The Most Decent US Presidents

Ike is one of the greats... far above decent...

Decent Presidents:

Monroe
John Q. Adams
Garfield
Taft
Coolidge
JFK (imo vastly overrated due to his assassination)
Ford
Clinton

And no Carter is a turd sandwich in the punchbowl... probably the worst president we've ever had.
 
I'm not sure what "decent" means. FDR wasn't decent, he was a devious man, but he accomplished "decent" (i.e., great as well as compassionate and principled things). Our worst president was the Klansman & Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson--if he'd prepared the country for war earlier it would have ended earlier and no Bolshevik revolution and probably no Hitler. And he screwed up royally with the peace treaty, all his fake idealism and total lack of understanding of Europe. Far worse than Jimmy Carter because far more was at stake.

I guess the word "decent" fits Grant and Eisenhower. Grant was president at a time when there was nothing to be done but protect civil rights gains, but here history was against him. Eisenhower was a president when times were good--and Truman had done the heavy lifting on the Cold War already. Ike could have been right up there with Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Truman--he had the intellect, character and emotional balance--but there was no major crisis so he remains just in the top 10.

A more interesting question would be: who were (a) the smartest presidents; and (b) the presidents with the best judgement. And how much overlap would there be?
 
A more interesting question would be: who were (a) the smartest presidents
I don't think you'd see too many people disagree that Jefferson was the smartest man to serve as president. Garfield, Kennedy, and Clinton were also brilliant, and honestly, we've had few (if any) truly unintelligent presidents.

and (b) the presidents with the best judgement.
I'd say Polk and McKinley are the winners there, neither of whom are considered great (except among a core of modern right-wing types like myself), but both of whom made brilliant strategic decisions that were largely responsible for America's place in today's world. And obviously Lincoln and FDR.

And how much overlap would there be?
Probably not a whole lot. I mean, the greatest are both, but most people--and most presidents--are one or the other (or neither, of course).
 
I don't think you'd see too many people disagree that Jefferson was the smartest man to serve as president. Garfield, Kennedy, and Clinton were also brilliant, and honestly, we've had few (if any) truly unintelligent presidents.

Jefferson was a genius as an architect and as a writer (his personal letters comprise one of the great achievements of American literature). He made the right decisions as President on the Louisiana Purchase, the Bill of Rights and the founding of West Point (so he was truly a great pres). But in some other ways he wasn't so smart and didn't have good judgement. Apart from his knee-jerk views on black folks and on slavery, he had a fatuous naivete about the Jacobins who highjacked the French Revolution--and his vision of an agrarian America and his dislike of commerce and industry were likewise kind of, er, limited.

Presidents with the best judgment: I'd say Washington, Polk, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower. Not Lincoln; although a great President, he made too many mistakes, especially in dealing with his military commanders. Smartest presidents: Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Eisenhower, TR. People forget that Ike was one of the U.S. Army's top intellectuals (military intellectual, not in other respects) before WW II, and that he was better educated than most presidents thanks to Fox Conner and the Army Staff College. And there's a reason Crusade in Europe is just about the most quoted book about the war against Hitler.

Re Clinton, I'm not convinced he's all that bright except in emotional IQ. As to Kennedy, if he really wrote Why England Slept he was smart as hell--but I don't think he wrote it, and nothing in his life thereafter would suggest he was the kind of intellectual who could produce a book as brilliant as that. His daddy made him president.

So it comes down to Ike who best blends smarts with judgement. If I'm wrong about Lincoln's judgement, and some people would think I am, then you have Ike and Lincoln. But if you throw the third element into the hopper, emotional balance, then you're left with Ike. The type of crisis that he would have been best at handling, however, never came along in the 1950s, and for that we can be grateful since it probably would have involved a horrific showdown with the Soviets.

Ike got to be the right man at the right time in the right place ONCE in his life. And once is enough for anyone. Or maybe the fact that there WAS no crisis in the 1950s suggests that he indeed did it twice. Sometimes greatness comes from maneuvering to avoid crises rather than dealing with them after they've metastasized, and thus the leader's role becomes almost invisible to historians.
 
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JFK did write Why England Slept by himself. He did very little of the research collection himself (UK party manifestos of all 3 parties from all the interwar elections- 1922/3/4/9/31/35- shipped free of charge to the US, plus typists to meet deadlines) but the writing was all him. It was graded one notch below summa cum laude, the exact Latin escapes me at the moment. Profiles was 50-60% ghostwritten according to his authoritative biographer Bob Dallek.

I agree on Ike, but Clinton's a Rhodes Scholar and very wonkish. I think you underestimate him.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Democratic sympathizer by any stretch of the imagination.
 
I once read a biography of Kennedy which essentially claimed that he was an intellectual light weight, that his older brother Joe Jr. was far more intelligent than he was. It did argue that "Why England slept" was an inferior thesis project that would have failed without the influence of his father. It claimed that Kennedy's notes on Profiles in Courage prove that he didn't have the intellectual capacity to actually provide any of the text therein. The copy I read seemed to be in dire need of proofreading. The level of typos in it was astounding. I believe it was called A Question of Character and it was a hatchet job on a far worse level than Darkside of Camelot.
 
You're reading the RL trollish horseshit. Read Bob Dallek, Richard Reeves or Kearns Goodwin for the real stuff. Joe Jr. was the "All-American" of the 4 brothers, undoubtedly. He was a conformist in all matters except intellectual, like Bobby. Nixon, among others, (who knew both brothers quite well) thought RFK was the smartest of the bunch. Undoubtedly he had the highest EQ. Jack's IQ was 117 if you're interested. I haven't seen numbers for the other 2, but I operate on the assumption that all 3 were in the high 110s-low 120s.
 
There's a lot of hand-wringing done over who constitutes being labelled a 'Great' President and who was simply terrible. But what about a list of Presidents for whom greatness was always out of reach, but who succeeded in presiding over an administration that was competent, successful to a point and ultimately left the country in slightly better shape?

All terms in this thread are highly subjective, so feel free to dispute others' definitions and explore what AHers think Greatness (and Decentness) actually is.


Arthur-reformed the Civil Service which in those days was quite the feat especially considering his background and who owed politically, I give the credit for real political heuvos.

Fillmore-not a total dink but governed adequately and was instrumental in ensuring the 1850 Compromise happened without him and with Taylor as President instead? I think 1850 could have been really bad for the US.

John Adams-Keeping us out of war in Europe was the appropriate thing to do at the time and it certainly would have been politically expedient for him to go to war. I think he gets a bad rap mostly because of who he followed.
 
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