Jules Witcover: Who’s Worse, Nixon or Bush?
A favorite pastime of political scientists and pollsters is compiling lists of the best presidents. The results vary widely, as the judgments of history conflict with contemporary sentiments. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and F.D.R. always finish high on the lists, with more controversial choices like Truman and Reagan often thrown in.
Currently, however, we’re seeing an outbreak of consensus on the worst: George W. Bush. The Internet is awash with academic tomes, blogs and partisan rants, the condemnation coming often from liberal Democrats but also from such varied figures as that eminent historian, Donald Trump.
Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.
From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon. I say that not simply because he was the first president to resign from office in scandal and disgrace. Well before the Watergate affair that eventually was his undoing, he had compiled a long record of deception, deceit and duplicity.
But the crimes and constitutional breaches of Watergate and Nixon’s obsessive efforts to cover them up went a long way toward immobilizing the executive branch of the government at the critical time when there was a war in Vietnam and great domestic unrest. His successor and ultimate benefactor, Gerald Ford, rightly called the period “our long national nightmare.”
Nixon’s sins basically grew from an unquenchable lust for power. He was determined to hold on to what he had and to get more and more of it, contrived through secrecy and an anything-goes political ethic that in time poisoned much of his five-and-a-half-year presidency.
In the end, the damage done to the nation was arrested by a change in the Oval Office with the elevation of Ford, a man of limited imagination and talents but a sense of good will. The adaptability of the American political system, demonstrated in the orderly transference of presidential power, saw Ford and the country through until the people were able to express their preference for a leader in 1976. Importantly, the Watergate nightmare essentially shook America domestically without more than temporarily impairing her relations with the world.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, who ran in 2000 as a unthreatening “compassionate conservative,” soon encountered a crisis and a fateful opportunity that put him on a different mission. He seized on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to segue from domestic affairs and a legitimate self-defense invasion of Afghanistan to a radical foreign policy of supposedly preventive war in Iraq....
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Currently, however, we’re seeing an outbreak of consensus on the worst: George W. Bush. The Internet is awash with academic tomes, blogs and partisan rants, the condemnation coming often from liberal Democrats but also from such varied figures as that eminent historian, Donald Trump.
Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.
From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon. I say that not simply because he was the first president to resign from office in scandal and disgrace. Well before the Watergate affair that eventually was his undoing, he had compiled a long record of deception, deceit and duplicity.
But the crimes and constitutional breaches of Watergate and Nixon’s obsessive efforts to cover them up went a long way toward immobilizing the executive branch of the government at the critical time when there was a war in Vietnam and great domestic unrest. His successor and ultimate benefactor, Gerald Ford, rightly called the period “our long national nightmare.”
Nixon’s sins basically grew from an unquenchable lust for power. He was determined to hold on to what he had and to get more and more of it, contrived through secrecy and an anything-goes political ethic that in time poisoned much of his five-and-a-half-year presidency.
In the end, the damage done to the nation was arrested by a change in the Oval Office with the elevation of Ford, a man of limited imagination and talents but a sense of good will. The adaptability of the American political system, demonstrated in the orderly transference of presidential power, saw Ford and the country through until the people were able to express their preference for a leader in 1976. Importantly, the Watergate nightmare essentially shook America domestically without more than temporarily impairing her relations with the world.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, who ran in 2000 as a unthreatening “compassionate conservative,” soon encountered a crisis and a fateful opportunity that put him on a different mission. He seized on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to segue from domestic affairs and a legitimate self-defense invasion of Afghanistan to a radical foreign policy of supposedly preventive war in Iraq....