I recently drove down to the terrific George C. Marshall Library in beautiful Lexington, Virginia, to do a final couple of days of research there. (Btw, eat at the Red Hen, downtown.) While I was going through folders (notes to Patton, even Marshall's desk litter, including his income tax statement), one of the researchers there showed me the transcript of an interview done with George F. Kennan in February 1953 about the making of the Marshall Plan, perhaps the most important foreign-policy action of the United States in the 20th century.

Marshall, not long after returning from Paris, called Kennan into his office. "After discussing the problem on which we were to work he said that he had only one piece of advice to give: 'Avoid trivia.' That was a nice laconic piece of advice, wasn't it?"

I asked frequent commenter Tyrtaios if he'd be interested in reviewing the new book on Lawrence. The game was not rigged -- I told him he could write anything he wanted. But to my relief, he liked it.

By "Tyrtaios"
Best Defense guest book reviewer

A noted fellow soldier and countryman of T.E. Lawrence, Sir William Francis Butler, wrote: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."

Thus starts in part, the preface of James J. Schneider's Guerrilla Leader: T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, along with a crisp and pithy forward by Tom Ricks, which will start the reader to understand that Lawrence's strength wasn't his ability to fight a guerrilla campaign, but more importantly, to lead one and how the man came to accomplish that, and a chronicle of events in doing so.

Once I picked the book up, I had to force myself to put it down and savor it. I found the book flowed very easily and quickly from describing Lawrence as a child prodigy, to his early characteristic of standing out from the crowd with a higher purpose, his education at Oxford that reinforced, interestingly to be sure, learning over solving the problem, to his early adventure in the pre-WWI Middle East, along with his gathering notoriety as a most remarkable individual.

The reader will further be provided with a concise description of the regional geo-political-military back-drop of the period that Lawrence would find himself operating in, and quickly move to Lawrence's most notable observations that would form his ideas, and vision of organizing the Bedouin in the north into a cohesive unconventional force, along with developing and lending to it, what I would categorize as a combined arms dimension.

Having read extensively about T.E. Lawrence prior, did I learn anything new reading Guerrilla Leader? Indeed, I was reminded by Schneider in his closing pages, something I wished had been explained to me many years ago as a younger man, something that vaguely nagged at me then, which caused Lawrence to betray his values, but he must have later grasped. I will leave that part undisclosed for the curious of you to find out, perhaps among those curious, that one "dangerous man who dreams by day with open eyes and makes it possible," as Lawrence tells us he did.

Schneider's Guerrilla Leader could easily replace several books all at once that I've seen on the recommended military reading lists for NCOs and commissioned officers alike, as well as those in mufti that work beside the military or cover it. 

In closing, although I own other works on Lawrence of Arabia, I have decided that Guerrilla Leader will take a position next to the man's own words written in Seven Pillars of Wisdom on my book shelf ... too late for me now, but for some ... perhaps not?

"Tyrtaios" is a retired infantry Marine whose career spanned 28 years of both enlisted and commissioned service, and included several tours of duty in the Middle East and Africa.

That's the National Park Service verdict on Bill O'Reilly's error-filled history of the assassination of President Lincoln. My favorite example: He has the president meeting in the Oval Office-which didn't exist until the 20th century.

Like I said, I've been reading further afield lately, and am almost finished with Michael Grant's The Rise of the Greeks, which is my idea of fun. Fill in this blank: "Thus in respect of basic equalities, [ ] was the first authentic, thoroughgoing democracy among the Greeks or anywhere in the world, as far as its citizens were concerned." (P. 93, paperback)

The answer is below.

Grant also says that the early Greek philosopher Anaximander was poking around with evolutionary theory, hypothesizing that "higher formers had developed from lower forerunners, so that human beings, at first a kind of fish in the water, had shed their scales on dry land so as to adjust their way of life to this new earthy medium." (P. 162)

So what is the answer? Oddly, Sparta. He also says that Spartan women enjoyed unusual privileges, with property rights, the right to speak freely, and freedom to engage in adulterous affairs, partly "owing to the continuous and urgent need to maintain and increase the Spartan birthrate." (P. 98) I guess this was the Spartan version of "don't ask, don't tell."

