caused to push all of Kennedy's ambitious agenda as well as an enormous agenda of his own which Kennedy probably had never dreamed of and it is doubtful that Kennedy would have approved of in its' entirety.
Kennedy's assassination took place less than one year before the 1964 Presidential Election so Johnson was already campaigning for reelection before his butt hit the chair in the Oval Office. His opponent in that election, Sen. Barry Goldwater was more than a little bit eccentric as well as a hard-line conservative activist that really never posed much a of threat to the seasoned political veteran, Johnson, but the President was from Texas where they like to things big and so by using a string of vicious campaign attack ads on television managed to convince the public that Goldwater was a trigger-happy-extremist in a nuclear age and that if he was to win: old people would be cut off from social security and every American of African decent would be lynched. Well that is, if they survived the nuclear war, Johnson's most controversial (read effective) ad was known as the "Daisy Ad" which showed a cute little girl being vaporized by a mushroom cloud as she whimsically plucked the pedals off from a daisy-flower and ending with a plea to vote for Lyndon Johnson because "the stakes are just too high." Goldwater's campaign never really got off the ground in spite of the the support of actor Ronald Reagan, Goldwater's slogan was "in your heart you know he's right" to which Johnson's people erected the powerful counter-slogan "in your guts you know he's nuts." Aside from his home state of Arizona, Goldwater took no states in the 1964 Election that segregationist Strom Thurmond didn't manage to take in his 1948 Third Party Bid and in the popular vote Johnson won the largest percentage landslide in history, a record that remains in tact to this day.
With a popular mandate and a filibuster-proof majority in Congress Johnson then undertook the most ambitious legislative agenda, perhaps of any head of state in world history, the Great Society. Now before I get into the details of the Great Society agenda and its many programs, as someone who has benefited greatly from the government funding for education and the sciences legislated during this period I would like to take a moment to thank the GOP for nominating Barry Goldwater in 1964 as I honestly do not think that an even slightly less eccentric nominee would have given Johnson enough momentum to achieve so much legislative success.
Of course many of the Great Society Programs continue to benefit Americans today: Medicare & Medicaid, Federal Guaranteed Student Loans & Financial Aid for Higher Education, The National Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The National Endowment for the Arts, Head Start, Food Stamps, etc, etc ... ad nauseum. The centerpiece of the Great Society was the War on Poverty which combined direct assistance to needy families with an aggressive effort to promote economic opportunity in distressed areas of the Nation and was a good deal more successful than has often been credited.
The great society was a warm fuzzy time but then there was the Vietnam War, having successfully painted his Opponent, Barry Goldwater, as a sadistic-war-mongering-suicidal-maniac in the 1964 Presidential Campaign, Johnson quickly amplified American involvement in the Vietnamese Civil War: securing passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (which Johnson himself later acknowledged was passed UNDER FALSE PRETENSES) giving him unlimited authority to commit troops to the region without Congressional oversight, instituting a Conscription Draft into the armed forces and began a series of destructive bombing raids in both North and South Vietnam which was followed by a massive ground invasion in South Vietnam (yes who were supposed to our allies).
The war quickly went sour and Johnson was caught making a large volume of misleading statements to the press causing Johnson to lose popularity and credibility. In addition to the War Protest Movement which was burgeoning on college campuses across the land there were Race Riots in nearly every large American city begining with the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles with the most damaging being in Newark and Detriot where parts of both cities were burned to the ground in 1967 never to be rebuilt, rioting peaked in 1968 following the Assassination of Martin Luther King which engulfed over 100 cities in a single day. Johnson called for more social programs to rebuild the inner cities but backlash to his Vietnam Policy had cost him his great majority in the Congress making any new Great Society programs implausible and Johnson's political capital was mostly spent.
On a personal note, I wasn't born yet so I don't know the exact circumstances in which all this took place, however, reading this era of history I cannot help but notice that the very people whom the Great Society most benefited, college students and impoverished inner-city residents, behaved rather badly during this period and, while do not agree with their sentiment, I do not blame members of Johnson's political who opposition looked at the Great Society programs and looked at the riots/peace protests and said: "you liberals got all of your reforms passed and this is the result." I simply cannot find it in my heart to condone or even understand those who chose to partake in civil unrest during this period as the result was not more liberty and not more economic opportunity but far less of both as the call went out for "Law and Order" in the wake of these activities. It was not the Great Society that failed to alleviate the nation's social problems but the people who failed to behave themselves and in the process ruining the career and reputation of a fine US President.
Okay, back to our story, the 1968 Presidential Election was to begin in an environment of riots and peace protests and with the War in Vietnam accelerated to its' bloodiest level yet with the enormous Tet Offenive undertaken in January of that year. Johnson had been seeking a third term (second elected term) but lost big in the all-important New Hampshire Primary to Sen. Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken critic of the War, prompting him to drop out of the race and announce that he was pulling out of Vietnam.
The 1968 Democratic National Convention was the scene of even more violence following the unexpected assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy Sr. at the hands of Palestinian Nationalist Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy had come out against the War and was challenging the nomination of pro-war Vice President Hubert Humphrey and a contingent developed demanding Kennedy's delegates be given to fellow antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy resulting in protesters outside the convention becoming involved in violent confrontations with police only months after Chicago, where the convention was being held, had been ripped apart by Race Riots Following the Assassination of Martin Luther King, this all was great fodder for Television News organizations but bad publicity for the Democratic Party who nominated Vice President Humphrey. Johnson's last act in office was to sign the Gun Control Act of 1968 outlawing the importation of fully-automatic weapons and the distribution and sale of the Saturday Night Special perhaps in anticipation of the civil unrest that plagued his last few years in office turning into a shootout.
President Lyndon Johnson died on January 22, 1973 at age 64. Historian Polls rank Johnson in the "well-above-average" range normally ranking about fifteenth in the same neighborhood as President William McKinley.
Richard M. Nixon 1969 - 1974, Republican from CaliforniaI have it on reasonably good authority from fully credentialed psychoanalytical practitioners that Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh President of the United States of America was, in fact, to use the term preferred by behavioral health professionals, a complete basket-case. But Nixon also had all the makings of a first-rate head of state being an exceedingly talented diplomat and an able administrator, there appear to be TWO Richard Nixons.
So which one shall we look at first? The man liberal pundit Noam Chomsky called "the last liberal president" who: Created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air Act, created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and put a man on the moon? Or perhaps the man widely toughted as greatest diplomat of the Twentieth Century and who: became the First President to visit Communist China, ended US participation in the Vietnam War and signed the first ever Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Or would you rather hear about Watergate and the illegal bombing of Cambodia? Yup that's what I thought.
Having won the 1968 Presidential Election on a Law and Order platform in the midst of Race Riots and Peace Protests that were tearing the Nation limb from limb Nixon undertook a crime wave in Washington DC breaking more laws than all of his predecessors combined (though the title of Most Corrupt Administration now belongs to Ronald Reagan). Nixon has always had his defenders and the most common line of thought goes that Nixon's only crime was to get caught, that all Presidents had their little bailiwicks and that Nixon's offenses were just par for the course. This is more than a little bit speculative and (though we must admit that Johnson, Eisenhower and Truman all had their kickbacks) the kinds of scandals we see in administrations, even in extreme cases such as Teapot Dome and Black Friday, were examples of Chief Executives who were corruptED whereas Nixon was very much a corruptER. Harding and Grant accepted bribes but Nixon actually PAID bribes. The annals of American Presidential History don't turn up anything like: Nixon's Enemies List, his dirty tricks campaign and certainly not burglary. As much as I would like to give the man benefit of the doubt given Nixon's fine legislative and diplomatic record an examination of the facts simply do not vindicate Nixon's actions in that way and it appears Nixon was unique in the abuses of power and criminal offenses committed under his direction during his administration.
In his First Inaugural Address Nixon set out the noble goal of being remembered as a "peacemaker" so, naturally, Nixon immediately began expanding the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia and Laos, illegally as it turns out but that's not important. However, at the same time, Nixon articulated the Nixon Doctrine to scale down American participation in the conflict through a process of Vietnamization in which phased withdraws of US troops would be contingent upon Vietnamese troops readiness to take their place. This apparently constituted Nixon's Secret Plan to End the War which had been one of his campaign pledges the year before and nobody was buying it especially after Nixon announced a ground invasion of Cambodia in April of 1970 which prompted the Great Student Strike of 1970 shutting down all the major colleges and universities in the Country as well as many high schools in the first two weeks of May of that year.
I don't really care for hippies any more than the next skeptic but I must admit that the Student Strikes actually were quite effective. Perhaps having seen social unrest destroy the Presidency of his predecessor, Nixon announced plans to end the draft (by far the most contentious issue) and eventually signed the Paris Peace Accords ending American participation in the conflict but with the condition that the US could interfere again if North Vietnam broke the accord and undertook another invasion of the South, which they did in 1975 but Congress refused funds to reignite the war, North Vietnam won that war and the US lost there are no two ways around it.
