Presidential Rankings

[dazzleman]

I think I would rank Harry Truman higher than he appears on the original list.

While he lacked a real understanding of economics, and pushed hard for left-wing programs that don't work, like price controls and confiscatory taxes against the rich, he had the nads to make a major stand against the Soviet Union, and revolutionized American foreign policy from anything it had been up to that point.

He also broke away from his segragationist southern background to speak up for equal rights for blacks.  I was very impressed with a story that I heard about a soldier who was an American Indian who had been killed in the Korean War.  Because of his background, the cemetery in his local town refused to allow him to be buried there.  Truman was outraged, and had him buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

I think Truman was a pivotal president of the postwar period.

[dazzleman]

It's true that Truman mishandled the internal security issue.  I also don't approve of his hostility toward business, and propensity toward price controls and high taxes.

But he did revolutionalize US foreign policy into taking the first steps to confront communism.  He developed the Marshall Plan and NATO.

I don't think anybody could have prevented the fall of China to the communists without a massive military intervention that would never have received the sustained support of the American public.  The nationalist government was completely ineffectual and corrupt, and Truman was not to blame for that.

[dazzleman]

I think LBJ was great on civil rights, but terrible on everything else, so it's hard to think of him as a "great" president.  LBJ and Nixon are the most conflicted modern presidents, with great strengths and ruinous weaknesses.

As far as Lincoln goes, I'm sure he didn't believe that blacks were equal to whites, but few people, if anybody, believed that back then.

He was radical in the sense that he not only opposed slavery, but wanted to end it.  He thought it evil enough that it had to end, and that was what those in the south could not abide.

It took another 100 years after slavery ended to truly give blacks even a semblance of equal rights,
but Lincoln did make a start with that, when others weren't willing to take the risks he did.

[dazzleman]

LBJ's legislative legacy is far better than his foreign policy legacy.  He passed the most important legislation of the latter 20th century, directly affecting the social make-up of the USA today.

The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Housing Act effectively ended segregation, the Fair Immigration Law of 1965 eliminated the quota system and vastly increased the cultural diversity in the US, and of course Medicare.

The riots and demonstrations are long gone, and what is left from his presidency far better America than it would have been without him.  It's why I put him in my Top Ten list.

LBJ had a great legislative legacy in terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but beyond that I think he did far more harm than good.

I think it's a great tragedy that LBJ followed up on his well-conceived plans to bring blacks into the mainstream with programs that encouraged the poor to rely more heavily on government programs.  Liberalized welfare programs increased dependency, and encouraged the kind of behavior that can only result in poverty.  Black illegitimacy, a strong predictor of poverty and criminality, jumped from 25% in 1965 to 70% today.  LBJ's approach to crime (rehabilitation, not punishment) also helped lead to a tripling of the per-capita crime rate since the early 1960s.

The meltdown of the black family has undone a lot of the good in Johnson's civil rights platform.  And largely because of this, racial separation (I won't call it segregation, since it's not imposed by law) has persisted throughout the country.  Housing laws only go so far when millions of individual decisions, made on the basis of perceived self-interest, lead to continued separation of the races.

I think that if LBJ had backed programs designed to create self-sufficiency rather than dependency, and if his administration had been a little more realistic and a little less idealistic, those he wanted to help would be in a far better position today than they are.