General Paul Gorman's oral history is fun for several aspects, but especially for his unvarnished account of life in the old Army. First, there was the night he lay drunk in his bed in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters at Fort Benning, having been out boozing and punching a warrant officer in the mouth:

I became aware that there was loud talk out in the hall. It was the warrant officer with a bunch of his buddies. They were coming to find me to beat out my teeth. I can recall having enough presence of mind to roll out of bed and get under it. They came in. They were all drunk and they stumbled around the room. I obviously had been vomiting because they were appalled at the condition of the floor. They left. In their wake came a captain of the battalion. He found me under the bed, got me in bed, and cleaned up the room a little bit. Then the son-of-a-bitch tried to kiss me. I apparently decked him too.

Arriving at the Korean War front in 1952, Gorman was told by some soldiers that the company XO was soliciting bribes to give soldiers early slots for R&R leave in Japan. Gorman, a new lieutenant, went to the company commander, who was spending most of his time playing poker, and wasn't interested in pursuing the allegation. So Gorman took care of it himself.

He also says that during the Korean War, the 65th Infantry Regiment had a bunch of guys who regularly used marijuana. "Every night they sat back there, puffing away on these weeds." Gorman doesn't mention it, but the 65th became notorious when many of its soldiers ran away from combat, resulting in 92 court martials, and eventually the relief of the regiment's commander.

By the way, here is the first review I have seen of Sorley's new biography of Westmoreland, which I read in galleys last summer, and enjoyed.

By Lewis Sorley
Best Defense Saigon bureau chief

10. He lacked the schooling and relevant experience to understand the war and devise a viable approach to prosecuting it. He was an artilleryman who missed out on the Army's great schools system, never attending the Command & General Staff College or the Army War College. Overseas during World War II he had limited line duty (16 months of battalion command, then 13 months in staff positions) and of 14 months of command during the Korean War and its immediate aftermath he spent eight months in reserve in Japan and only six months in Korea, and that during the mostly static final months of the war.

9. His senior staff lacked diversity of experience and professional outlook, consisting mostly of people with backgrounds similar to his own, especially airborne. Thus there was little internal capacity for debating or evaluating his chosen course of action.

8. He was uninterested in other viewpoints on how the war might be prosecuted, dismissing the PROVN Study sponsored by Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson (which concluded that Westmoreland's way of war was not working and could not work) and basic disagreements with Westmoreland's organization and approach voiced by his brilliant classmate General Bruce Palmer Jr.

7. He thought he could take over the war from the South Vietnamese, bring it to a successful conclusion, and then hand their country back to them and go home in triumph. He couldn't.

6. He deprived the South Vietnamese of modern weaponry, giving U.S. and other allied forces priority for issue of the new M-16 rifle and other advanced military wherewithal. The South Vietnamese thus went for years equipped with castoff WWII-vintage U.S. equipment while outgunned by the communists, who were armed with the AK-47 assault rifle and other top of the line equipment.

5. He denied senior civilian officials accurate data on enemy strength and composition, during development of a 1967 Special National Intelligence Estimate imposing a ceiling on the number of enemy forces his intelligence officers could report or agree to and personally removing from the order of battle entire categories that had long been included, thus falsely portraying progress in reducing enemy strength.

4. His war of attrition, search and destroy tactics, and emphasis on body count did nothing to affect the war in the hamlets and villages of South Vietnam, where the enemy's covert infrastructure was left free to continue using coercion and terror to dominate the rural populace.

3. He underestimated the enemy's staying power, maintaining that if he could inflict enough casualties the communists would lose heart and cease their aggression against South Vietnam. Instead the enemy proved willing to absorb horrifying losses and keep fighting. Thus the "progress" Westmoreland claimed in racking up huge body counts did nothing to win the war. The enemy simply kept sending more and more replacements to make up his losses. Westmoreland was on a treadmill.

2. He overestimated the American people's patience and tolerance of friendly losses. On a visit to Vietnam Senator Hollings from Westmoreland's home state of South Carolina was told by Westmoreland: "We're killing these people," the enemy, "at a ratio of 10 to 1." Said Hollings, "Westy, the American people don't care about the ten. They care about the one." Westmoreland didn't get it.

1. And the number one reason why Westmoreland lost the war in Vietnam: With his unavailing approach to conduct of the war he squandered four years of support by much of the American people, the Congress, and even the media.

