I am shocked the Mr. Ricks would include President Nixon in this mix, especially in terms of foreign policy.

Richard Nixon was a realist in foreign policy. He changed the Cold War game by going to China and establishing detente with the Soviet Union in 1972. He also ended the Vietnam War and started the all-volunteer army, the latter which led to the elite fighting force we have today. What's more, his policy of Vietnamization was more coherent than his predecessors "search and destroy" efforts.

And we all know that WG was just another political witch hunt...

Nixon did not end Vietnam, He saw it could not be won.!! Nixon along with his war criminal security advisor Henrey Kissinger sabotaged the 1968 Talks when LBJ was looking to end the war. Then while in office Nixon stepped up bombing and went further,,into Cambodia. Laos etc. Even after Nixon resigned Kissinger was advising Ford about Vietnam, while US soldiers were still dying in Cambodia and lands that our govt said we were not in. Nixon was a war criminal and H. Kissinger is still a war criminal. Both men are responsible for millions of deaths, including the deaths in Cambodia b/c our "leaders" continued a war in Indo China that eventually led to the scourge of Pol Pot. After which Cambodia turned into a -to use a Orwell term- 1984. Cambodian leaders transformed their nation into a total communist state, even going as far as killing every educated person women, man or young adult. Relocating millions out of citys and into farm like communities, becoming animals for a so called communal good. .....ow ya then there is that whole watergate thing, but we will talk about that another day this is prolly to much for you to handle at this time.
You need to re-educate yourseld on the Nixon years before you dare protect and feeble legacy he may have.

This sentence confuses me

President Nixon ended the war with the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and brought the POWs home just months later. Had Congress continued to provide aid to the South Vietnamese Army it would have been able to prevent the take over of Saigon.

Even though the ultimate outcome was less than favorable (again, Congress's fault), he still changed the game with the China initiative. Those are the facts.

I suggest you educate yourself before you write so emotionally.

Dear MCA5022: Your deep visceral hatred of President Nixon has blinded you to the realities of the world. Therapy is available for those who want to rewrite history. (As I recall, the Soviets were always rewriting history.)

Libertarians would not agree with your assessment of Hoover:

http://www.quebecoislibre.org/07/070916-4.htm

Libertarians rarely agree with things like that. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're right.

The article posted is well documented. Give it a whirl.

Hoover disliked laissez-faire economics, which he called "theoretic and emotional." As president, Hoover believed in government intervention and regulation of the economy to protect the consumer from big business. Before 1929 was over, he was pushing the Congress and the states to expand public works spending to counter the effects of the stock market crash. He badgered business to maintain wages, employment, and investment spending. He created the Reconstruction Finance Company, which lent money to business for major projects that promised jobs and to states for public relief. Hoover also signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill in order to boost farm prices and incomes by eliminating import competition. Most of these measures were dubious, and Smoot-Hawley was disastrous, but none was laissez-faire.

Having taken all these measures, Hoover was at a loss when they failed to turn the economy around and said as much. He wasn't paralyzed--he became pessimistic. He transmitted a sense that he did not know what more to do and was unequal to the task. Americans usually prefer optimists, and few presidential candidates were more optimistic, cheerful, and hopeful than Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover didn't stand a chance of reelection.

Oh, one more thing. Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign attacked Hoover for his deficit spending--in effect, attacking him from the right--but FDR expanded the scope of Hoover's interventionist policies once in office and added quite a few new measures of his own.

Didn't he sign off on the Smoot-Hawley tariffs which many say caused the worst economic crisis our nation witnessed? It seems to me that trying to meddle in markets can hardly be called "laissez faire".
I agree that he may be the worst, ranking up there with FDR who made everything worse.

Now, I really do not know enough here to be a judge, and I appreciate FDR as a War Leader, I just thought it was good timing. Here is Larry Summers on FDR:

"Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed."

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11777

about 21:50

Found via Mankiw, http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/

Of course Charlie Rose wants to pass this half truth as truth.