Nixon's economic policy was nearly as controversial as the Cambodian campaign. Government spending on Vietnam and the Great Society had caused inflation to skyrocket forcing Nixon to take the US dollar off the Gold Standard due to a massive depletion of US Gold reserves to foreign speculators. He also instituted a system of Wage and Price Controls to force down inflation a practice that was completely abandoned in the US a few years later in favor of the less draconian use of Monetary Policy to control prices by adjusting interest rates. Nixon also presented a budget to Congress in 1971 which employed deficit financing of fiscal stimulus to drive down unemployment, apparently because everyone had become Keynesian at that point.
By far Nixon's finest achievement was his 1972 Visit to China which greatly improved relations between the US and the world's most populace nation. This prompted the Soviets to seek a better relationship with the US as well and Nixon visited the Kremlin in May of 1972 setting the stage for SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which had been touted as setting goals for Nuclear Arsenal Reductions in both Nations that never came to pass but did set the US and USSR on a path that would lead to the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s.
With so much in the way of domestic and foreign policy success in his first-term, Nixon seemed a shoe-in to be reelected in the 1972 Presidential Election particularly after the Democrats nominated the comparatively inexperienced and, frankly, weak candidate Sen. George McGovern but here is where the story gets crazy because, for some reason, Nixon decided to cheat. For a reason unknown, and perhaps unknowable, on June 17, 1972 five buglers directly tied to Nixon's Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) were arrested as they attempted to illegally break into Democratic Party Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC as well as having attempted to tap telephones in the Democratic party's headquarters.
Subsequent investigation of the five men's ties to the Nixon White House would uncover another of Nixon's bailiwicks known as the White House Plumbers who were tied to the Watergate Break-in through the persons of CIA Agent E Howard Hunt and former FBI Speical Agent G. Gordon Liddy who were both arrested on charges of: conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping. It turned out that Watergate was not Nixon's first black bag operation (gathering information on a political opponent and then making it look like a robbery) and that following the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 which exposed misconduct leading up to American involvement in the Vietnam War the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg, a state department official who had leaked the papers to the New York Times, had been burglarized as well.
Hunt and Liddy were facing serious time and so CREEP went into action raising half a million US dollars to buy the seven men's silence which was transfered by illegal means opening the President up to serious charges of: money laundering, obstructing justice, bribery and suborning perjury, all felonies punishable by imprisonment. In September reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered a laundered check linking Nixon to a secret slush fund controlled by Nixons campaign manager, former Attorney General John Mitchell which tied Mitchell (and therefore Nixon) to the Watergate burglary.
All these facts were known and well publicized on Election Day 1972 when Nixon won reelection by the largest popular vote margin in history over McGovern who won a paltry 37.5% only taking the state of Massachusetts and Washington DC making McGovern's name a byword for "loser" in the popular vernacular for decades to come.
On September 11, 1973 a CIA Backed Military Coup in Chile toppled the democratically elected (but avowedly Marxist) Presidential Administration of Salvador Allende resulting in the Chilean's president's death under highly suspicious circumstances. Perhaps fearing the rise of a second Marxist regime in the hemisphere Nixon backed the Government Junta of Chile led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet who, one year later, would have himself named President of Chile at the same time suspending democratic elections for the next fifteen years, a time in which Pinochet, an admirer of Mussolini, is known to have committed many human rights abuses and governed Chile with great cruelty whereby the Country was crawling with death squads, known as the Caravan of Death, that Pinochet sent out to roundup, torture and murder his political opponents or place them in concentration camps.
Less than one year after the 1972 Landslide Nixon's Vice President Sprio Agnew was forced to resign owing to charges of accepting bribes and embezzlement of state funds during his tenure as Governor of Maryland and Agnew replaced by Rep. Gerald Ford. That same month the OPEC Oil Cartel levied an enormous increase in the price of crude oil to punish the US for taking the side of Israel in the Yom Kippur War prompting the 1973 oil crisis officially bringing to an end almost three decades of consistent and unprecedented economic growth which had been fueled largely by cheep Middle-Eastern Oil Reserves.
On June 25, 1973 a bombshell hit when Senior White House Council John Dean testified before a Senate committee that Nixon had ordered a cover up of the Watergate affair and implicating John Mitchell in influence-pedaling, money-laundering and bribery in securing and distributing funds through CREEP. One month later it was revealed that Nixon had installed a secret taping-system in the White House the resulting tapes from which were subpoenaed by special prosecutor Archibald Cox who Nixon then fired in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre which also resulted in the top two members of the justice department putting in their resignations rather than obey Nixon's order to fire Cox. The Supreme Court would order Nixon to turn over the tapes to Cox's successor in July of 1974 in their landmark ruling in the case of United States v. Nixon in which, citing the Supreme Court's ruling in Marbury v. Madison where the court declared itself to have authority to strike down actions of the Legislative Branch of Government, the Court ruled itself to also have authority over the Executive Branch as well. It seems funny now but there were actually people at the time who thought there was a snowball's chance in hell of the Court deciding the case in some other way. Marbury and Nixon are the two most important cases in American Judicial history in that they grant the Supreme Court the authority to declare legislation and executive orders Unconstitutional, see you learned something today, go out and tell all your friends ... I actually don't agree with the decision in the Nixon case but I won't get into that.
The tapes were discovered to have contained an 18½ minute gap corresponding to three days after the Watergate Burglary corroborating John Dean's testimony though not conclusively as the content of the gap is still the subject of much speculation. On August 5, 1974 the Special Prosecutor's office revealed that one of the tapes contained a conversation in which Nixon conspired to obstruct justice by using the influence of the Presidency to convince the CIA Director Richard Helms to muscle the FBI out of the investigation on fictional National Security grounds. This was probably the least odious activity in the long list of what John Mitchell would describe as White House horrors but it was an impeachable offense and the House Judiciary Committee was already in the process of drawing up Articles of Impeachment when Nixon announced his resignation three days later. On August 9, 1974 at 12:00 PM Nixon bid farewell to the White House giving a odd little speech which ended with the catchy prose: "[a]lways remember others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them and then you destroy yourself."
On September 8, 1974 President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full and absolute pardon and Nixon would, over the next two decades, regain much of his reputation as a fine statesman particularly in the Early 1990s when his advice on Foreign Affairs was frequently sought out by the fledgling Clinton Administration shortly before his death at the age of eighty-one on April 18, 1994. Historian Polls are unkind to Nixon ranking him in the below average to poor range with some polls even ranking him in the worst category, his overall ranking averages out to about thirtieth pretty much tied with President Herbert Hoover, a fellow Californian, Quaker and friend of Nixon's.
Gerald R. Ford 1974 - 1977, Republican from MichiganFar and away the most athletic US President, nevertheless, comedian Chevy Chase was to make a career for himself parodying Ford's frequent slip and fall accidents on Saturday Night Live. Second to his Pardon of Richard Nixon, Ford (who was known to enjoy a cocktail or two in the early afternoon) is chiefly remembered for falling down a flight of stairs leading from Air Force One to the tarmac and losing his driver in a golf match, striking an unfortunate old women atop her head, both on national television.
But there is much more to President Ford's story than a few bumbled photo ops and the unpopular decision to pardon his predecessor to whom he owed his Presidency in spite of the fact that Nixon steadfastly refused to admit any wrongdoing. For President Ford also, almost certainly, authorized the near genocide of the citizens of East Timor at the hands of the Indonesian Army and initiated Operation Condor, a CIA directed program of: brutal oppression, torture and assassination undertaken in South America whereby in excess of 60,000 persons are known to have been killed, often for little more than their political views. Those two little tidbits of history tend to be overlooked with all too much attention going to the "stair-master" scene at the airport and the "gulf-swing from hell" when Ford's Presidency is recounted, in my ever so humble opinion.
Of course, Ford wasn't all bad, he was, in fact, a very moderate and conciliatory figure at a time when passions ran rather high in the US. Ford was: pro-choice on the abortion issue, was a vocal supporter of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution (ERA), supported universal healthcare, granted amnesty to many who had dodged the draft in Vietnam by leaving the country and, most importantly in my opinion, established Special Education in America's Public Schools through passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.
However, it was also Gerald Ford who happened to sit in the Oval Office when North Vietnamese forces broke the Peace Accords eventually capturing South Vietnam and uniting the entire region into a single Marxist country. Lacking support in Congress to fund military endeavors in the region, Ford was forced to oversee a hasty evacuation of US Personnel and Equipment from the region films of which have come to symbolize the humiliation at having to concede defeat in a conflict which American involvement had spanned the better part of two decades.