Lewis Sorley's new book, Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, is being published today by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I recently re-read The Generals' War, a history of the 1991 Gulf War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor. I thought it was a good book when I read it the first time, when it was published 16 years ago, but now I think it is even better. I would say, just terrific.

Their analyses have been borne out by time, especially of the failings of General Norman Schwarzkopf -- that his planning lacked imagination, that he didn't appreciate the political implications of the Scud attacks on Israel (and so failed to consider in his planning whether to insert Special Operators to go after Scuds in western Iraq), that he and General Powell didn't grasp the implications of the Khafji battle (which the authors say showed that Iraqi ground forces could be damaged considerably by air attacks), and so devised a war plan that backfired. Schwarzkopf wanted to use a Marine attack from the south to fix the Iraqis in Kuwait so they could be destroyed by Army forces attacking from the west. Instead, the Iraqi forces were so weakened by air attacks and desertion that the Marines pushed the Iraqis out, like a cork popping out of a bottle, and the Army arrived on the scene too late.  

In a foreshadowing of the Iraq war in 2003, Schwarzkopf apparently gave no thought to the day after the war ended.

Sidenotes: I hadn't realized how much I had forgotten about the '91 war. Also, an odd sensation to be making a transition in the book I am writing from history I didn't experience (World War II, Korea, Vietnam) to history I did.

The other day, one of my guest columnists was citing Eitan Shamir's Transforming Command: The pursuit of mission command in the U.S., British and Israeli armies. Checking on line, I saw that the title of Shamir's chapter 4 is, "Inspired by corporate practices: American army command traditions." That intrigued me, because it relates to some themes of the book I'm currently writing. I also was impressed that he got Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a smart guy, to write a foreword.

So I was pretty disappointed when I read the chapter to find that its title wasn't supported by much evidence. Or any, really. Shamir writes that, "Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall patterned army organization on the ideas of American business." (p. 61). That surprised me because I have read thousands of pages of interviews and documents Marshall produced and corporate practice almost never comes up.

The second warning sign: Shamir footnotes that sentence about Marshall to Gabriel and Savage's Crisis in Command, which is not a very good book, and is about Vietnam, not about World War II or George Marshall. So I went down to the Vietnam section of my basement library and found on page 18 of Gabriel and Savage's book one paragraph of unsupported assertions about Marshall relying on business practice in World War II. No evidence, no footnotes, no nothing.

That is a mighty thin reed on which to build a chapter. And, like the clock striking 13, it makes me wonder what else Shamir has gotten wrong. So later in the book when I read his statement that, "The British Army has probably been most successful in implementing mission command," (P. 197) I was skeptical. I wondered what his evidence was, or whether this was simply more unsupported assertion.  

Based on what I have read so far, I was surprised to see Stanford University Press published the book. I mean, Stanford is supposed to be pretty good, no? Best university west of UC Berkeley?

It's been so long that we've been at peace that I fear we may have forgotten what it is like. But in preparation for our wars ending (not with a bang but with a whimper), it is worth starting to think about it, and how our militaries will be affected.

I bring this up because of a comment I read the other day in General Sir Archibald Wavell's first lecture on generalship:

It is in peace that regulations and routine become important and that the qualities of boldness and originality are cramped. It is interesting to note how little of normal peace soldiering many of our best generals had-Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington, and his lieutenants, Graham, Hill, Crauford.

I have a lot of respect for Col. Paul Yingling, who I know from Iraq, and whose thinking about today's military has had a lot of influence on me. He actually is the first person quoted in the book I am writing right now, as the manuscript currently stands. So I was pleased to get this from him.

There is lots of memorable stuff in this short essay. I was especially struck by his third sentence: "Mission command takes intelligent and courageous senior officers accountable for battlefield results." I also liked this one: "Great leaders do not rely on favorable conditions; they create them." And this one: "When a small unit gets in trouble, senior commanders find cover in SOPs thick enough to stop an OER bullet." And his bottom line: "Far from prohibiting mission command, the conditions of modern combat demand it."

