And turn a merely “good” depression into a truly “great” one, while making ongoing deficits the norm. Being a true innovator is only a plus if they’re positive innovations.

Firebug,
Checked out much recent Wilson scholarship? Most in the academy under 50 (especially historians) hate his guts. Resegregating DC pretty much earns emnity in this day and age – a big shift since the 50s when his stock was high.

The worst president in American history is Woodrow Wilson. No Wilsonian interventionism = no Treaty of Versailles = no Hitler. Kind of hard to top that.

You can’t blame a US president for the actions of Hitler. Responsibility there rests with Hitler.

If you must blame a US President FDR is more proximate. He was the leader of the most powerful nation in the world but did nothing at Munich.

Compared with Neville Chamberlain FDR comes off second best. Chamberlain was able to lead his country to war with Germany in September 1939. FDR was unable to get his country to declare war on Germany until two-and-a-quarter years later after – get this – Hitler had already declared war on Germany. Weak as water!

Syd Webb is utterly misguided in his position because you cannot separate war casualties from the question of blame.

You can and I did. Wilson fought a world war and his troops inflected 100,000 casualties. Truman fought a police action – Korea – and killed four million. Completely disproportionate.

Now you can argue that the holocaust in Korea was justified in anti-communist terms. Yet when Hitler fought communism – he called it Judeo-Bolshevism – there were 25 million Soviet citizens killed, 3 million of them Jewish, as well as 3 million Jews of other nationalities.

No, when talking about mega-deaths I have little time with ends-justifies-the means arguments. I don’t believe that good intentions take you off your Hell-bound path.

Besides, I offer a simple metric for Presidential badness: How many people did their servants kill? Just a question of looking at the scoreboard. No quibbles about was the goal well-kicked or forced; whether the touchdown was brilliantly executed or fumbled.

It’s an impartial metric whereas Firebug’s approach is whimsical, effectively – “I like Nixon, I don’t like Wilson.”

My metric may not be to everyone’s taste – if you don’t think presidents should hold hands with their wives in public then Jimmy Carter is the Worst. President. Ever.

But my metric is objective – Firebug’s approach is purely subjective.

Nixon? Body count? Thought he got USA out of Vietnam after the Democrats had embroiled the nation in that war.

Still killed more people than Johnson.

Johnson could have made peace in late ‘68 but for Nixon’s sabotage. As it was Nixon went on to invade Cambodia and Laos, drop more bombs on these countries and Vietnam than were dropped in all of WWII only to come up in 1973 with the same peace terms that were on offer in 1968. North Vietnamese forces were even allowed to remain in the South. No wonder that after a decent interval South Vietnam fell.

The shrub is a distant number two. Buchanan and Pierce were pretty bad, but the Civil War was really inevitable since the South wasn’t willing to accept anything but total capitulation to the Slave Power. Yes, they could have done much more. Hoover was guilty mostly of failing to think outside the box. Keynesian remedies simply weren’t in the mental universe of government leaders at the time. It took a true innovator (FDR) to put them there. But that proves that FDR was unusually good, not that Hoover was unusually bad.

Grant and Harding shouldn’t even be in the ten worst. Their petty corruption (nothing compared to the shrub’s) did no lasting damage, and they had legitimate offsetting accomplishments (Harding pardoned Eugene Debs and sponsored anti-lynching legislation; Grant fought hard against KKK terrorism).

Syd Webb is utterly misguided in his position because you cannot separate war casualties from the question of blame. We’re responsible for Iraq II casualties because we started the war with no good reason. WWII, on the other hand, started when the Japanese attacked us and Hitler then followed up by declaring war, and it was already a total war when Truman whipped out the A-bomb. No U.S. president would, could, or should have done anything differently. Furthermore, the bomb saved lives because the alternative would have been a bloody ground invasion that would have killed millions rather than mere hundreds of thousands. And the Soviets might have gotten a big chunk of Japan, and who knows what future horrors Stalin might have done there. Given that Japan is today a peaceful, prosperous democracy in large part due to our reconstruction, I’m willing to give FDR and Truman the benefit of the doubt. Somehow I’m less optimistic about Iraq turning out that way.

Well, Bush does have a way to go to beat Buchanan and Nixon, in terms of US body count

Barry, I like your way of thinking. Here in Australia we have an expression, “Look at the scoreboard!” and as a way of measuring badness numbers of kills is hard to top.

However, being unAmerican a foreigner I’m more inclined to look at the human body count, rather than just US dead. Looking at the death tolls of each president and their armed forces ISTM that Harry S Truman is the worst, followed by Richard M Nixon, Lyndon B Johnson and Franklin D Roosevelt.

[To be pre-emptive I have no time for those who would seek to justify the presidential slaughters on the grounds that the other side started it or was bad. You might not start a war but you certainly get to choose how you fight it. Woodrow Wilson fought a world war with very few American-inflicted civilian casualties.]

When nobody really knew just how much we could do before we had to pull back, we had a position of strength. Right now we couldn’t disarm a Boy Scout Jamboree, and the whole world knows it. I doubt that even Iran fears a ground invasion at this point. The troops to do it simply don’t exist, and bombs, even nukes don’t guarantee destroying a weapons program.