The Unemployment rate dropped quite a bit from when FDR took office to 1941; it dropped from 25% when he took office to 15% in 1941.

FDR is one of the three greatest Americans - Lincoln and Washington are the other two. Whoever is fourth is way below these three.

Walt

. . . a great president--who should have been impeached.

Iran-Contra was an impeachable offense (not that it necessarily would have been prudent to impeach him, given numerous other factors).

And there's lots of other stuff he did--or didn't do--I don't like.

But one thing makes him great--indeed, very great. He recognized in Gorbachev a new kind of Soviet leader, and he determined to work with him, no matter how much heat he took from his right wing base. That was crucial to giving Gorbachev the latitude to reform (had Reagan reacted distrustingly and belligerently, Gorbachev's bosses would have demanded the same).

While Gorbachev should get most credit for ending the Cold War, he couldn't have done it without Reagan.

Actually while RR denigrated big government, under his watch, the federal government burgeoned. Public debt roughly tripled during Reagan as he wracked up more debt than all previous Presidents combined. GW Bush did that again, and Obama will do in 3 short years, but most of the Obama trillions so far are mopping up after Bush.

His pro-growth message that emphasized deep tax cuts was a fallacy – he responsibly raised taxes 13 times.

His one achievement to reduce big government would have been to dissolve the ATF, because he thought is was redundant. But the NRA was worried that they would loose their whipping boy. Denigrating the jack booted thugs at ATF was a very effective fundraiser for them, so they asked RR NOT to dissolve it. He agreed. RR and his staff were gunned down by a crazy kid with a gun.

To cowtow to paranoid big oil, concerned that they would loose market share, Reagan tore Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House. Reagan was subservient to Ford and GM, and cancelled already legislated CAFE (car fuel efficiency) standards, that costs us hundreds of millions of dollars a year in oil purchases that we largely give to rogue states like dictatorships Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Not our friends.

We bailed out our car companies, partly because they did not make fuel efficient cars. In 2010, As a registered Republican, I wish, we as a party, would gain the high ground on environmental protection. RR gutted environmental legislation. RR Reagan declared with gusto, “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do”. RR and GW Bush actually were lockstep in anti-government, anti-environment ideology while simultaneously swelling government ranks and our debt.

On Reagan’s watch, between 1980 and 1988, the USSR’s nuclear bombs surged from 25k to 40k, ironically forcing us years later to pay billions to denuke the fractious former soviet block once they fell apart. If a dirty bomb is exploded in NYC, it will probably have been built in the USSR during the RR Presidency. Star Wars, RR crown jewel, has largely exacerbated the problem.

RR legacy is denigrated but massive government, huge debt, huge dependency on foreign oil.

RICHARDMILLER: I can't remember the last time I've heard such a convoluted, iniquitous, and just plain erroneous characterization of any public figure. Thanx for rewriting history!

on your comment: "He did much to improve our economy in the 1930’s with many new bills sent to congress."

FDR was an economic disaster, and according to one recent study by two top economists at UCLA, his economic policies helped to ensure the U.S. remained in the Great Depression until World War II pulled us out. FDR, in my opinion, is one of the most overated presidents in American history. Let's not forget that his economic policies still haunt us to this day, and are at least to some extent directly and indirectly responsible for the fiscal woes our nation faces.

It's not hard to understand why someone would nominate him for this poll.

A bad situation improved under FDR.

Here is something my mother wrote. She was born in 1925:

"In one sense, I owe my life to Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he became
President in 1932 [sic], somehow food became more available, clothes were made available to those who needed them, and plants and mills began to re-open so that people could go back to work. As young as I was, I could immediately see a new optimism and hopefulness among the people of my small hometown. I remember jobless young men going off to work in the forests through the CCC and jobless husbands found work to do in building, road work, and other enterprises through the WPA. I taught in a school in Lakeview which had been built by the WPA. Suffice it to say that Roosevelt's optimism and great personality brought about great changes in the country, and I never have been hungry again. Thanks for reminding me that today, April 12, 2005 is the sixtieth anniversary of his death. He was truly great and I loved him."