So it is a real pleasure to recommend this to you. I think it is one of the best columns this blog has ever had:

By Paul Yingling
Best Defense chief correspondent of lost causes

MAJ Niel Smith is a good friend and a superb officer, but he's wrong about mission command. Auftragstaktik doesn't require highly trained junior officers, reforms in personnel management or professional military education, or time to integrate the latest technology. Mission command takes intelligent and courageous senior officers accountable for battlefield results. If we identify and promote such officers, the rest will fall into place. If we don't, the best trained captains in the Army's history won't save us from failure.

There is plenty of historical evidence to contradict MAJ Smith's claim that "mission command requires stable, highly trained staffs and company/troop commanders, proficient in their specialty and job." Scipio's centurions didn't have 3.5 years of brigade staff time to learn their trade before fighting Hannibal. Sherman's cavalry troops were not made audacious by rigorous PME. Guderian's race to the English Channel was not preceded by a year of stability in ARFORGEN. Patton's tank companies were not the product of enlightened personnel policies. These officers succeed because they had the intelligence to see the battlefield clearly, and the courage to act on their convictions. In any war worthy of the name, the delicate conditions MAJ Smith requires to implement mission command have never existed. Great leaders do not rely on favorable conditions; they create them.

Claims that today's wars are somehow more complex than previous conflicts will draw belly laughs from historians. Is sectarian conflict in Iraq somehow more politically complex than Rome's civil wars? Does the rate of technological change in the last ten years in Afghanistan exceed that of the last two years of World War I? Even if we accept the dubious proposition that today's wars are unparalleled in complexity, successful brigade commanders have demonstrated that mission command works. Colonel Sean McFarland helped turn the tide in Anbar Province thanks in large part to the autonomy he granted to Captain Travis Patriquin. Colonel H.R. McMaster's success in Tall Afar was attributable to a command climate in which thinking was required and PowerPoint was not. Have new and unparalleled complexities transformed warfare since 2006?

MAJ Smith's defense of detailed planning doesn't stand up to empirical scrutiny. Thick orders and elaborate SOPs haven't eliminated costly, stupid mistakes. Consider two of the most heavily regulated activities on the modern battlefield  -- air strikes and detainee operations. Air strikes have killed civilians and ground troops have abused detainees, even when the SOPs regulating these activities ran to several hundred pages. Each crime and blunder adds another chapter to the tome, but none of it seems to matter. Leaders prone to crimes and blunders are not dissuaded by elaborate checklists or sternly worded prose.

Yet the production of highly prescriptive orders and SOPs, what Germans call Befehlstaktik, continues unabated; why?  The primary purpose of detailed orders is not battlefield success, but rather the protection of field-grade and flag officer careers. In ten years of war, no Army general has relieved a fellow flag officer for battlefield failure. Why so many failures and so little accountability? When a small unit gets in trouble, senior commanders find cover in SOPs thick enough to stop an OER bullet. (I told the troops not to beat detainees; it's right here on page 11.) Rather than preventing battlefield failure, detailed planning often enables it. Senior officers can survive almost any debacle so long as there's a FRAGO and a captain between them and the problem.

Detailed planning can be useful in understanding problems, anticipating opportunities and risks and synchronizing activities. Prescriptive orders and SOPs have their place in performing routine mechanical tasks. However, these techniques are often counterproductive in the fog and friction of combat. Modern combat requires junior leaders capable of exercising judgment and initiative, and senior officers capable of fostering these qualities. It requires junior leaders capable of acting on commander's intent, and senior officers capable of clearly expressing their intent. It requires junior leaders capable of taking prudent risks, and senior officers willing to underwrite and reward risk-taking. Far from prohibiting mission command, the conditions of modern combat demand it.

Most importantly of all, Auftragstaktik demands accountability for results rather than adherence to procedures. Some will succeed and advance, while others will fail and find employment elsewhere. These outcomes have little to do with time in grade, PME or the complexities of the modern battlefield. Senior officers who wish to exercise mission command shouldn't wait for favorable conditions; they should create them.

Paul L. Yingling is a colonel in the U.S. Army and a professor of security studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Government or St. Jude.

For the last month I've been almost as quiet as Clarence Thomas. No more! And no, I did not give up blogging for Ramadan.

