With his reign coming to an end, Chris Game asks if George W Bush is the worst ever president.
Everyone knows the W in the 43rd President’s name is to distinguish him from his father: George Bush, the 41st President.
But some, unaware that it is actually his grandfather’s name, Walker, believe it stands for “Worse” – as in worse even than his father.
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And there is growing speculation that it could be “Worst” – as in worst US President in history.
There is serious competition, but in this contest he’s got my vote.
First, though, the judgments of the professionals – as in those regular surveys asking academic historians to rank mainly dead statesmen in terms of their achievements and leadership qualities.
British Prime Ministerial lists are invariably headed by some permutation of Attlee, Churchill, Lloyd George, and – depending on the Conservatism of the assessors – Thatcher. At the bottom are usually the quartet of Eden, Douglas-Home, Neville Chamberlain and Balfour, just edging out John Major.
Interestingly, British academics are rarely asked to include even 19th century figures – possibly because it is suspected we won’t know enough about them. Americans, however, are assumed capable of pronouncing upon all 40-plus presidents.
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They too produce a predictable top trio of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and George Washington, followed by Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. But, as in the Premier League, it’s the relegation skirmish that is more absorbing.
In 12 of these academic rankings since 1948, there is no conclusive agreement on the worst-ever president.
With several listings pre-dating the disgraced Richard Nixon and almost all excluding George W, there seem four main candidates: chronologically, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding.
All four feature in the top six in at least 11 of the 12 lists and all but Pierce head at least one. To understand these rankings – Lincoln’s position as most frequent “Best Ever President” as well as those of several worst-ever candidates – we must remember that for Americans the overwhelmingly most important event in US history was the Civil War in the early 1860s.
Lincoln, the first president elected for the new anti-slavery Republican Party, won the war. He saved the Union by defeating the 11 southern Confederate secessionist states, was thus responsible for the Constitutional abolition of slavery and was then martyred by an assassin’s bullet before he had to deal with too much of the contentious business of Union reconstruction.
We’ll hear rather less about his stretching of presidential constitutional powers in order to prosecute the war, his spending money without Congressional approval and, above all, his imprisonment without trial of thousands of Confederate sympathisers – at least 20 times the number detained in Guantánamo.
Similarly, several candidates for worst-ever president can blame their dire modern-day rankings on having got the one thing for which they are remembered badly wrong, especially in events surrounding the Civil War.
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Take Franklin Pierce (1853-57). Apparently a thoroughly pleasant, inoffensive cove, Pierce was another lawyer-turned-politician – from a state, New Hampshire, that had abolished slavery way back in the 1780s.
He didn’t need to advertise his abolitionist credentials and, when the 1852 Democratic Nominating Convention became irreconcilably deadlocked, Pierce proved the least unacceptable compromise candidate, winning his party’s presidential nomination on the 49th ballot. Less threatening to southern slave owners than his Whig Party opponent, he was comfortably elected as, at 48, the then youngest-ever president. So far, so good. But Pierce’s unique reputation point was the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and he blew it – through appearing weak, indecisive and too conciliatory.
Pierce was succeeded by James Buchanan (1857-61), also a northern Democrat with southern sympathies. Another compromise candidate, Buchanan’s prime attraction was being completely untainted by Kansas-Nebraska, having been in England throughout the dispute. He had, though, the biggest Unique Reputation Point of them all. He presided over the growing north-south schism and failed to prevent the secession of the southern states and the ensuing Civil War. Secession, he declared, was illegal, but so too would be intervening to stop it. So, calamitously for his long-term reputation, he did nothing.
Enter Lincoln then, following his assassination, Vice-President Andrew Johnson (1865-69).
Johnson, a Governor of Tennessee, was a man of some integrity with a creditable political record. The only southern US Senator not to resign following his state’s secession, he became an important War Democrat, supporting Lincoln and joining him on a National Unity Party ticket when he was re-elected in 1864. But Lincoln’s death left Johnson in charge of reconstruction without any real political support. Following Lincoln’s own reconciliatory instincts – pardons for many Confederate leaders and swift readmission for secessionist states – he outraged a Congress dominated by northern hardliners demanding tougher punishment and more grovelling.
Worse, he clashed with Congress over their respective veto powers, thereby inviting his killer URP: an impeachment trial. Charged essentially with attempting unconstitutionally to override Congress, he was eventually narrowly acquitted in the Senate.
But, until Bill Clinton’s alleged perjury and obstruction of justice over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Johnson’s reputation rested for over a century almost solely on his being the only president to be impeached.
Yet if any Presidential record deserved impeachment, it was surely not Johnson’s political or Clinton’s sexual recklessness, but the Harding Administration’s rampant corruption.
Warren Harding (1921-23) looked and even sounded presidential, but the ‘Ohio Gang’ he appointed to senior government posts operated like aspiring Al Capones.
They were charged variously with fraud, conspiracy, giving and receiving bribes, illicit alcohol and drug distribution, and – in what, following his death, became Harding’s personal URP – leasing government oil field rights to personal friends.
And oil fields, of course, bring us right back to George W. My thesis is simple. W’s rivals for worst-ever president mostly earned their reputations by screwing up one really big thing in their only term of office.
W, however, over two terms, has screwed up many, many big things: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Western Alliance, Guantánamo, human rights, torture, the Constitution, the economy, the national debt, Hurricane Katrina, the Kyoto Protocol, climate change, the environment, global population control, national morale.
I’m out of space, but surely the title has to be his.
* Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham