This study actually surprises people? I thought I remembered a similar study after his first term stating the same thing. Obviously he will go down as one of the worst presidents ever, no question. The real historical debate should be which was worse his first term or his second term....
Except it was much worse under Carter, higher inflation, higher unemployment, higher interest rate, bad oil problem. Americans were so much worse off during that time. But people usually have short memory, apparently they already forgot what's it like to buy a house and pay 18% mortgage rate.
I agree completely. I'm certainly no fan of GWB, but historians talking about the success of a presidency not yet finished is just funny.
If in anyway you can be compared to carter, it means you screwed up bad. I don't know how this clown was elected twice.
its not too early to rate the bush presidency. it can be summed up by one event. Katrina. totally unprepared.
I have trouble understanding how anyone who hasn't completely bought the "the Republicans are the party of God and country and they save babies and stop gay marriage", or people with a lot invested in defense industry stocks could still be defending Bush. He is terrible if you are liberal or a libertarian because he has shredded the constitution, he is terrible if you are a fiscal conservative because he spends like a drunken democrat. He's probably even terrible for worshippers of the fortune 500 because the stock market is in the crapper. I won't be voting for McCain and will actively support the Democratic nominee, but honestly compared to this fruitbat McCain would look like Lincoln. Is there really anything anyone could like about Baby Bush, other than he is a reasonably genial baseball fan who at least pays lip service to being Christian.
Maybe enough Americans thought their lives under Bush were pretty good? And get ready for Carter #2 when Obama gets into the office.
And let us not forget: Extraordinary rendition by the United States Plame Affair + Lewis Libby clemency controversy U.S.-China Spy Plane Incident Downing Street memo Coalition of the willing No Child Left Behind Act Mission Accomplished While W's Presidency is not yet over, W has dug a mighty deep hole. Opinions of some of the above missteps may softened with time, while others will likely only get worse.
thumbs, with all due respect, Jack Kennedy had not committed large American forces to the Vietnam theatre prior to his murder and not only had doubts about the wisdom of a conflict there dating back to 1951, but intended to withdraw the 16,500 troops we had there... Left - Congressman Kennedy on an inspection tour of the Boston waterfront. Right - In 1951, JFK (in rear) in Vietnam on a fact finding tour with the French. Kennedy was critical of U.S. support of the French there, saying, "We have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire." http://www.historyplace.com/kennedy/politician.htm This is an excerpt from CNN's Perspective series on the Cold War. It uses information from this: The National Security Archive is a non-governmental, non-profit organization founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who sought a centralized home for formerly secret U.S. government documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The National Security Archive is proud to have had the opportunity to make a substantial contribution to the Cold War series. INTERVIEW WITH ROGER HILSMAN INT: It's June the eighth and I'm interviewing Roger Hilsman, for the Cold War series, first of all the program about Vietnam. So, if we can start off, can I ask you first, what was President Kennedy's attitude to Vietnam? Why did he choose Vietnam as a place to make a stand? ROGER HILSMAN: He did not choose to make Vietnam a stand, that's the whole point. The long answer is that Kennedy was a Catholic, Ngu Dinh Diem was a Catholic, the President of Vietnam and when Ngu Dinh Diem became President of Vietnam, American Catholics generally thought that this was a wonderful hero and should be backed. He came out there... Kennedy went out to Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer and met as a young congressman, I should say, and met a young Foreign Service officer who was the head of their action section in the embassy. And this guy said that he didn't believe that a Catholic, surrounded by Catholics in a country that was ninety five per cent Bhuddist was going to make it, and this shook Kennedy, as a very young congressman, a great deal. And many years later when he had decided... I mean, he used to say to me - I was Assistant Secretary for the Far East, so I was in charge of Vietnam - and he used to say to me, we'll do everything we can to help them, but we will not fight, we will not send an American soldier to fight. And I said, well, you know, I said, I agree with you, but why did you reach this conclusion, 'cos he knew nothing about (unintelligible), he told me this story that he'd been out in Vietnam as a young congressman and the man who influenced him became a great friend, but he said, I've thought about that very deeply and we'll give 'em all the help we can, all the aid, all the arms, but we won't fight there. INT: So presumably he was torn against making an anti-Communist stand... RH: (Interrupts) Well, what I'm trying to suggest is that Kennedy started off as a young man, a young congressman, very pro-Ngu Dinh Diem, shaken as a young congressman in this belief that Ngu Dinh Diem could win and then the whole business of the Bay of Pigs, if that had not happened first, it might have been different. But Kennedy kept saying, you know, how can I ask the American people to fight in Vietnam, nine thousand miles away and not fight in Cuba ninety miles away? So he was determined to give all the help he could, but not to fight. And as I say, he learned. The one thing about Jack Kennedy, all the Kennedys, were that they learned. He started off being kind of a Hawk on Vietnam. He then decided that it wasn't a go, you know, that it was a morass and a swamp, he decided then to gi... but he made it clear to me - I was Assistant Secretary, so I was in charge of Asia, including Vietnam - and he made it very clear to me that your job is to do everything you can to help the Vietnamese, but not get us into a war and some of the worst situations that I had with him were just because of that. One day, for example, the New York Times, with malice aforethought, had two little boxes on the front page, one of them - this was before there were any American troops there, you know, - one of them says 'American general visits Vietnam' some brigadier general, and the