All-time presidential rankings

[DavidGee24]

Maybe we ought to think more about
todays President. He's the one that
counts.

We mean like we all already do? Thanks for the reminder.

[DavidGee24]

Oh, and just so we're clear on this, I stomped Moe...as always.

[Donn Beach]

I was just perusing through different historical rankings of all the presidents in US history, presumably by folks who know a hell of lot more than I or any of us here do.

So basically, in combining various sources for rankings we have four "quadrants" of presidents.

Top quadrant:
Washington
Jefferson
Madison
Jackson
Lincoln (most have him #1 all-time)
Teddy Roosevelt
Wilson
FDR
Truman
Eisenhower
Reagan
The biggest surprise here for me was Jackson. I figured he'd lose a lot of points for The Trail Of Tears, but on the other hand this was a man who let someone shoot him first in a duel and then capped the poor shlub, survived the first assassination attempt of a US president because the assailant's gun was too scared to fire bullets at him knowing it would just piss him off (justified when Jackson then beat the crap out of the assailant), and later expressed regret for not hanging John Calhoun...his vice president. When Teddy Roosevelt looks at your portrait and says, "Now THERE was a sumbitch I wouldn't want to tangle with", you get top-quadrant status.

Second quadrant:
Adams
Monroe
Quincy Adams
Polk
Cleveland
McKinley
JFK
LBJ
HW Bush
Clinton
Obama
Ha ha, Obama in the second quadrant. That by itself is going to make this thread a lot more fun to see unfold. And I'm pleased to see HW Bush here, I got to meet him in The Gulf War and in one of the issues of Time Magazine from November (26th?) of 1990 I'm in a picture standing on top of a cargo box about 25 feet from him as he's addressing the troops.

Third quadrant:
Van Buren
Hayes
Garfield
Arthur
B. Harrison
Taft
Coolidge
Nixon
Ford
Carter
W Bush
How do you give Garfield any kind of rating when he got capped six months into office? And how in the world is someone with the name "Calvin Coolidge" a WHITE guy?

Fourth quadrant:
WH Harrison
Tyler
Taylor
Fillmore
Pierce
Buchanan
A. Johnson
Grant
Harding
Hoover
Trump
Trump in the fourth quadrant, that'll go over like a fart in a two-man horse costume here. This is why it's not only important to be a US president, but to act like a US president. And as with Garfield, how do you rate Harrison, who croaked from pneumonia 31 days after he took office? Just how much bad could he have done in that time, minus the time he was bedridden? Did he send the entire US Army to invade Bouvet Island? "Well, they should be easy to beat."

reading a biography of Garfield, i guess other than the fact he was assassinated six months into his presidency its hard to really fault the guy. He was an exceedingly intelligence man, rose from utter poverty to the presidency, progressive in his thinking, might have made a great president after the assassination of Lincoln. Its interesting the effect of assassination has on history

[D-train]

What is amazing is that he was assassinated after Lincoln. Did they not consider beefing up the secret service team after the night at the theater????

[DavidGee24]

What is amazing is that he was assassinated after Lincoln. Did they not consider beefing up the secret service team after the night at the theater????

Not only that, but 20 years after Garfield, McKinley was assassinated in similar fashion. By that time there was security but McKinley eschewed it because he wanted to shake hands with people. Admirable but he badly underestimated the drive and will of crackpots.

reading a biography of Garfield, i guess other than the fact he was assassinated six months into his presidency its hard to really fault the guy. He was an exceedingly intelligence man, rose from utter poverty to the presidency, progressive in his thinking, might have made a great president after the assassination of Lincoln. Its interesting the effect of assassination has on history

Yeah, there's much more of a question on what history would have been like if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated due to the turbulence of the time (in Garfield's time pretty much the only thing going on was The Wild West), but if Garfield isn't killed Arthur is never president and if Garfield was then re-elected possibly Cleveland as well. From there things probably settle back into what they ended up being, but you never know.

The biggest what-if of course is how would history have unfolded if Gavrilo Princip hadn't assassinated Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914. Does World War I still happen? If war does still break out anyway, is it more localized without the US getting involved? And if so with Germany not being defeated, does Hitler not rise to power, thus averting World War II since there's probably no European war, no Holocaust, and Japan likely doesn't dare attack the US without Nazi support? Does the Japanese empire expand unchecked as a result? And without the damage done to Russia, how does Stalin's legacy unfold? And, most importantly, what does the rock band Franz Ferdinand end up calling themselves?

