One might view posting this today, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, as being in questionable taste. I would argue that it is the perfect day to consider the legacy of President #35, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963).
For JFK was saved from historical infamy by moral luck, once for certain, and maybe twice. The first was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a culmination of blunders that could have started World War III and would have, if a less rational Soviet leader had been Kennedy’s adversary. The second was the assassination, recalling snide comments by various wags that the early deaths of Elvis and Truman Capote were “good career moves.” Kennedy’s death transformed him into an icon, frozen in youth and vitality, a brilliant leader whose death caused darkness to fall. In truth, Kennedy’s three years in office were marked by few successes and serious mistakes that outlived him, like his continuing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In an era in which the news media were less inclined to keep secrets for a President, JFK might have been impeached. His obsessive adulterous escapades endangered national security: among his many conquests were a Mob moll and an Israeli spy.
Kennedy cannot be fairly judged one of the worst Presidents, however, because he filled the crucial role of President as Symbol of America and the living flag as well or batter than all but a few modern Presidents, in a small group that includes FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Obama. This, plus the fact that he had less than three years to add something positive beyond the Peace Corps and the space program to his legacy, takes him out of the Worst President race.
Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.
#36, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969), also doesn’t make the cut. For all the pain and national scarring the Vietnam War inflicted, Johnson didn’t start it (or end it), and few Presidents, maybe none, would have been able to successfully negotiate the cultural A-Bomb of the Sixties.
Anyone who doubts LBJ’s effectiveness should listen to the archived phone tapes of his personal maneuvering, cajoling and threatening former Congressional associates to get his Civil Rights bill passed. For some reason historians like to say that Kennedy, if he lived, would have signed a similar law; that’s a dubious assumption. Kennedy probably wouldn’t have won in 1964 by a landslide: Nelson Rockefeller might have been the next President, and it was the Southern Democrats, Johnson’s cronies, who were the main obstacles to civil rights. You don’t have to agree, with the benefit of hindsight, with all of “The Great Society” to agree that Johnson was one of our most skilled Presidents, though a flawed and unlucky one.
Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.
Now, at last, we come to a genuine contender for Worst President Ever: Richard Milhous Nixon, #37 (1968-1974). Even he’s problematic: although he is the only President so far who would have been legitimately impeached and convicted, Nixon was, before the Watergate conspiracy, another very skilled and effective President. He was one of our smartest White House residents (but then so was Wilson), and understood the office from the start as few have. Nixon had many important policy achievements as well, and those accomplishments came in the teeth of strong opposition and bias from the news media (though nothing as extreme as Republican Presidents have faced in this century), and almost unanimous hate from an entire generation.
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