Why Bush Is Our Most Catastrophic President

Sandy Levinson

I have been taken to task for describing George W. Bush as the most catastrophic president in our history. Part of the critique is that worse catastrophes have happened in other presidential administrations, including, say, the capture and burning of Washington by the British in the War of 1812 or the decimation of the Union army in the early days of the Civil War. One might include Pearl Harbor in this list. Mention has been made of the fact that the 3,000 American dead in Iraq, though of incalculable loss to the families of the deceased, is a quite small number compared to the losses in earlier battles and wars. And so on. So why do I remain convinced that he is indeed our most catastrophic president?

Part of the answer lies simply in the expanded domain for decisionmaking by modern presidents. Michael Lind, in a Washington Post symposium on who have been our worst presidents, educated me as to the truly dreadful nature of the Madison presidency. The War of 1812 was awful, perhaps even catastrophic, in every way. Had the British in fact reconquered the US (and not simply a part of northern Maine, which they gave back), then Madison would obviously have been the hands-down winner of worst and most catastrophic president. But, of course, the US pulled through, albeit ingloriously. So the consequences of Madison's incompetence were relatively minor. And there just wasn't much else that Madison, or any President, could do, for good or for ill. He signed the bill establishing the Second Bank and he vetoed an internal improvements bill. The very fact that most Americans know nothing at all about Madison's presidency suggests that, at the end of the day, it was simply of little significance, one way or the other. And that's true of most 19th century presidencies, because the national government just didn't do much. And if one castigates some of the presidents for their collaboration with slavery, then one can respond that they were simply following the terms of the initial Constitution, a convenant with Death and an agreement with Hell, though some were more eager to live up to that covenant and agreement than others. But no US president comes through with flying colors, including Lincoln, who emphasized in his First Inaugural that he had desire to challenge slavery where it already existed and, indeed, would support an amendment guaranteeing the legal integrity of slavery in perpetuity.


Yes, the losses at Bull Run and elsewhere were catastrophic, but I'm not sure that one can properly blame them on Abraham Lincoln, unless one wants to address the question of whether he should have adopted James Buchanan's policy of declaring secession illegal but, nonetheless, non-prevetable by the national government. We've talked about that earlier, and I actually think there's something to be said for Buchanan's argument. As I've argued earlier, I think main justification for Lincoln's decision to join in going to war--it takes two to tango, after all--is along "humanitarian intervention" grounds emphasizing the necessity of eliminating chattel slavery, but this justification, as I've also argued earlier, calls into question the weakness of the ensuing "reconstruction" that utterly failed to achieve genuine "regime change" and permanently harmed American politics by giving the South even more political power in the long run than it had had prior to the War. So maybe Andrew Johnson is our most "catastrophic President" for his failure to crack down early and hard on the defeated Southern entities.

Incidentally, perhaps James Polk deserves mention, since it was his decision to initiate the Mexican-American War. Still, it's hard to argue that gaining the American Southwest, including California, has disserved the country (in the way that a weak Reconstruction clearly disserved the country, however understandable it is politically).

Perhaps it should be Woodrow Wilson, the most racist president in our history (relative to the cultural possibilities of the time, since, after all Teddy Roosevelt had had Booker Washington to the White House as a guest) and the implementer of America's debatable participation in World War I and then the various catastrophies linked with Versailles afterward. He was also a stunningly obdurate, self-righteous political leader, in part because of his assurance that he had been called by God to exercise his particular leadership. (Sound familiar?)

Harding scarcely counts. Corruption does not equal catastrophe. Hoover was the victim of structural forces as much as his own ineptitude. Indeed, had he accepted FDR's entreaties in 1920 to run for the presidency on the Democratic ticket (and been elected), I suspect we would regard him as a first-rate president, since he was a man of enormous ability (unlike you know who).

Some people might describe FDR as a catastrophe because of the New Deal. I don't. If anyone wants to take up the argument, feel free.

So now we're up to Truman, Ike and JFK. All were far from perfect, but catastrophic seems excessive, even for their detractors. JFK comes closest, because of his monumental ineptitude at the Vienna conference with Khruschev, which persuaded the latter that he was a weakling. Thus the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK risked nuclear holocaust in part so that the Democratics could avoid decimation in the 1962 congressional elections. (There might have been other considerations, but no less that Robert McNamara downplayed the genuine threat to the US posed by the missiles in Cuba.)

LBJ is the most tragic president in our history. For me he was the greatest domestic president we ever had, including Lincoln and FDR. Then there is Vietnam, which was, I think, an utter catastrophe. But, as I've argued earlier, it was a "soluble" catastrophe in the specific sense that acceptance of American defeat, as Gerald Ford was ultimately willing to do, had relatively little international effect. (Domestic politics are another matter.)

No one could argue that Carter was "catastrophic," so let's move on to Reagan. Again we could have all sorts of political arguments about the Reagan presidency, but it is true that, for all of his throwing down certain gauntlets, he was not bellicose or prone to take unnecessary risks. In retrospect, one feels almost nostalgic for the maturity of leadership of George Schultz in the State Department.

George H.W. Bush or Clinton? Highly imperfect, yes, "catastrophic," no. So this brings us, obviously, to George W. Bush. He embarked on a war of choice that has not only torn this country apart, but threatens to destabilize the entire Middle East and provoke ethnic bloodbaths, not to mention, for what it is worth, instabilities in the supply of oil and the like. He has, as Mark Graber has noted, turned a blind eye to global warming. He has, as Tom Friedman has repeatedly noted, been totally indifferent to achieving any real "energy independence" by adopting a more intelligent energy policy. He has threatened our children and grandchildren with economic insecurity by having to pay for his combination of reckless tax cuts and an expanding welfare state (such as the drug bill with its enormous benefits to big drug companies). The list goes on. In any event, I challenge anyone on this list to specify why another of our 43 presidents can legitimately be called "more catastrophic" or "worse" in terms of long-term consequences for the US and the world than George W. Bush, who, because of our defective Constitution, has 740 days remaining in his term.
Posted 10:54 AM by Sandy Levinson [link]