Let's review the month:

--My condolences to the families of the SEALs lost on Aug. 5. Oddly, I think I know the valley where they went down -- I remember going to a picnic near there in the spring of 1971. We also used to go skiing about 15 or 20 miles NE of the crash site. Even had a rope tow, and nice views of the Koh-i-Baba range.  

--I'm not fed up with President Obama. I agree with the observation I saw that he is less reckless than his political opponents. I don't think he has been given sufficient credit for that.  

--But I am fed up with Obama's Lincoln imitation. Here he is in Iowa in mid-August: "First of all, democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this. We're diverse, got a lot of points of view. We kind of romanticize sometimes what democracy used to be like. But when you listen to what the Federalists said about the anti- Federalists and the names that Jefferson called Hamilton and back and forth -- I mean, those guys were tough. Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me." Actually, they talked much worse about Lincoln, and the country was in a much worse situation.

--Nice job wrapping up the Libyan war. This strikes me as a victory for the Libyan rebels, for NATO and for Obama. Turned out leading from the rear worked -- the United States achieved its aim, yet is not on the hook for the aftermath. Let the Libyans figure it out. Not one American died in this fight, as that is a good thing, in many ways. Was this Suez '56 in reverse?

--The Syrian military may be showing signs of splitting. It would be nice to see Assad go the way of Qaddafi. Iran worries about this happening and advises Assad to lighten up.

--Commentary on the British youff riots struck me as a mirror in which everyone blamed it on whatever they didn't like. Col. Blimp types blamed multiculturalism. (I actually think Europe doesn't have a multi-culture--we Americans do have one, and it works, generally. The UK and the Euros simply have societies that generally tolerate the presence of other minority cultures.) My favorite column blamed the Americanization of Britain, as if we invented riots.  

-If corporations are people, as candidate Romney asserts, why can't they be sentenced to jail, like regular people? Or even executed, like they do in Texas?

--And then there was this headline of the day:

Maybe first, put on some pants.

By Matthew Irvine
Best Defense directorate of Delta force activities

After a decade of counterterrorism, the United States still doesn't quite seem to have the right formula. As we look back on a decade of lessons learned, it is useful to also study what our allies and partners have been up to in their own fights with terrorism.

Daniel Byman's new book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, tells the story of Israel's seven decades of counterterrorism. Byman overcomes the potential minefield subject of Israel/Palestine by tracing the arc of contemporary Israeli policies and challenges to their historical roots, often dating back to the British Mandate period and the 1967 war.

What struck me when reading Byman's book?

The Israeli military and politics are truly familial. Many of Israel's political and security officials today have worked together for decades, starting as soldiers in the IDF. Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak served on the same commando team that freed a hijacked El Al plane in 1972. Somberly, Bibi's brother Yonatan Netanyahu was killed in the famous Entebbe raid in 1976. These intimate relationships and the country's close ties to its military forces make the use of force, especially commandos, a very personal affair for those in power.

The long learning curve of countering terrorism. Israeli intelligence was forced to adapt as Black September emerged in the 1970s, as the PLO built a mini-state in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority took power after Oslo and amidst the Second Intifada and the rise of Hamas. These required a relatively small cadre of counterterror specialists to constantly look for new openings in collection, new avenues of disruption and better ways to harden defenses. Israel still hasn't perfected its methods to say the least but has established an impressive record to versatility in a persistent irregular conflict. The United States should take note as we enter a second decade of war: retaining top level talent and constantly learning is key to long-term success.

The dangers of sanctuary. According to Byman, "Israel's history shows that no factor is more important to the success of a terrorist group than sanctuary." This argument is supported by studies of insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. Israel has focused much of its historical efforts on eliminating these sanctuaries both within and outside its borders. However it is important to note that as one safe haven closed, inevitably another appeared, whether in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Algeria or Gaza.

Read on

By John Stuart Blackton
Best Defense chief Afghanistan correspondent

Before responding directly to Major Wharton, let me step back a bit and put the concept of Afghan corruption into context.

The simple definition that most of the current practical work on corruption uses is something along the lines of: "corruption is the abuse of public position for private gain." This is a moral and legal perspective that assumes a shared social agreement on the distinction between public and private and an agreed moral and legal view of what constitutes abuse around that public/private distinction. 

These basic conditions have not been met for most of the last 500 years in Afghanistan. To the extent that they have a historical basis in the country, it is quite recent as I will endeavor to illustrate in my remarks today. 