Princip, who lived until 1918 and thus saw what he sparked, might well have been in part responsible for many millions of deaths. Amazing what an impact some random squirmy runt like he or Lee Harvey Oswald can have on human history.

[D-train]

What is amazing is that he was assassinated after Lincoln. Did they not consider beefing up the secret service team after the night at the theater????

Not only that, but 20 years after Garfield, McKinley was assassinated in similar fashion. By that time there was security but McKinley eschewed it because he wanted to shake hands with people. Admirable but he badly underestimated the drive and will of crackpots.

reading a biography of Garfield, i guess other than the fact he was assassinated six months into his presidency its hard to really fault the guy. He was an exceedingly intelligence man, rose from utter poverty to the presidency, progressive in his thinking, might have made a great president after the assassination of Lincoln. Its interesting the effect of assassination has on history

Yeah, there's much more of a question on what history would have been like if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated due to the turbulence of the time (in Garfield's time pretty much the only thing going on was The Wild West), but if Garfield isn't killed Arthur is never president and if Garfield was then re-elected possibly Cleveland as well. From there things probably settle back into what they ended up being, but you never know.

The biggest what-if of course is how would history have unfolded if Gavrilo Princip hadn't assassinated Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914. Does World War I still happen? If war does still break out anyway, is it more localized without the US getting involved? And if so with Germany not being defeated, does Hitler not rise to power, thus averting World War II since there's probably no European war, no Holocaust, and Japan likely doesn't dare attack the US without Nazi support? Does the Japanese empire expand unchecked as a result? And without the damage done to Russia, how does Stalin's legacy unfold? And, most importantly, what does the rock band Franz Ferdinand end up calling themselves?

Princip, who lived until 1918 and thus saw what he sparked, might well have been in part responsible for many millions of deaths. Amazing what an impact some random squirmy runt like he or Lee Harvey Oswald can have on human history.

Interesting that historians named that event after Bobby Thompson's HR off Ralph Branca.

[D-train]

Taking it a few steps further there is no Holocaust, no Israeli state, no Israeli Arab conflict, no assassination of RFK, no Islamic terrorist groups, no 911 no Iraq WAR, no WAR in Afghanistan. (I just realized I put war in all Caps because I am so used to typing baseball WAR.) lol

[DavidGee24]

Isn't that something? Conflicts of course are still going to break out, probably elsewhere, but chances are there are probably a lot less people alive in the world right now and a lot more people throughout history have died horribly because some 19 year old whose friends had failed in the earlier assassination attempt happened to walk out of a deli and right into the path of Ferdinand's car which happened to change its route after the first attempt. Dumb luck (Ferdinand was the Steven Earl Parent of his time) and it ended up being possibly the biggest alteration of world history.

[Donn Beach]

Yeah, there's much more of a question on what history would have been like if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated due to the turbulence of the time (in Garfield's time pretty much the only thing going on was The Wild West

the only thing going on?...there was this thing called "Reconstruction", the process of trying to bring the country back together. Lincoln had a plan, that though difficult could have had a dramatic effect on the course of history. I think a lot of the issues this country faces today, lack of development in the south, civil rights, black resentment, the issues of the '60's stem from the failed Reconstruction under Johnson rather than Lincoln.

Andrew Johnson’s first task after taking over as President was to reconcile his divided country. In origin a poor white Southerner, Johnson’s feelings towards blacks were at best mixed. He was certainly more concerned with the maintenance of the constitution than the abolition of slavery. When in 1866 laws were passed to protect the rights of ex-slaves, Johnson vetoed them as unconstitutional. His own plans for reconstruction were frustrated by his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton and others within his cabinet.

Even when Johnson eventually freed the slaves it was a botched job. The decision as to how to cope with emancipation was left in the hands of white Southerners and the result was a series of repressive ‘Black Codes’ that made mockery of the rights of the former slaves. A century and a half later, many African Americans still feel themselves second class citizens in a white society and many in the South remain resentful of the North. It is ironic that the last dying kick of the Confederacy should have resulted in such a repressive post-bellum regime as would hold back the advancement of the South for decades.

It could all have been very different. At his second inaugural speech only six weeks before his death President Lincoln had urged,

With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

And what he proclaimed publicly he affirmed privately. At a cabinet meeting on the morning of his assassination Lincoln said of his former enemies,

I hope there will be no persecution, no bloody work after the war is over. No one need expect me to take part in hanging or killing those men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off, enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union.

[D-train]

I watched the movie Lincoln last night. Good reminder that he had to fight like hell to get Dem votes for the Emancipation Proclamation. Great movie.