Walt

FDR's budget-balance policy of his second term undid everything he accomplished in his first. Score him as a mediocrity there.

His demand of unconditional surrender from the Axis defined 1) the goal of the wartime Alliance and 2) terms for admittance to the peace conference table thereafter. He succeeded where Wilson had failed. Score him as an unconditional success there.

Insisting on unconditional surrender probably cost the loss of many, many Allied soldiers unncessarily.

Had FDR and Churchill called on the German people to throw out the Nazi murderers and usurpers of all that was good about Germany, we would surely have had a better outcome.

Walt

>> Insisting on unconditional surrender probably cost the loss of many, many Allied soldiers unncessarily. <<

Blame it on the Munich Pact, not on the Casablanca Declaration.

>> Had FDR and Churchill called on the German people to throw out the Nazi murderers and usurpers of all that was good about Germany, we would surely have had a better outcome. <<

Sorry but I ain't buying it. That's identical to Bush41's halt f Desert Sword and letting sanctions overthrow Saddam Hussein - fat lot of good that did!

Unconditional Surrender served a two-fold purpose:

1) It left no room for a new stab-in-the-back myth for any future putative Hitler heir. The Germans had to learn the hard way. And, thankfully, they have.

2) It left no room for doubt in Stalin's mind about the sincerity of the West - after all, the Soviets were taking the worst of the burden.

I don't buy your argument on uncondtional surrender. It makes no sense.

What could possibly be the downside of encouraging the German people to depose the Nazis?

Walt

"Wilson is in the top three since he was basically an invalid for the last 2 years of his presidency. Has to count some, right?"

Wrong. After the stroke Edith Wilson effectively became a combination ersatz-president and WH Chief-of-Staff, controlling all access to Wilson, telling him which bills to sign and issuing public statements lying about his condition. She took special care to block out VP Thomas Marshal from assuming duties as Acting President. An absolutely unconstitutional situation.

I think we agree.

Which were mostly forced on him by a Congress and an electorate that were quite at odds with him. The EPA, leaving Vietnam, Clean Air/Water: he approved them (sometimes grudgingly) at the behest of others.

Political turmoil in Iran and Central America (and thus the hostage crisis and Iran-contra) can be traced back to Eisenhower, who ordered/supported the overthrow of elected governments in favor of U.S.-friendly (by which I mean friendly to American-owned fruit plantations and the oil companies) despots in both places back in the 50s. Replacing Mossadegh with the Shah was the real reason the Iranian mullahs hated us; United Fruit's insistence on only compliant (that is, not really sovereign) governments in Central America contributed to instability and violence there.
It's a curious thing to blame Saddam's invasion of Kuwait on the Iran-Iraq war; had they not been busy fighting Iran, would the Iraqis not have invaded Kuwait all the sooner?

I actually agree with you that Carter is definitely up there in the "bad Presidents" list, but I disagree with you on the merits. The Soviets *hated* Carter and found him an obstinate opponent, especially after years of having the HAK-Dobrynin channel greasing the wheels of detente. His moralistic sermonizing meant they couldn't sweep their political repressions under the rug; his insistence on relitigating large chunks of SALT II tossed a lot of HAK's concessions in the trash (but preserved A/G/SLCMs as a major weapons system, something that HAK intended to give away as a bargaining chip); his economic, diplomatic and paramilitary response to the Soviet invasion of AF shocked the Kremlin and caused significant rifts with our allies (in particular Germany -- see the recent declassifications from the British Archives on that)*; and his close relationship with Eastern European hawk Zbig gave the old men in Red Square more than their share of agita. In other words, despite the reputation Carter's been humping since the 1980s, he was considerably more hawkish than people give him credit for. A failure? Oh, yes. But no "weak geek" to a Kremlin that was used to having HAK's friendly ear at the head of US foreign policy. (It's also worth remembering that Carter kicked off deregulation and dismantled what remained of Nixon's command-state economic policies.)