It would already of been apparent that President Gerald Ford stood little chance of being reelected in the 1976 Presidential Elections but political pundits assure me that Ford's loss to relative newcomer Gov. Jimmy Carter had little to do with: pardons, death-squads, hasty evacuations, lost wars or even slip-and-fall accidents. Rather there was a gaffe by Ford in one of his debates with Gov. Carter in which he claimed that Poland was "independent and autonomous" from the Soviet Union and which he repeated the next day saying "[t]here is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration." Of course he didn't really believe any such thing and was probably reviving an old game from the beginnings of the Cold War where more bellicose anticommunist elements tried to pressure the State Department not to recognize Soviet domination in Eastern Europe (Ronald Reagan gave a speech at the 1964 Republican Convention, for instance, demanding that government of the tiny Island of Taiwan be recognized as being the government of all of China) but the voting populace weren't in on the joke and went to the polls fully convinced that President For "couldn't find his ass with both hands, two hunting dogs and a can of chili" and Jimmy Carter (a political novice) defeated Ford, in a surprisingly close race remembered as the last time a Democratic canidate carried all of the States of the Southern US.
Ford led a very active and profitable retirement (the running joke was that it cost $50,000 to shake Gerald Ford's hand) right up until his death in 2006 at the age of ninety-three. At the 1980 Republican National Convention Ronald Reagan offered Ford the Vice Presidential slot on the ticket but Ford announced he would only accept the nomination with the, frankly, unreasonable and, undoubtedly, unconstitutional stipulation that he be granted equal power and influence with Reagan in the administration. This offer was, needless to say, rejected and former CIA Director George H. W. Bush was selected in his stead.
Historian Polls are about what one would expect in ranking Ford near the lower end of the bellow-average quartile averaging a rank of about twenty-eighth not as good as President Rutherford B. Hayes but ever-so-slightly better than President Zachary Taylor.
Jimmy Carter 1977 - 1981, Democrat from GeorgiaBy far the most scientifically litterate US President, having received training in nuclear engineering during service in the US Navy, Jimmy Carter is also the only world leader I am aware of to have taken a personal interest in the Skeptical Community having been a guest on the The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe Podcast episode 105 - July 25, 2007. So it's a little bit difficult for me to remain objective in evaluating the Presidency of Carter, whom I very much like as a person but whose administration as President is widely viewed as having been a failure. It is far easier to give particular attention the accomplishments of Presidents I personally dislike such as Nixon and Harding in the name of objectivity than it is to trash the Presidency of someone I admire and respect for the sake of something as intangible as fairness.
Although, his post-Presidential philanthropic enterprises were to win him much popularity in the decades following his Presidency, the categorization of Carter's Presidency as a failure is not completely unfair. This may sound a bit rough in consideration of how far I out of my way I went to point out the good qualities of the perniciously corrupt Nixon administration and there is success to be found among Carter's actions as President, most spectacularly in the Camp David Accords and the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty negotiated by Carter bringing an end to the Israeli-Egyptian wars, and Carter's efforts to end the practice which had become rampant in the administrations of his predicessors of using the CIA to harry most of South and Central America to prop up cryto-fascist military dictatorships have largely gone unapplauded, however, Carter's mismanagement of the economy would cause him to have to force the economy into recession to clear up the combination of: inflation, unemployment and shortages resulting from Carter's policy that heretofore economists had assumed was impossible and his weak and ineffective reaction to the Iranian Revolution would lead to the last one-year-two-months-and-eighteen-days of his administration being referred to colloquially as "America Held Hostage".
At first sight Carter would seem an unlikely choice to have become the Democratic Party standard-bearer having had only limited national exposure and having amassed less than sterling liberal credentials in his single term as Governor of Georgia however the experience of the 1972 Presidential Election where a candidate with solid gold liberal credentials had only been able to take the votes of single New England state at a time when his opponent had been implicated in the single worst scandal up to that point in American history led many Democratic Party types to seek a candidate with broader appeal nationally and Carter's Southern roots and self-identification as a Born Again Christian made him the ideal candidate for Democrats who had been hemorrhaging voters in the South and Midwest at an alarming rate at least since the passage of Civil Rights over a decade before (yes it was Civil Rights there was no other reason).
In truth at that time, in 1976 which was long before McMegachures began to blight the landscape, a majority of Americans (who at that time belonged to Catholic and Mainline Protestant denominations) probably didn't fully understand what Carter meant when he would identify himself as being "born-again" other than that it meant that he was very religious and therefore moral making it unlikely that he would be staging Black Bag Operations or toppling democratically elected governments, activities Americans had grown more than a little bit intolerant of and, for all the criticism that Carter has received, I am unaware of the slightest hint of Carter having even attempted anything of that kind. If Americans did understand the origins of Born-Again Christianity in the circus sideshow that was the Tent Revival Movement of the 1920s there is a good chance it would have cost Carter votes, quite frankly.
Its' important to note that Jimmy Carter is not a Creationist nor does he subscribe to a Literal Interpretation of the Holy Bible. However, in contrast to Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. Carter's faith is quite genuine and he was and remains very active in his church communities. Carter spoke very openly about his "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" during the campaign but: generally accepted the doctrine of Separation of Church and State, was moderate on the abortion issue, supported the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, opposed organized prayer in schools (though he made it clear that voluntary prayer should be allowed) and was the first US President to have voiced support for Gay Civil Rights.
In keeping with his kind of folksy, small-town image Carter did much to eliminate the pomp and circumstance that had come to surround the office of the Presidency: selling the Presidential Yacht, walking from the Capital building to the White House to stress the need to conserve gasoline, eliminating much of the wait-staff and cleaning-staff at the White House and generally adopting a far more informal demeanor than had been seen in the White House at least since before the Camelot days of the Kennedy. His first act as President was to declare a full and unconditional amnesty for persons who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
There were many positive initiatives proposed by Congress but Carter's unfamiliarity with the ways of Washington DC led to a rift between Carter's administration and Congress. Few Presidents before or sense Carter have been as bold in using their veto power as he and his instincts were correct in that it was very much high time someone tried to clean up the corrupted "barter system" and "pork barrel" spending that had characterized American Domestic Policy at least since reconstruction but the immediate result was that Congress refused to pass much if any of Carter's own bills making his Presidency less effective and he was widely viewed in Washington DC as having taken upon himself duties traditionally in the purview of Congress.
Like most Americans President Jimmy Carter had a Ne'er Do Well Brother who was to cause Carter and the Democratic Party much embarrassment during Carter's term and make for the only scandal of an otherwise squeaky clean administration. Though Billy Carter's main claim to fame was his failed adult beverage venture known as Billy Beer, the President's brother's relationship with Libyan Dictator Muammar Qaddafi was to lead to Senate hearings known as "Billygate" when Billy registered as a foreign agent of the North African Oil-producer after having accepted a $220,000 loan from Libya. The influence-pedaling charges never led to any judicial action although it does appear that Billy Carter had access to some State Department materials not normally made available to international businessmen and that President Jimmy Carter attempted to use his brother's influence to help Americans held hostage in Iran. This was the first instance that the suffix "-gate" was attached to a Congressional Investigation since Watergate, a tradition that continues to this day.
In January of 1979 the American-installed Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution which replaced the Monarch with Ayatollah Khomeini. The immediate result of this was a Second Energy Crisis which Carter responded to by giving his infamous "malaise" speech promoting conservation of energy and blaming the crisis on America's penchant for self-indulgence stating: "too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption, human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns."
The speech was not well received and many mark the "malaise" speech as the end of Jimmy Carter's political career as, by blaming the energy crisis upon the emerging consumerist-pseudo-yuppie-culture, Carter cost himself the douchebag vote and, needless to say, the 1980 American Presidential Election. Far be it for me to denounce anyone's attempt to stem the tide of douchebaggary which really did contribute to multiple credit crunches in later years, however, the 1979 Oil Crisis did not come about as a result of there being an actual shortage of resources, rather, as we shall see, there were specific economic and political events, unrelated to douchebaggary, which led to the energy market blow-up. Perhaps Carter wasn't really blaming douchebaggary for the Crisis but instead was attempting to "kill-two-birds-with-one-stone" offering a solution to the energy crisis that would both ease the demand for energy and prevent the coming consumer credit crisis which were inevitable so long as douchebaggary remained unchecked, I don't know. His instincts were certainly correct but there is a time and place.