other little box says, 'South Vietnamese forces lose the battle at Upok '. Well, Kennedy called me up and just screamed, before breakfast he called me, when he was reading the paper and he could be quite profane and he was quite profane over this and he said, why did you let that blankety blank blank blank general go out there, don't you know we want to keep as low a profile as we can, why did you allow that? And when he paused for breath, I said, look, Mr. President, I'm Assistant Secretary of State, not Defense, I didn't know there was any general going out there, nobody told me this. And he said, oh, and bam went the phone. Well, that afternoon, a National Security memorandum came out and it's very straightforward. It said, no officer of general or flag rank will visit Vietnam without the written permission of the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, which was me. INT: What sort of conflict did he envisage it was going to be, was this... RH: Did what? INT: What sort of conflict did Kennedy envisage it was going to be? There was this counter-insurgency idea. RH: Well, as I say, he went through several stages on Vietnam, you know, I mean he... originally what... you must remember that the very first thing that happened, Ngu Dinh Diem asks for help and so Kennedy sends out General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to visit the country. They come back and in their recommendation, top secret, is not only do we give them a lot of aid, but we sent ten thousand American troops out there to form a fence, you see, between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. and Kennedy had that stricken from their cable and tried to prevent it from being circulated within the government, American government. I had a fight about that, because I was Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and I was cut out, I wasn't allowed to see it and when I heard about it, I yelled bloody murder but he was determined not to get involved with American troops. No bombing, no ground forces, and so long as he was alive, that was the policy. Then, towards the end of his life, in the fall of '63, he beat McNamara to beat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a withdrawal plan. At that time, we had only sixteen thousand five hundred Americans in the country, they were not troops, they were advisers and the plan, which was finally approved in the fall of '63, was to withdraw those, all of them. And the only troops... only people we'd have had there would be marine guards, ten of them, for the embassy. Before Kennedy was killed, the first thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn. If Kennedy had lived, the other sixteen thousand five hundred or fifteen thousand five hundred would have been withdrawn within three or four months. INT: So you're pretty convinced then that Kennedy wanted to end the war? RH: It's not that I'm convinced. This was... the documents are there, you see, and I didn't say he wanted to end the war, he said he wanted to withdraw from it. First of all, from the beginning, he was determined that it not be an American war, that he would not bomb the North, he would not send troops. But then after …you remember the Buddhist crisis in the spring of '63, this convinced Kennedy that Ngu Dinh Diem had no chance of winning and that we best we get out. So, he used that as an excuse, beat on McNamara to beat on the JCS to develop a withdrawal plan. The plan was made, he approved the plan and the first one thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred were withdrawn before Kennedy was killed. If he had lived, the other sixteen thousand would have been out of there within three or four months. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/hilsman1.html Roger Hilsman wasn't pulling this out of his hat, being deeply involved at the time. We also have declassified documents proving that Jack Kennedy was beginning a pullout shortly before his death: No, it wasn't JFK's war. Truman began aid to Vietnam before the French left. Ike continued and expanded that aid. Kennedy didn't come into office looking at Vietnam and operating in a vacuum. He had visited Vietnam in 1951 as a young congressman. We already had an American policy providing aid under the two previous Presidents. If anything, Kennedy's death prevented American withdrawal of the limited forces we had there and allowed LBJ his great foreign policy disaster... massive intervention in Southeast Asia. No, if one insists on calling it the war of a particular President, that President was Lyndon Johnson, not Jack Kennedy. Lyndon and Tricky Dick Nixon, who caused us more casualties "ending it" than LBJ had caused fighting it. Trim Bush.
Yes but intentions <<< results And my post reflected the results. I am not hating on JFK though. 16K is a bit less than our total commitment (Thats a joke)
No offense Deckard as I recall you posting that info before. I will point out what I've said before. Whether JFK agreed to withdraw 1K troops that would still leave 15K troops in and whatever he might've thought privately he still ramped up troop numbers in Vietnam. Its very speculative that JFK would've pulled the US out of Vietnam especially considering that he was a committed cold warrior.
To be fair he has accomplished quite abit, large tax cuts passed, getting two war resolutions passed, preventing an early withdrawl of US troops, getting two USSC justices onto the court including a Chief Justice, creating the Department of Homeland Security, limiting civil liberties, not being vetoed for 6 years and winning two elections. The fact that most of us don't like those accomplishments and think they have actually harmed the US doesn't mean he didn't get them accomplished. In terms of getting what they wanted passed the Bush Admin has actually been fairly successful and probably more successful than any Admin. since Nixon.
Simply...WTF? Experts have been warning us for decades that we are totally unprepared for a major disaster. If Katrina had happened during the Clinton administration...hell...even during the Johnson administration, we would have been equally unprepared.
Michael Brown the horse judge with no emergency management experience who lied on his resume as FEMA Director was a point of failure unique to dubbya. It is reasonable to assume the aftermath of Katrina could have been handled 100x better by an agency directed by someone appointed for something other than ideological soundness, like someone who actually was experienced in disaster management. Nobody could have prevented the damage, but the triage and response was undeniably uniquely inept.
