Lincoln/Washington tied for best. FDR good but overrated. Hoover a good man but a bad President. Buchanan arguably the worst.

JFK got US into Vietnam. End of discussion, can't be the best.

Nixon is very interesting. I agree he was as good as it gets for foreign policy. Nuclear treaty with russia, opening China, ended vietnam,. Its funny how the hippies love Kennedy (started Vietnam) and hate Nixon (ended Vietnam). He was a brilliant man and got caught doing a minor thing with Watergate. If it wasn't for watergate he would be a top 5 president.


Reagan to me is one of the worst presidents ever. Reaganomics is killing the US. He started it in California and look what its doing there. His idea that the govt. can barrow $ and never pay it back as long as the economy grows is BS. Trickle down theory: The poor will be better off if the rich have all the money. Even GB Sr. disagreed with Reaganomic. First he ran against these policies in the 1980 primaries. Next he tried to reverse many of these policies as president. Your points about the church are true. The problem is the president has no business propping up the pope and the church. Remember separation of church and state? Taking credit for the collapse of USSR is a stretch. The problems there were internal economic problems. The US having more nuclear weapons had very little to do with it. Oh yes, how about Iran Conta? That scandal broke because the CIA got caught with a crashed plane load of cocaine. Wow trading cocaine for guns. What a great idea! So he made the "War on Drugs" a priority. That was real successful. Makes Watergate look all "sunshine, lollipops and rainbows." Lets not forget Reagan had serious Alzheimer's disease his last 4 years in office. Even his own family now admits it.

Not sure who the best president ever is but Reagan did as much damage to the US, long term economic health as anyone in history.

Actually I don't think Regan propped up the Pope, I think they worked in tandem with Lech Walesa to pressure Poland and the Soviets and helped them to see that further armed conflict with the Resistance was futile. Moreover, the Pope is not just the leader of the Catholic Church, he is also the head of State of the Vatican. Regan had to work with him but I think they set a tone for each other and I know that they had close ties through the embassies. Their tandem was a key to Russian decision making in the area of invading Poland. It is easy to forget it was only 12 or so years before that the Soviets invited themselves into Prague. I think there was a fear that Regan would react far differently than Johnson and Ike had (in Hungry) and that the result would put them far behind the eight ball. They had to let up. I agree that Regan didn't bring down the wall, he just wasn't afraid to exploit the Soviets weakness when it counted. One other thing, There was just something about the way that RR spoke to our nation that gave us faith. We saw the same skills in JFK and in FDR (who had it been a television era may not have faired as well). Ike was a leader of men but really had no effect on our nation, Nixon couldn't stop sweating, LBJ was meant for the backrooms not the living room, Truman had no polish, Hoover's brilliance was off-putting as was his inability to admit disaster when we entered one, Wilson and Taft were just too patrician and also very off putting. TR was everyone's teddy bear and beloved for it.

I fail to mention Ford, the accidental President, who probably did more for our Nation and less for himself than anyone to hold the office in his pardon of Nixon, and Carter who was the 20th century's answer to Buchanan.

I agree it is way too early to tell about Clinton, Bush2 or OBama but

As a foreigner I am always surprised when Ronald Reagan shows up in these lists. Especially claims that the wall would not have come down without him. I lived in Holland during that time and I would give more credit to the Germans themselves and after that Gorbachev. This assumes the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable because communism fails.

Star Wars defense tho

The only way Germans stand up, is if they are assured they will not face Soviet tanks. That assurance was there because Soviets didn't waltz into Poland 5 years sooner, the government opposition to Solidarity failed there and there was no response by Russia, and that is in part because their economy was crashing after Afghanistan and in trying to prop up all the other corrupt regimes and because they had no idea how far RR might go. They didn't have anything to compete with the star wars defense and weren't sure we couldn't build it. Regan sold it to the world, Further the Pope kept a free Poland in the world and especially the Eastern European face all the time. His encouragement meant so much to the heavily catholic Polish people. Solidarity members often point to feeling like they had God on their side and America too.

It was delivery more than anything else, but just as JFK told Berlin it would not ever be handed over to the Russians when he gave his "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" Speech, RR's "Mr. Gorbachev Tear Down This Wall" Speech sent a shiver down the Soviet spine. Only Yards from the gun towers of the East, an American President and a real live cowboy as far as the Soviets were concerned was giving them an ultimatum. They just didn't know how far he would go, and that made them hesitate.

The first blocks of that wall came down in the election of Blessed John Paul II The Great. As I have said before, he was very close to President Regan in view and I believe we will find a lot of information sharing between these two heads of State. I think RR's election sent a strong message abroad that America was tired of being thought of as a soft superpower. These winds of change in Poland much like the recent success of the Egyptian rebels, gave the peoples other nations the opportunity to stand p almost together and sat the Soviets back on their heels. In that blink of time, the revolution occured and was telecast on Cable. Like the Arab conficts on Al Jeezera this televised images made serious inroads and again held back Moscow.

I don't credit RR with the fall of the wall, I credit him with crafting a world and a reality where that could have happened.

Americans have an obsession with making everything about them, so when they read/hear that Reagan said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" and the wall came down a few years later, they think "OMG Ronnie Ray-gun GOAT!!!" Only problem is, it wasn't Gorbachev who tore down the wall, and nor was it Reagan (to the contrary, Thatcher and to a much lesser extent Reagan were actually disturbed that the wall was coming down at all--no one wanted a destabilized Eastern front at that point). It's classic post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, or what I suppose we'd call results-oriented thinking on a Poker site.

Stuff like this:
is mostly ex post facto hagiography that doesn't gel very well with the internal situation in Germany, Poland, or the USSR. The Soviet collapse was long, the strategic situation was changed very little in the 1980s, and Reagan played almost no role in accelerating the collapse. Nor did John Paul II have much significance except having the good fortune to be Polish-born and an arch-conservative, orthodox anti-communist, thus providing a PR symbol for Solidarity, Lech Walesa, and the rest. What almost nobody knows or remembers, though, is that Solidarity's primary goal was to create an economic system of worker ownership ("legitimate" socialism in their minds), not the free market dreams of Reaganites and Thatcherites.

The facts aside, Americans like Reagan because after Vietnam/Watergate/Stagflation/Iranian hostage crisis, he made Americans feel better.

You could go into a much longer description, but "feel better" sums it up pretty well.

Then someone shot him and he bounced back up and kept going.

As a symbolic leader, he was great. As for his actual policies and accomplishments, meh. There is much debate to be had and probably some more time needed. I agree his economic policies seem like they were long term terrible.

Easily Best FDR/Washington and Lincoln in third.

I missed Nixon from 2002-2008 .

Theodore Roosevelt.... the former cowboy!

James Madison... saved the US from a British invasion that would have wiped away all the work of the Revolution.

A lot of historians believe that the later elections of FDR were rigged. I remember several history professors who have said this before.

Best president: George Washington -Established a lot to help build this country.

Worst President: Abraham Lincoln - Caused more bloodshed than any other president.

Wat

Nixon escalated the war in Vietnam and ordered or oversaw many secret unethical policies and campaigns, such as the bombing of Cambodia that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Khmer Rouge increased in number 20 fold after the bombing campaign. Nixon by no means wanted to give up on Vietnam until it was finally deemed unwinable. Watergate is small potatoes. If morality counts for anything then Nixon was a terrible president in my view. I don't think Kennedy was good president either.