The economy during Carter's administration was notoriously bad with both record inflation and high unemployment which is something they tell you in macroeconomics class isn't supposed to be possible leading to the creation of a new Economics term: Stagflation as measured by the so-called Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment) which reached its' historic high of 21.98% during Carter's Presidency. The oil shortages mostly resulted from foreign policy initiatives undertaken by previous administrations that had pissed off OPEC, the high rates of inflation primarily derived from the rapid increase in Government spending that had accompanied the Great Society and the Vietnam War both of which can similarly be cast off onto other administrations as well. However, the: slow economic growth, high interest rates and high unemployment which characterized the economy of the late 1970s were largely of Carter's own making and, moreover, he did it on purpose. Having been blocked from using wage and price controls by Congress Cater was forced to implement the ideas of Monetarism which had been tested in Chile under Pinochet whereby interest rates are raised to decrease the demand for money in the economy "burning off" inflation causing prices and wages to decrease to manageable levels. Its' not a magic pill however, as that Phillips Curve I linked to early which shows the trade-off between inflation and unemployment works both ways so while disinflation was taking hold unemployment skyrocketed and economic growth was slowed to a crawl. The Prime Rate was nearing 20% as Carter faced reelection in the midst of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
International human rights was the centerpiece of Carter's foreign policy and the results were mixed. Early on he abandoned South Korea ordering a phased withdraw of missiles and men from the region and focused upon the Arab-Israeli Conflict with remarkable success in hamering out the 1978 Camp David Accords bringing peace between Egypt and Israel with the later only giving up the Golan Heights and being forced to recognize the autonomy of the Palestinian_Territories. Others have attempted to make peace in the region and no one has had anything close to the success attained by Carter.
More controversial were the Panama Canal Treaties giving back the Canal to Panama which was under the control of a corrupt military strongman the fear that the burgeoning Cocaine traffic from Columbia threatened to dominate traffic in the Canal didn't seem to play a role in the negotiations but to some extent that is what happened a decade later resulting in the US Invasion of Panama in 1989. Carter put a great deal of effort into the SALT II nuclear nonproliferation agreement but the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan caused Carter to withdraw the treaty as well as to force the US to
boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
The Iranian Revolution which had led to the Energy Crisis in 1979 would prove the biggest headache Carter would face as President. During the revolution fifty-two Americans were taken hostage during a siege of the American Embassy in Iran and they would be held from November 4 1979 until the very end of Carter's Presidency as Carter refused to return the exiled Shah or unfreeze Iranian assets in the United States. A failed attempt at rescuing the hostages called Operation Eagle Claw both further antagonized the militants and added considerably to Carter's unpopularity at home. There seems little doubt that Carter's landslide loss in the 1980 Presidential Election was significantly influenced by the fact that the election took place on the one-year anniversary of the taking of the Hostages who were still imprisoned as voters took to the polls.
Carter led a very active retirement following his loss in 1980 and still does to this day and has been called "the best ex-President this Country ever had" by many an American with his work with Habitat for Humanity promoting voluntarism in the area housing for the underprivileged being particularly subject to praise. Less praise-worthy would appear to be his continued public interest in the Arab-Israeli situation which has opened him up to charges of Antisemitism from both Jewish groups and pundits on the political Right. Historian Polls rank Carter's Presidency in the well-below-average-to-borderline-poor range with an average ranking of twenty-seventh just above President Benjamin Harrison and just below President Chester A. Arthur which is nothing to be proud of I will grant, again however, he has to be considered the greatest of all ex-Presidents.
Ronald Reagan 1981 - 1989, Republican from CaliforniaReagan is another one of those larger-than-life, iconic figures whose Administration is remembered as time of financial prosperity and renewed optimism in the American Way of Life. There appears to be agreement that he personally brought down the entire Soviet Empire all by himself through pure force of will but his administration also left behind record trade and budget deficits transforming America from the largest exporter of products and lender of money into the world's largest importer and debtor nation. As I have mentioned before, the Reagan Administration also holds the record for being the most scandalous administration in History with the jewel in the tiarra being the Iran–Contra Affair in which weapons were covertly sold to America's enemies and the profits used to finance Death Squads in Central America, an act of treachery and cruelty which runs counter to the kindly image of the man which most of us have engraved in our memories.
Reagan's victory in the 1980 Presidential Election actually came as a surprise to many as his extreme Conservative views had long ago been rejected in the 1964 Goldwater Campaign and his economic policy, then derided as Voodoo Economics, bore a striking similarity to the policies that had precipitated the Great Depression with the notable exception that Reagan was vocal supporter of Free Trade.
And yet the former actor's magnificent stage presence and his campaign theme "government is not the solution to our problems government is the problem" appears to have struck a long-established anti-establishment cord that ran through the country propelling him to victory.
The failings of the previous administrations hung densely in the air on election day which marked the one year anniversary of the Iranian Hostage Crisis while interest rates, unemployment, inflation, etc were at historical zeniths. The so-called Reagan Revolution is better described as a counterrevolution, the New Deal/Great Society model of government was seen as broken beyond repair and Reagan wanted to take the nation back to the good old days.
It was during Reagan's inauguration speech that the Iranian Hostages were finally released. Reagan's first act as President was to abolish price controls on domestic oil.
On March 30, 1981 Reagan became the sixth US President to have been assaulted with a firearm while in office when a very disturbed young man John Warnock Hinckley, Jr. ambushed the Presidential entourage outside the Washington Hilton Hotel and a stray bullet bounced off the bullet-proof Presidential limousine peircing the Presidential lung causing it to collapse. Reagan was to survive the assassination attempt, however, the injuries he received were actually worse than the injuries which would take the lives of Presidents Garfield and McKinley whose respective attacks took place before modern emergency medical facilities and antiseptic surgical techniques.
Up to that point concerns about Reagan's hands-off management style and apparent disinterest in certain important affairs of state had been widely expressed in the media. Though widely hailed as "The Great Communicator" Reagan: often appeared befuddled in news conferences, was known to fall asleep during cabinet meetings, was often forgetful and generally showed signs of being in the early stages of the Alzheimer's Disease with which he would be diagnosed officially only five years after leaving office. Following the assassination attempt, however, a wave of national sympathy forced the press to go comparatively easy on Reagan and many of his "senior moments" went unreported.
Even more seriously injured in the attack was Reagan's Press Secretary James Brady who received a gunshot wound to the head that would permanently disable him inspiring passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993 provisions of which would make it more difficult for the mentally ill to acquire firearms. The bill was passed over the vocal opposition of mentally ill Americans ... Sorry I mean Republicans, who interpreted the Second Amendment to the US Constitution to guarantee the rights of citizens to keep and carry firearms without regard to their state of mental health. Supporters of the bill included the former First Lady Nancy Reagan.
Reagan's next big move as President came in August when he busted the Air Traffic Controllers Union, firing over 11,000 striking members. A lack of experienced Air Traffic Controllers combined with the continued Airline Deregulation begun under his predecessor made for an unusually high insidence of Major Commerical Airline Disasters during Reagan's term in office which hitherto and hithersince were generally considered comparatively rare.
In August of 1981 Congress passed Reagan's Economic Recovery Tax Act significantly lowering Income Tax Rates particularly in the wealthiest of Taxpayers. This act is widely remembered as having spurred the economic growth for which Reagan's Administration is so widely remember and Reagan is idolized as a great tax-cutter, however, concerns over the record level of Deficit Spending and an impending crisis in funding Social Security forced Reagan and Congress to Raise Taxes in 1982, statistically the overwhelming majority of Americans actually had their Income Taxes increased while Reagan was President.
Distressing to many Americans, including many devoted Christians and Republicans, was Reagan's association with less-than-reputable televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to whom Reagan appears to have believed he owed his victory in the 1980 Presidential election. Poll after poll showed that the social issues promoted by organizations such as the Moral Majority were of minimal concern to a sizable majority of voters but Reagan, who seems to have been more superstitious than religious personally, appears to have taken the 1980 Election as a referendum on the Moral Majority's social agenda: declaring 1983 the "Year of the Bible", pursuing the War on Drugs with renewed vigor, taking every opportunity to limit access to abortion and contraception, pushing for the return of prayer in public schools and constantly invoking God and prayer in his speeches.
Of particular concern to many was the eschatalogical rhetoric which often accompanied the peculiar brand of Christianity who had attached themselves to Reagan's Presidency indicating that the Battle of Armageddon was not only eminent but desirable. The timing of statements to that effect by persons close to the President and even, occasionally, the President himself was unfortunate in that it coincided with An Escalation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and an unprecedented peacetime Military Buildup and the breakdown of Nuclear Nonproliferation Negotiations.
Of course, I wouldn't be writing this if Reagan actually had destroyed the World as many seemed to think that he was bound to and, contrary to popular belief, the Military Buildup undertaken by Reagan was primarily focused upon conventional warfare. There was only a slight increase in America's Nuclear Stockpiles during Reagan's term though stockpiles in the USSR nearly doubled during that same time-period far surpassing the volume of Nuclear Arms held by the United States.
This new war machine was first tested by invading the tiny Island of Grenada to drive out a Communist Government that had taken hold there. Though a lopsided contest from the first to say the least Americans, still reeling from the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, celebrated the victory in Grenada as if it were Russia itself who had fallen to US Imperialist Aggression which must have been quite perplexing to the rest of the World.