As for Iran, it's hard to see a good way out of that one -- doubling down on support for the Shah was unlikely to work (the old man had been pronounced dead many times by CIA, and they were never wrong so much as inaccurate on time of death), though the decision to let him into the US for medical treatment was appallingly stupid, and probably helped tip the internal political balance to Khomeini as well as threatened the lives of American officials. The botched EAGLE CLAW mission was a screwup of the first rank: Carter gets the blame for being in charge, but in particular he failed to deal with a military that wrote a plan that wouldn't have made it off "Get Smart's" cutting room floor. No effort at all would have been better than something that poorly-run.

In any case, Carter turned out to be a poor administrator who chose an inexperienced team and then vacillated between contradictory policies, eventually paying the political price for it. From a foreign policy perspective, we'd have done better with Ford in place -- or, hell, four more years of Nixon. Instead, we got four years of Carter and eight of Reagan (perhaps the most incapable head of state since Warren G. Harding) until competency was restored with GHWB.

As far as I'm concerned, Carter's definitely one of the more ineffective Presidents of the century, and in a list of poor performers right up there with -- IMO -- Wilson, Hoover, and Reagan. (Nixon was a hateful little man, but few played their foreign policy cards with such consummate skill; Eisenhower, for all his intelligence and ability, probably deserves a mention thanks to his profligate use of covert actions, most of which caused greater problems than they solved; JFK escapes a place only thanks to his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his quick exit from the scene, else he'd have a spot high on the wall of shame.) But the easy propaganda's wrong, as it usually is.

* The Politburo transcripts make it clear that the Sovs were going to invade AF no matter what, even though they knew that any Soviet presence was going to be a jihad magnet for US-supported Muj rebels. What they didn't expect was for the US to make a major issue out of the invasion -- as far as they were concerned, this was a minor buffer state rectification to deal with a particularly nasty local CP head, not an attempt to expand the Soviet sphere as such.

The president who blamed the American people for lacking confidence in him (cf. the so-called "malaise" speech) has to be considered the worst. Petty, prickly, humorless, and ineffectual, Jimmy Carter still hasn't forgiven the American electorate for not giving him four more years.

but actually he was a European stlye liberal, which is why the left loves him.

Not sure whether that says more about me or about him.
Best,
Tom

Dear RPM: You say Nixon was the worst "...for the lasting damage he did to the presidency and the nation." What lasting damage? For whatever shame he brought upon himself, it was left behind very quickly indeed. I guess you're blaming all of today's problems on President Nixon. (It's really fun to watch amateur political "experts" who remember so little in the way of facts.)

I'd agree that the internment camps were FDR's worst policy. However, he only established them because of World War II.
So no WWII, no internment camps. FDR comes out ahead. No WWII, also no victory, no ascension to superpower status, no economic recovery...and FDR is a mixed bag again.

I'm not so positive that internment camps were necessarily as "evil" as you opine. The world of the mid-twentieth century was vastly different than that of today. Nationalism ran much deeper. Philip Bobbitt would say that it was a time of nation-states. Further, WWII was a declared, and total war. Sure the humanist and liberal in me is outraged... and it was a different time, with different constraints.

Compare it to today. Internment is not a viable (or moral) option. The wars we fight are undeclared, limited interventions. Nationalism is less pronounced. It is, in short, a very different time.

I think our condemnation of EO 9066 may be a bit anachronystic.

To start (as has been made clear before) this is for presidents of the 20th century. After that, how foolish of me to think that it was a rather reasonable reaction to an attempt by half the country to secede over certain issues, the most important of which was slavery, because they lost an election where they kept Lincoln's name off the ballot. How crazy to think that it would be a rather intelligent action for any state to take to keep the strength of their nation.

Who fired the first shot of the Civil War?

Walt