Worst U.S. President and Why?

by Black Man 41 Replies latest jw friends

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  5go

  Tie Bush Jr, Nixon, and Reagan

  Notice No, Bush Sr, Carter, or Ford they had the balls to do the right thing even though it cost them their jobs.
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  darth frosty

  Ya'll just hatin on bush because hes the current president. As we all know history tends to obscure the truth. I mean how can any one forget the antics of William Henry Harrison.
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  5go

  Ya'll just hatin on bush because hes the current president

  No, History is turning on bush I was for him not two years ago.

  That and what he is doing is shinning the light on past presidents that were close to his style of governing.
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  JeffT

  This question is getting old.

  The fundamentalist democrats and people who's idea of "history" runs all the way back to last week will all say Bush. Some of us who have actually studied history, and know that it takes twenty or thirty years for a statment like "history is turning on Bush" to make sense will pick on somebody like Buchanan, Madison, or Hoover.
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  SWALKER

  I guess the question should read, "Worst U.S. President in Modern Times?" We all know the answer to that one!!! I really think that ten years from now we will still be trying to overcome the problems associated with this presidency.

  Swalker
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  5go

  yeah wasn't the guty before licoln the worst really

  http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history On bush as the worst.

• The 10 Worst Presidents US news article on it.

The 10 Worst Presidents:
1. James Buchanan (1857-1861)

By Jay Tolson Posted 2/16/07

A Pennsylvania-born Democrat, deeply devout in his faith and the only bachelor elected to the presidency, Buchanan rejected slavery as an indefensible evil but, like the majority of his party, refused to challenge the constitutionally established order. Even before he became president, he supported the various compromises that made it possible for slavery to spread into the western territories acquired by the Lousiana Purchase and the Mexican War. (Particularly hurtful to the cause of restraining slavery's spread was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, for example, allowed settlers to determine the status of slavery in their proposed state constitutions.) In his inaugural address, the 15th president tacitly encouraged the Supreme Court's forthcoming Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress had no power to keep slavery out of the territories. More damaging to his name, though, was his weak acquiescence before the secessionist tide—an unwillingness to challenge those states that declared their intention to withdraw from the Union after Lincoln's election. Sitting on his hands as the situation spiraled out of control, Buchanan believed that the Constitution gave him no power to act against would-be seceders. To his dying day, he felt that history would treat him favorably for having performed his constitutional duty. He was wrong.

The 10 Worst Presidents:
2. Warren G. Harding (1921-1923)

By Jay Tolson Posted 2/16/07

Warren G. Harding's claim to infamy rests on spectacular ineptitude captured in his own pathetic words: "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." A former newspaperman and publisher who won a string of offices in his native Ohio, he was an unrestrained womanizer noted for his affability, good looks, and implacable desire to please. It was good, his father once told him, that he hadn't been born a girl, "because you'd be in the family way all the time. You can't say no."

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Harding should have said no when Republican Party bosses in the proverbial smoke-filled room (a phrase that originated with this instance) made him their 11th-hour pick for the highest office. He was so reassuringly vague in his campaign declarations that he was understood to support both the foes and the backers of U.S. entry into the League of Nations, the hottest issue of the day. Once in the White House, the 29th president busied himself with golf, poker, and his mistress, while appointees and cronies plundered the U.S. government in a variety of creative ways. (His secretary of the interior allowed oilmen, for a modest under-the-table sum, to tap into government oil reserves, including one in Teapot Dome, Wyo.) "I have no trouble with my enemies," Harding once said, adding that it was his friends who "keep me walking the floor nights." Stress no doubt contributed to his death in office, probably from a stroke. Almost a decade later, his former attorney general called Harding "a modern Abraham Lincoln whose name and fame will grow with time." That time is still a long way off.

The 10 Worst Presidents:
3. Andrew Johnson (1865-1869)

By Jay Tolson Posted 2/16/07

Andrew Johnson has risen in scholarly dis-esteem since the publication of Schlesinger's 1948 poll probably because the post-Civil War Reconstruction has enjoyed athorough scholarly face-lift, and Johnson is now scorned for having resisted Radical Republican policies aimed at securing the rights and well-being of the newly emancipated African-Americans. (Before he was president, historian Woodrow Wilson did a lastingly thorough job of sullying Reconstruction, depicting it as a vindictive program that hurt even repentant southerners.) while benefitting northern opportunists, the so-called Carpetbaggers, and cynical white southerners, or Scalawags, who exploited alliances with blacks for political gain.

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A native North Carolinian of humble origins, Johnson worked as a tailor and eventually settled in Tennessee, where he entered politics as a populist Jackson Democrat. He was elected to several high offices, including U.S. senator. Though no abolitionist, he was a staunch supporter of the Union and the only southerner to retain his seat in the Senate after secession. For his loyalty, Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee, where he set about suppressing Confederates and championing black suffrage. (Tennessee became the first southern state to end slavery by state law.) Lincoln selected him as his running mate in 1864, and Johnson became the 17th president only a month after being sworn in as vice president. Unfortunately, his subsequent battles with Radical Republicans in Congress over a host of Reconstruction measures revealed political ineptitude and an astonishing indifference toward the plight of the newly freed African-Americans. In addition to Vetoing renewal of the Freedman's Bureau and the first civil rights bill, he encouraged opposition to the 14th Amendment. An increasingly nasty power struggle—in which Congress wrongly attempted to strip him of certain constitutionally delegated powers—resulted in the first presidential impeachment and a near conviction. Failing to be renominated, he returned to Tennessee and was again elected to the U.S. Senate. History's current verdict may prove to be overly harsh, but it is fair to say that Johnson did turn a blind eye to those southerners who tried to undo what the Civil War had accomplished.