Hitherto US policy toward the Soviet Union had rested on the principle of Containment first articulated by President Harry Truman whereby military action was only threatened if Communist nations sought to expand their empire, pretty much leaving the existing Communist Bloc alone. This actually hadn't worked very well as: China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc had all fallen to Communism despite the US' best efforts to prevent such and Afghanistan was now on the verge of being absorbed into the Soviet Bloc which would have given Russia a long sought after warm-water-port. The Reagan Doctrine set a new goal, instead of merely swatting the occasional mosquito (which usually flew away unharmed) Reagan pledged to "clear the swamp" pledging: "the forward march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history".
Reagan was successful in securing funding for his defense buildup but was unable to convince Congress to fund a proposed missile shield known derisively as "Star Wars" which scientists said would never work and which Foreign Relations Experts said that even if it did work it would only escalate the Arms Race further. Though it was never developed fear that the US might be able to launch a Nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without fear of reciprocity eventually does seem to have brought the Soviets to the bargaining table during Reagan's second term.
In 1984 Reagan won the Presidential Election with the largest margin of victory in terms of Electoral Votes in history. His opponent, Former Vice President Walter Mondale took only his home State of Minnesota garnering three less electoral votes than Sen. George McGovern had in the 1972 Election, although Mondale did, in fact, take a larger percentage of the Popular Vote.
The beginning of Reagan's second term coincided with the rise to power of reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union who would institute policies of Glasnost and Perestroika or "openness" in stark contrast to the Stalinist hardliners that preceded him. This was the beginning of the End of the Cold War as it was clear that the USSR could no longer compete financially with the US in terms of military budgets due to a drop in the price of oil which had caused the Soviet economy to become stagnant and eventually collapse.
Summit conferences between the two leaders resulted in series of Nuclear Nonproliferation agreements and, to the surprise of many, shortly after Reagan left office, the Soviet Union pulled out of Eastern Europe and two years after that collapsed entirely.
The only overt military venture undertaken in Reagan's second term was a single Bombing Raid of Libya in 1986 in response that nation's sponsorship of terrorism. Covert operations undertaken by the President, however, were to have devastating consequences for his legacy as a large part of his second term would be dominated by the Iran-Contra Affair one of the most explosive scandals in American Presidential History.
In 1982 and again in 1984 the Congress had attached riders to the Military Budget know as the Boland Amendment prohibiting the President from providing military or financial assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras, a counterrevolutionary outfit attempting to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. This act of Congress may not have, in fact, been Constitutional owing to the President's position as Commander in Chief ... Not important, violation of that particular rider to a couple of Defense Appropriations bills is a minor part of the scandal that would erupt.
During negotiations for the release of several hostages held in Iran the Reagan Administration agreed to covertly sell arms to that nation's government and middlemen used in the process grossly overcharged the Iranian's for said weapons. When accused of sale of arms to Iran Reagan was indignant stating: "In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories of arms for hostages and alleged ransom payments, we did not, repeat did not,trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we."
Well actually, yes he did, hostages were freed but new hostages were quickly rounded up to take their place and the Iranians now had sparkley new machines guns and missiles with which to gather up even more hostages. While investigating the, clearly illegal, sale of arms to Iran the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered the fact that said profits were diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras in violation of the aforementioned Boland Amendment.
During testimony before the Senate Reagan pulled the off a routine of "I'm an old man and I can't remember things too well any more," which was quite plausible as Reagan was clearly showing signs of some sort of neurological deterioration, as evidenced by the perplexing statement he made when he finally came clean "[a] few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages - my heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."
There was the usual routine of suppression of documents which continues to this day in the case and it is more than clear that conspirators had been embezzling from the operation for which there was absolutely no oversight. At one point Lt. Col. Oliver North was convicted of Obstruction of Justice and Destruction of Evidence, and given a small fine and some community service but the vast bulk of conspirators got off Scott-Free and even North's conviction was overturned on a technicality, apparently some of the evidence used against North was extracted under a promise of immunity which wasn't fully on the up and up.
Reagan was already seventy-seven years old when he left office in 1989 with the highest approval rating of any exiting President (64%). Though his Administration is still remembered as a time of financial prosperity in America this was largely cosmetic as evidenced by the Stock Market Crash known as Black Monday (1987) and the quadrupling of the National Debt that occurred during his time in office. Reagan also mishandled many reciprocal trade agreements causing the US to run an enormous Trade Deficit with the Pacific Rim putting many American manufacturers out of business as profits from the sale of consumer goods to Americans were quickly used by her international trade competitors to buy up American manufacturing resources setting into a motion an overall decline in American Industrial Output which continues to this day.
In his farewell address Reagan expressed regret over the budget and trade deficits run up during his two terms in office but placed the blame upon Congress and the Media. Reagan died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three following a very public battle with Alzheimer's Disease with much public mourning and fanfare (though not from Christopher Hitchens).
Historian Polls are quite mixed on Regan's Presidency ranking him as high as Sixth to as low as low as twenty-forth with the most recent polls averaging a ranking of about eighteenth in fairly close proximity to President Grover Cleveland.
George H.W. Bush1989 - 1993, Republican from TexasGeorge H.W. Bush was the President who would oversee the end of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, however, his administration has a tendency to be overlooked both by historians and contemporary political sources. In stark contrast to Reagan before him and Clinton after his term in office was largely free of scandal, he was an able administrator, a tough no-nonsense diplomat and a successful military commander, and yet our image of him, perhaps due to his unusual syntax and nasally voice, is that of a wimp who ruined the economy.
During the 1988 Presidential Campaign George Bush and his running mate Dan Quayle ran behind his Democratic opponent Gov. Michael Dukakis throughout the early polling but managed to stage a remarkable comeback waging a rather nasty campaign centering around a provocative attack ad exploiting the case of a Maryland women who had been raped an murdered by convicted murderer Willie Horton while out of prison as part of a furlough program that Dukakis had authorized as Massachusetts Governor.
In truth, many of Dukakis' positions were too center left for most American's to swallow but Bush's pledge at the 1988 Republican National Convention: "Read my lips -- No! New! Taxes!" appears to have been the most memorable moment of the contest and would come back to haunt him four years later due to his passage of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. Bush Sr. was a conservative but he was not a hardliner.
Bush's single term was quite eventful beginning with the Dissolution of the Soviet Union beginning with the first free elections in Poland in June of 1989 and which has come to be symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that same year. Also in 1989 Bush undertook an Invasion of Panama and would capture their nominal-President Col. Manuel Noriega who would be sentenced to forty years in prison on drug trafficking charges in 1992.
In August of 1990 Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich Emirate of Kuwait, a British Protectorate, prompting President Bush to initiate the First Gulf War the fighting of which took place from about Jan. 17 to April 3, 1991. Due to pressure from international allies the Bush administration decided to stop short of a full-scale invasion of Iraq allowing the UN's UNSCOM commission undertake the disarming of Iraq with the coperation of Saddam Hussein who was allowed to remain in power, for now.
Bush was highly criticized during the 1992 Presidential Campaign for focusing too much energy on foreign policy and neglecting domestic affairs, however, there was a decent amount of legislation passed during Bush's term including significant addendum to the Clean Air Act and, by Bush's own initiative, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Republicans continue to blame Bush's loss in the 1992 Election on the presence of third party candidate Ross Perot, a colorful Texas businessman who spent many millions of his own savings on a platform of Deficit Reduction and isolationism.
This may or may not be true as it is difficult to know how much of the roughly 20% of the vote Perot won would have gone to Bush and the GOP did little to lure voters away from Perot, who was pro-choice and generally moderate on other social issues, putting on a virtual tent revival at the 1992 Republican National Convention which featured prime-time speeches from ultra-right-wing Journalist Pat Buchanan and televangelist Pat Robertson propping up Platform virtually promising a second Bush administration was to be a Fundamentalist Christian Theocracy.
Bush was quite magnanimous and humble in about leaving office in 1993 when compared to his successors and has generally been less active than most former Presidents perhaps not wishing to disrupt the political rise (and fall) of George W. Bush. In spite of his astounding diplomatic successes, Historian Polls rank the Senior George Bush squarely in the below-average category with an overall ranking of number twenty-two, between Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Martin Van Buren.
Bill Clinton 1993 - 2001, Democrat from ArkansasIt may still be a bit early in the game to objectively judge the overall effectiveness of the Clinton Administration as most sources are forced to rely on popular media reports from the era when the institution of journalism was notoriously lax about fact-checking, reliable sources, etc. Former President Clinton is a highly gifted administrator and a very skilled politician, however, he was unable to subordinate his personal interests to the responsibilities of the great office he held so in spite of a a wide array of useful measure for which he can be given credit his legacy will always remain mixed at best.
This is not, of course, entirely President Clinton's fault as fully half of his time in office was dominated by a feud with House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, having never received a single vote outside of his suburban Atalanta Congressional District, established himself as virtual Viceroy of the Realm resulting in a battle of wills between himself and Clinton which Clinton did not lose. It would be Gingrich who would be forced to resign in disgrace, but, like all feuds among the over-mighty going all the way back to King Edward the Confessor vs Earl Godwin, the real losers coming out of the feud were the American people who would suffer a Shutdown of the Federal Government and a failed Impeachment Attempt ... Oh the drama!