The "abuse of public position for private gain" construct is a top-down view of the process. It takes the standpoint of the state. For my purposes, as the United States Military tries to relate the real, empirical fact of widespread corruption in Afghanistan to a population-centric approach to achieving stabilization of security, it may make more sense to take a bottom-up view of the process. 

Viewed from the perspective of a 30-year old Afghan male head of household, corruption (let's simplify it to "bribery") is a functional tool. One pays a bribe for one of two reasons: 

• To get something, or
• To prevent something

A bribe is only useful to our putative Afghan father if he is transacting with an official who has something to offer (public services, for example) or with an official who seeks to do something damaging to him that can be averted with the bribe. 

For most of Afghan history over the last five centuries the state was not sufficiently powerful to make institutional bribery a very useful, instrumental tool for an ordinary Afghan man. The state offered almost no services (so he couldn't buy much of value from an official) and the state was not actively taking too much (it was not a notable collector of taxes and it was not raising and maintaining a large standing army by conscription). Afghanistan was on the periphery of two great imperial systems that did, in fact, offer a range of public services and possess serious capability to take away goods, land and chattels from their citizens. The Mogul Empire, to the east, was a massive taxation machine raising enormous revenues to support an expensive imperial establishment and a massive standing army. The Persian state, just to the west, was a similarly expansive tax machine with a costly central government. Elaborate and extensive systems of corruption permeated life in the Mogul empire and in Persia. Even minor citizens at the bottom paid bribes to mitigate having to pay more onerous taxes or having to supply sons to the army. They paid bribes to gain favors and services from an elaborate system of local and provincial governors who could offer or withhold things of considerable value to citizens.

Read on

I was surprised to see Ronald Wilson Reagan and Woodrow Wilson almost tie as the worst presidents of the 20th century. Reagan led most of the week, but Wilson pulled by him yesterday afternoon -- only to be edged out in the final tally when I shut down voting at 9 A.M. eastern time this morning.

I understand Wilson's showing -- both the pacifist left and the non-interventionist right loathe him, as well as many people who simply see him as a racist. But I suspect Reagan's high score says a lot about the readers of this blog. Based on comments posted on this blog and notes to my blog e-mailbox, you guys really think Reagan was a bad president. I suspect his surprise near-"win" is due in part to a growing distaste with tax-cutting ideologues who seem blithely unaware of the damage they do. Sample comment from Boone, N.C.: "with his half-baked political philosophy, Reagan set this country on its present course to ruin."

The surprise to me is how even the voting was. After Reagan and Wilson, it basically is close to a scatter-shot tie between the rest -- Harding, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon clumped together, followed by Carter and Hoover, who also tied. And old Coolidge brought up the rear with one vote.

I was impressed that one Marine intelligence analyst in Afghanistan took the time to send in an anti-Harding vote. Another military e-mail voted against Richard Nixon, not for the usual reasons of corruption and such, but because, he wrote, "He's helped the Chinese more than he's helped Americans. We're still paying for his foreign policy coup since most of our manufacturing is now over there."

And you all certainly don't agree with me about JFK. In fact, there was not a single whole vote for him as worst president of the century, although one person gave him a half vote, and several offered him 2nd place, maybe just to be nice to me. Reading over the discussion and notes, I've been persuaded that he was not the worst president of the 20th century, but probably the most over-rated. (Though of course many of you would give that title to Reagan.)

I'm also surprised that Lyndon Johnson didn't get more votes. And apparently people have forgiven Bill Clinton his inability keep all his body parts inside his clothing -- not a single person named him, despite the apparent bias against Southern Democrats (Wilson, Carter, Johnson) in the polling. And yes, Wilson was a Southern Democrat. He received one of the most succinct votes: "On any consequentialist reading, whether you are realist or liberal in international relations, the worst American president in the international realm of all time. On civil rights, more retrograde than any American politician since Andrew Johnson."

Here is the final tally:

1. Ronald Reagan 17.5
2. Woodrow Wilson 17
3. Warren Harding 9
4. Richard Nixon 9
5. Lyndon Johnson 8
6. Herbert Hoover 7
7. Jimmy Carter 7
8. Calvin Coolidge 1
9. JFK .5