Another rather unhelpful individual in analyzing the Clinton Presidency is publishing magnet Richard Scaife whose use of publications such as the The American Spectator
to promulgate nonsense such as the Clinton Body Count confound any attempt to do an objective or balancing accounting of Clinton's presidency. While a lot of the ill-reports about President Clinton, including the suggestion that he was involved in the death of Vince Foster, were just, quite simply made up, questions still remain in regards to Chinagate and other matters for which documents are being withheld. Based on whom is withholding said documents I have a strong suspicion what they might say ... Neither here nor there, a pox on both their houses.
Clinton had won the 1992 Presidential Campaign over incumbent George H.W. Bush and self-financed Independent Canidate H. Ross Perot promising: a tax cut for the middle class, universal healthcare and affordable college or vocational training for all Americans. However, the economy had experienced slow growth in the demobilization which had followed the First Gulf War and it was agreed that the enormous Federal Budget Deficit was the primary stumbling block to economic recovery forcing Clinton to go back on his pledge drafting the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1993 which increased taxes slightly but to nowhere near pre-1983 levels as some had prophesied that he would.
The Clinton Health Care Plan was a disaster and would be defeated by the Senate in early 1994 expending much of Clinton's political capital and contributing to the landslide victory in the 1994 Congressional elections that would be called the Republican Revolution. However, Clinton did pass the Family and Medical Leave Act making it illegal to fire someone who was required to take an unpaid leave of absence from work due to pregnancy or to care for a sick relative, which had been vetoed by his predecessor and managed to aquire a partial lifting of the ban on homosexuals in the military known as "Don't ask, don't tell".
Clinton also submitted the North American Free Trade Agreement to the US Senate which had been completely negotiated by the George H.W. Bush administration and signed the Brady Bill restricting the sale of handguns to lunatics.
Scandals appeared in his first term including Travelgate where White House Travel Office employees were fired when it turned out the director, who would be acquitted of embezzlement charges, was mixing Travel Office funds with his own funds in his private bank account and Filegate in which First Lady Hillary Clinton was accused of having been granted improper access to FBI files for the purpose of gathering information to be used for political purposes. In neither case was there substantive evidence of wrongdoing but both cases smell a bit fishy and continue to be used against the Clintons today by their political opponents.
In 1994 Republicans won sweeping majorities in both the House and Senate forestalling any more of Clinton's domestic policy agenda from being passed for most of the rest of his term particularly after Democratic Senators Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell switched parties to become Republicans after the election but before the 104th Congress convened. The new House Speaker Newt Gingrich touted something he called the Contract with America which was an ambitious set of administrative, judicial and even Constitutional reforms, mainly benefiting Republicans that Gingrich pledged to pass during the 104th Congress.
In truth few voters could recall ever hearing about the "Contract" prior to the election and some items included in the document, such as the Congressional Accountability Act, had actually been sandbagged by Republicans when they were in the minority. However, the Clinton Administration had gotten off to rather a slow start and America was glad to see some legislation actually being passed so for a little while Gingrich's reputation for corruption and unscrupulousness appears to have been overlooked as Gingrich and his Freshman Class of Congressional Republicans got straight to work passing most of the Contract in record time.
Speaker Gingrich is a bit of an odd duck, he has a PhD in history and considers himself an intellectual but can always be counted on to take the most short-sighted and reactionary position on any issue laid before him and tends to rely on his personal emotional responses rather than facts when making decisions.
This political shortsightedness, lack of emotional restraint and neglectfulness of details was to cost Gingrich, who had never campaigned in a national election, dearly as he declared war on the President of the United States, a seasoned political veteran. Gingrich's philosophical viewpoint, if any, is hard to pin down but he appears to be something of a neo-Luddite aligning himself with futurist Alvin Toffler most famous for his 1970 book Future Shock which warned of a grim future where machines and people become indistinguishable should advances in technology remain unchecked.
Gingrich also set out to undo President Johnson's Great Society programs denouncing: Public Broadcasting, disability insurance and even Medicare with great vitriol as he took his message to the media.
The greatest symbol of the Luddite and reactionary nature of the so-called Republican Revolution was the use of the antiquated AM Radio band to get their message across. Shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage took to the airwaves trumpeting the Republican Revolution and inspiring their listeners to harangue their elected officials demanding fewer: freedoms and opportunities in the name of freedom and opportunity. It was a masterwork of Machiavellianism as the ideal of the free-thinking rebel was turned upon itself creating the oxymoronical mythological being "The Rebel Conservative."
It was complete and utter NONSENSE. It was also, as even the most strident Republican today would have to admit, a complete failure.
It is unusual in to go into this kind of detail over the petty infighting that occupied the Washington establishment during the 1990s in an historical overview of a US President, however, it was an article on Troopergate which led to the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit that would culminate in Clinton's Impeachment Trial on perjury charges for denying that he got a rimjob from Monica Lewinsky who was a student intern given access to the inner-circle of the White House due to the Government Shutdown initiated by Newt Gingrich's feud with Bill Clinton. So it's actually all interconnected.
In 1996 Clinton was reelected, defeating Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole in an election that would not be without controversy. The details are a little sketchy but there is evidence of the Democratic National Committee receiving illegal campaign contributions from agents working on behalf of the People's Republic of China and the resulting Justice Department action resulted in twenty-two fraud convictions and many others would leave the country or refuse to testify.
When secrets would turn up missing from Los Alamos National Laboratory attempts were made, most prominantly by Sen. James Inhofe, to link the missing secrets to the illegal campaign contributions but neither Congress nor the Justice Department suggested any such link. The Chinese Government flatly denies that they attempted to influence the 1996 Elections in any way, however, Clinton's decision to grant China Most Favored Nation Trading Status had been highly criticized owing to China's shoddy human rights record and remains a very sensitive both in terms of its economic impact and in terms of National Security.
Enter Special Prosecutor Ken Starr who had been brought in to conduct a, frankly politically motivated, investigation of the so-called Whitewater Controversy linking President Clinton and His Wife to the failure of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. When Starr was brought in the case had been closed both by the Senate Banking Committee and the FBI but there were serious allegations being floated about by a man named David Hale, a convicted swindler, that Clinton had pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Madison Guaranty, a charge that Ken Starr's own report would find insufficient evidence substantiate but which would lead Starr to expand his investigation to include the Paula Jones Lawsuit, Filegate, Travelgate, etc which would lead a White House employee named Linda Tripp to turn over tape recordings that she had made of phone conversations with Monika Lewinski in which Lewinski detailed sexual acts that she had performed on the President contrary to statements that Clinton had made in a deposition during the Clinton V Jones civil suit.
By the time the Starr Report was released in September 1998, the Paula Jones Civil Suit had already been dismissed for lack of evidence but there was still a perjury case to be made. The Report is memorable for it's passing on little tidbits such as a cigar being used as a sex-prop and Lewinsky's testimony to have engaged in "oral-anal contact." Like many Americans, prior to the Starr report had no idea that anyone enjoyed doing that second gratuitous inclusion in the Report, I was quite happy not knowing and, frankly, I don't know that I will ever find it in my heart to forgive: President Clinton, Monika Lewinsky and in particular Ken Starr for depriving me of my blissful ignorance on that account.
On December 19, 1998 the US House of Representatives voted to Impeach President Clinton on the grounds of perjury to a grand jury by a vote 228 to 206 but and on the grounds of obstruction of justice by a vote of 221 to 212. A trial then took place in the US Senate where a two-thirds "supermajority" was required to convict Clinton and remove him from office but both counts were voted down by 55 to 45 for the Perjury Charge and 50 to 50 for the obstruction Charge.
Allegations of marital infidelity which he had apparently been untruthful about in Divorce Court Proceedings caused Newt Gingrich to resign from Congress just before the Impeachment hearings were to begin. Clinton had won the battle of wills but it should have been no contest as Gingrich really wasn't in the same class as Clinton either intellectually or politically and ultimately Bill Clinton was the person Americans had voted into office.
Clinton's last two years in office were primarily consumed with the Kosovo-Albanian Conflict in seeming fulfillment of the 1997 comedy Wag the Dog about a President who invades Albania to distract attention from a sexual-abuse allegation, in the film Albania was chosen at random because it appeared first alphabetically. In 2000 Clinton's Justice Department was forced to interfere in the Elián González Child Custody Case who had survived a boat wreck that had killed his mother who was escaping Cuba to come to the US (the Carter Administration issued an executive order that anyone from Cuba who made it to US shores would be automatically granted asylum) but whose father remained in Cuba, Clinton sided with the boy's father and the child was returned to Cuba over the loud objections of talk-radio and the Cuban Community in Florida.
Clinton would leave office with a 65% job approval rating and has led as active and controversial a life in his post-Presidency as he did on the job. In 2008 his wife Hilary was the early favorite to win the Democratic nomination for President but she was ultimately defeated by relative political novice Sen. Barack Obama in a racially charged campaign which would inflict even more damage upon the former-Presidents already bruised reputation.
Historian Polls generally rank Clinton's Presidency in the average-range with an overall ranking of about seventeenth higher than President Ronald Reagan but lower than President William McKinley. It must be stressed, however, that at this point historians only have popular media reports to go on and a systematic evaluation of Clinton's presidency using source documents is yet to have been undertaken as of this posting.
George W. Bush 2001 - 2009, Republican from TexasAs with Clinton before him, it is probably a bit too soon to properly evaluate the Presidency of George W. Bush. As of this posting his Presidency is still considered to have been a disaster from which a long list of failings can be extracted, including but not limited to: Enron, 9/11, Space Shuttle Columbia, Adding $4 Trillion to the National Debt, Promoting Intelligent Design, the Valerie Plame Leak, the Voter Suppression Scandal, the U.S. Attorneys Firing Scandal, Hurricane Katrina, the Failure to Capture bin Laden, pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, his attempt to privatize Social Security, the Housing Market Explosion, the Bank Bailout and the Invasion of Iraq.
I know, it looks like a lot when you just sort of list them off that way but the younger George Bush was successful in getting much of his agenda passed including: the USA PATRIOT Act, tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, No_Child Left Behind, Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, the Department of Homeland Security, Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, , Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and Medicare Part D. There are items listed as successes that I don't necessarily agree with and there may be items listed as failure that you may not agree with but lists of initiatives and whether or not they can be considered failed or successful is bound to be speculative less than two years after his leaving office.
Bush the Younger did not come into office under happy circumstances. Polling in the 2000 Presidential Election had been unusually tight and his Democratic opponent Vice President Al Gore had actually out-polled Bush in the Popular Vote but lost the Electoral Collage after a nasty and contentious Florida Ballot Recount Ordeal. As I said in the segment on the Elder George Bush, W.'s father's administrative and foreign policy successes had largely gone unappreciated by a fickle American Public, many of whom, perhaps even a majority, now viewed the Younger George Bush's Presidency as illegitimate and he had also walked in at the beginning of a recession not of his making as a result of the bursting of the Dot-com bubble.
Bush's first major initiative as President was the Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 which intended to stimulate the economy through tax cuts that are set to expire January 1, 2011 if not made permanent by an act of Congress before then. Bush famously "pulled a McGovern" making the tax cuts retroactive sending nearly every taxpayer in America $300+ checks on two occasions often irregardless of if their tax burden for the previous filing season was truly lowered by that amount or, sometimes, at all. When recessionary pressures continued in spite of the tax cuts Bush would pass an additional round of cuts in 2003.
As a devout Christian one of Bush's favorite endvors was creation of the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives which funneled Federal funds to religious charities and community organizations. Needless to say, this action was not without its' critics and myself being one of the most vocal of those. Granting that the Establishment Clause does not prohibit outright the granting of funds to religious organizations provided that they are used to to fulfill a strictly secular objective, one cannot see how playing favorites with charities receiving Federal moneys based on their spiritual outlook does not amount to the Government promoting religion. The office is still in use today and there is little I can do about it but I cannot help thinking that if a secular charity were to be denied funds it would be the makings of a landmark legal case.
Bush's religious perspective was also at the forefront of the Global Gag Rule blocking federal aid to foreign groups that offered counseling or any other assistance to women in obtaining abortions and in 2003 he would pass a Ban on Partial-Birth Abortions. He also supported a Justice Department lawsuit to overturn Oregon's Death with Dignity Act which legalized doctor assisted suicide and euthanasia and endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment defining marriage as only valid between one man and one women.
Many of these ultra-conservative policies were unpopular and unemployment was on the rise. Also Bush's less than elegant speaking style and slightly goofy demeanor was the subject of much ridicule and even scorn, he looked like a sitting duck in the 2002 Midterm Congressional Elections but then 9/11 happened and it changed everything.
Having spent far too much time going out and debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories, which I don't recommend others do (once you find out about the Lizard People its' pretty much all downhill from there) I consider myself reasonably familiar with the events of 9/11 but I will not recount them here except to say that following 9/11 George Bush appeared to have found his stride. Bush became bolder and more energetic and on October 7, 2001 Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom undertaking a Full-Scale Invasion of Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden who was known to be behind the attacks.
The action in Afghanistan was universally popular and Bush's quick and decisive action following the 9/11 attacks was to give him a boost in popularity the likes of which no one would have imagined only months before when "George Bush is an Idiot" was pretty much accepted as an established truth. As for his being an "idiot," based on his SAT Scores his IQ is probably in the mid 120s which is well above the average of 100 overall and right about average for someone who has finished college.
Bush campaigned aggressively for Republican candidates in the 2002 Midterm Congressional elections winning small but unexpected majorities in both the Senate and House races. And, of course, when Republicans win a majority that can only mean one thing ... More War.
President Bush had been claiming throughout 2002 that Iraqi President Saddam Husein was in violation of UN Sanctions which had been placed upon him following the first Gulf War prohibiting him from possessing or manufacturing Weapons of Mass Destruction and that there was a connection between Iraq and the Al-Qaeda Terror Network who were responsible for 9/11. Late in the year UN Inspections were undertaken and no such weapons were found and Iraq was declared to be in full compliance with UN Resolutions but on March 20, 2003 the United States began a full-scale invasion of Iraq.
As with the first Gulf War, the initial goal of overthrowing the Husein regime was relatively easy causing Bush to give his bombastic Mission Accomplished Speech on May 1, 2003. But following the invasion sectarian violence broke out between Sunni and Shia and general attacks on US troops broke out making several months in 2003/04 as bloody or bloodier than the original invasion had been. In December Saddam Hussein was captured and he would be tried and hanged two years later.
In April of 2004 reports hit the press of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib Military Prison in Iraq complete with disturbing photographs. This was not the torture which would become such an emotional issue during Bush's second term such as the Waterboarding conducted at Guantanamo Bay, rather the photos bear a striking resemblance to some of the most extreme Fraternity Hazing that I have heard stories of but wouldn't know about because I wasn't cool enough to rush a frat in college.
Going into the 2004 Presidential Elections Bush had already conceded there to be no WMD in Iraq and the al-Quida connection had pretty much been debunked as well. Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry was a decorated hero of the Vietnam War in contrast there was much speculation that Bush may have deserted the Air National Guard and he had already walked over Sen. John McCain, a Congressional Metal of Honor winner to win the GOP nomination in the 2000 GOP Primaries.
Nevertheless, Bush won the election taking more that 50% of the vote meaning those who thought his first term was illegitimate were on less firm ground now. Exit polls from the 2004 campaign revealed that 50% of those who voted Republican believed that WMD had actually been found in Iraq and that Saddam Husein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
To be fair, however, exit polls following the 2008 campaign found Democratic voters equally ill-informed on other issues. It is agreed that the ad campaign sponsored by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth calling into question Sen. Kerry's war record were fabricated as the individuals making the statements were not in a position to have any first-hand knowledge of the events they described.
Bush's second term in office has universally been categorized as a disaster. 2005 proved a volatile year and even the weather seemed to hate the Republicans. In addition to being unsuccessful in his attempt to privatize Social Security and to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the slow response by FEMA to Hurricane Katrina was widely blamed on FEMA Dirctor Michael Brown, Bush's appointee and someone whose qualifications and work experience clearly weren't up to the job of managing such a potentially disaster-prone department.
In the 2006 Midterm Elections Democrats won small majorities in both Houses of Congress following allegations that the House leadership had helped to cover up Rep. Mark Foley's unrepentant sexual harassment of Congressional Pageboys. Bush was quickly forced to accept the resignation of his controversial Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who he had steadfastly defended as the Iraq War had gone sour saying "I'm the decider."
In 2006 Bush vetoed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act which would have authorized Federal funding for the creation of new stem cell lines for medical research. Bush also promoted the teaching of Intelligent Design in Public Schools denied that Global Warming was manmade but nearly doubled the budget of the National Science Foundation and took a very personal interest in Space Exploration creating an ambitious Vision for Space Exploration which would have created a moon base and financed a manned mission to Mars.
Bush's last two years in office were spent in a deep recession and Bush faced several Congressional inquiries most notably in the Attorney Firing Scandel where US attorneys were apparently fired for political reasons and often to be replaced with woefully under-qualified graduates of Pat Roberson's Regent University School of Law. Bush would leave office in January 2009 with the lowest job approval rating on record (21%).
It is too soon to judge overall, however, Bush's economic policies never really pulled the entire nation out of Recession and in his last year in office began the the Worst Financial Crisis since the Great Depression making it unlikely that his time in office will be remembered well in terms of financial prosperity. Bush's aggressive foreign policy, and in particular the Iraq War where there were famously "no Weapons of Mass Destruction" may still be vindicated should there be another 9/11 size attack on US soil during the term of his successor. At this point I think that short of another 9/11 it is unlikely that Bush's Foreign Policy will be viewed as successful anytime soon, history shows that leaving office with two unresolved conflicts leaves a rather messy stain on one's legacy unless you died in office.
George W. Bush is not the drooling moron Michael Moore makes him out to be nor the evil monster Alex Jones portrays him as rather, in the words of President Herbert Hoover when speaking of President Warren G. Harding: "[h]e was not a man with either the experience or the intellectual quality that the position needed."
To date Historian Polls have been unkind to Bush the Younger rating him firmly in the "failure" category with an average ranking of thirtieth tied with President Jimmy Carter.
Barack Obama 2009 - Present, Democrat from IllinoisAt this posting Barack Obama has only held the office of President of the United States for eighteen months so it is, of course, far too early to assess the overall effectiveness of his Administration. Also, as of this posting President Obama has a 27% job approval rating and in his short time in office has already added an astounding $2 trillion to the national debt ... So its' not looking pretty from where I stand.
When then Senator Obama announced his candidacy for the Nation's Highest Office on February 10, 2007 he had been a US Senator for Illinois for barely two years having experience only in the Illinois State Senate prior to that and his defeat of Former Ambassador Alan Keyes, a fringe third party supporter hardly impressed anyone.
Sen. Obama did manage to impress a lot of people, however, as his Campaign got underway and he would manage to put down two seasoned political veterans, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination and Sen. John McCain for the US Presidency, in the 2008 Presidential Campaign, perhaps the longest Campaign season on record with the Primary season beginning almost a year ahead of schedule. During the Campaign Obama had been outspoken against: the Iraq War and the North American Free Trade Agreement, having been forced to settle for center-right "New Democrats" as canidates in previous elections many Liberal-Democrats got behind Obama propelling him to victory in the the Iowa Caucus and South Carolina primaries. Obama was on a roll, coming out on top in the massive one day delegate-a-thon known as Super Tuesday. The Clinton Campaign had not planned for continuing the Primary Campaign beyond Super Tuesday and was thus ill-prepared going into the later stages of the race having not set up organizations in States with Primaries scheduled later than Super-Tuesday.
The nomination remained in doubt until Early June and ultimately Obama would owe his nomination to a tactical error on the part of the State Legislatures of Michigan and Florida respectively who had moved up their Primary dates to before the South Carolina Primary in violation of Democratic Party rules thus invalidating their results. Obama's name did not appear on the Michigan ballot and Clinton won Florida handily so the Obama campaign, naturally, insisted that the delegates from those states not be seated but ultimately a compromise was reached whereby the delegations of each offending state were reduced by half which still gave Obama enough delegates to win the nomination but would not cost him those two large and important States in the Primary.
With an unpopular President of the opposition party still in office and in the midst of a Financial Crisis the likes of which had not been seen since the Great Depression winning the Democratic Nomination was tantamount to winning the 2008 Election. There was great optimism that the young, energetic and charismatic Sen. Obama was just the man to put the Nation back on track toward economic and political stability.
Nevertheless Obama's campaign was nearly derailed late in the Primary Season when YouTube videos came to light of the pastor of his Church, Jeremiah Wright making anti-American and Antisemitic statements, rather loudly for the taste of us white folks, from his pulpit. Obama initially was reluctant to disown the controversial pastor choosing instead to take the opportunity to engage the American Public in a "Thoughtful Discussion of Race in America" explaining that while he did not agree with Wright's comments, calling them "a profoundly distorted view of this country," he understood that Wright's generation of African-Americans grew up in an environment that cultured such extremist views and that he could "no more disown him than I can disown the black community." Obama's ethnic background is more accurately described as multiracial, however he identifies himself as black and, it seems unlikely that he would ever disown African-American culture, however, he wasted no time in disowning Jeremiah Wright following a series of public speaking engagements in which Wright praised the work of Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan and accused the US Government of "inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color".
In American Political Culture persons are generally not taken to task for statements made in ignorance that they have since retracted unconditionally unless such statements are part of a broader pattern of faulty judgment or, more often, dishonesty. American voters can be pragmatic at times and the Jeremiah Wright Controversy does not appear to have affected the outcome of the election as Obama's opponent in the General Election, Sen. John McCain is known to have adamantly refused to allow his supporters to run clips of Wright's sermons to discredit the Democratic Nominee, something to remember about McCain whose loss in the 2008 Presidential Election should take nothing away from his background or his character but seems to have.
Obama's choice of running mates, Sen. Joseph Biden perplexed a great many people, though six terms in the US Senate made him one of the more experienced members of the pool Biden had a reputation for drama and held positions most Liberal-Democrats found offensive. Biden had been an opponent of Obama early in the Democratic Nomination contests dropping out after the Iowa caucus. Biden's statement that Obama was the "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" had been viewed by many as racially insensitive and was undoubtedly the inspiration for the spoof website www.BlackPeopleLoveUs.com. Personally I understand Obama's decision to choose Biden and, as insults go, if someone called me: articulate, bright, clean and nice looking, I would probably take it as a compliment.
By contrast McCain's choice of running mate, relative political newcomer Gov. Sarah Palin sparked outrage due both to her extreme conservative political views and her apparent ignorance of National Affairs. Though Palin surprised many in her Vice Presidential debate with Biden subsequent one-on-one interviews with ABC's Charlie Gibson and CBS' Katie Couric exposed a lack of both experience and education which worried many as Sen. McCain was seventy-two years old and, should he have died in office, she would have succeeded him as President. In response to these concerns McCain pledged that he would not seek a second term if elected.
As election day drew near the Subprime Mortgage Crisis had reached a critical stage with the Bankruptcy of financial giants Lehman Brothers and Congress was forced to pass a Treasury Department initiative known popularly as the Bailout Bill creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program using hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to buy up worthless sub-prime mortgages to prevent any more huge bank failures. Both Obama and McCain voted for the act but it was extremely unpopular with many voters who saw moneys being taken from ther $13/hour paychecks and being given to international bankers, often in the form of bonuses. Though as much as $700 billion was made available for the bailout to date only $89 billion has been required to stabilized the Financial Markets, far less than the $160 billion needed to correct the Savings and Loan Crisis of two decades before.
When Obama did win the election on November 4 with 52.9% of the popular vote he became the first US President of African decent ( though rumors persist about Warren G. Harding) and the first Democratic Presidential Candidate to win a majority of the popular vote since 1976. Obama was also elected with large majorities in both houses of Congress though the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy would cost him a Filibuster-Proof Majority in the US Senate.
Obama's first day in office he ordered the closure of the controversial US Military Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay Cuba and signed into law funding for the SCHIP Children's Health Insurance Program which had been vetoed by his predecessor. His first major undertaking was an Economic Stimulus Bill to create government employment that would supplement the labor market and, he hoped, stimulate economic growth. Funds totally $787 billion in: tax cuts, infrastructure projects, unemployment benefits, etc were approved with particular attention to helping states with Medicaid payments and developing alternative sources of energy to oil and coal. As of this posting roughly 20% of the stimulus funds have been allocated and the unemployment rate has dropped roughly one-half-of-one-percent since the passage of this legislation.
The only major undertaking thus far in 2010 had been the long-awaited Health Care Reform Act which, although differing little from the plan he had offered up during the Presidential Campaign, disappointed many on the left who had hoped for a Single-Payer System and infuriated many on the right due to provisions mandating the purchase Health Insurance of Health Insurance by Individuals Uncovered by Their Employers and Ineligible for Medicare/Medicaid Coverage. There are also questions in regards to the administration's forthcomingness in regards to the fiduciary burden attached to the legislation. As of this posting the last major peice of legislation signed by President Obama was a Consumer Protection and Wall Street Reform Bill which he claims will insure there to be "no more taxpayer-funded bailouts, period."
In his brief tenure in office President Obama has already managed to provoke mass demonstrations, known as TEA Party Events (in honor of the Boston Tea Party of 1773 which sparked the American Revolution) over his use of Fiscal Policy to stimulate the economy and his expansion of Government Health Insurance agencies to cover more Americans. Actions many TEA Party Protesters describe as "Marxist." Obama has been criticized for referring to a white police officer as acting "stupidly" in what has become known as the Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy and has been the subject of many malicious slanders regarding his American Citizenship and his religious identification throughout his Presidency. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Obama very shortly after his Inauguration has also been questioned by many (kay I'll admit it myself included) however, his work with Republican Senator Dick Lugar in the area of Nuclear Non-Proliferation is often overlooked by haters on the Nobel Prize.
Only one Historian Poll has included Barack Obama, a 2010 Siena poll of 238 Presidential scholars, which ranked Obama at fifteenth out of forty-three just below President Andrew Jackson and just above President Lyndon Johnson.
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