Failures of Presidents by Thomas J. Craughwell with M. William Phelps

Thomas J. Craughwell, along with M. William Phelps, has published a book entitled Failures of the Presidents. The book has the laudable goal of listing the greatest mistakes various Presidents of the United States have made throughout history, with a view of learning from them.

Failures of the Presidents is, at least superficially, unbiased. Presidents of every persuasion, Republican, Democrat, Federalist, and Whig from George Washington to George W. Bush come under scrutiny.

Some of the mistakes described are well known to even a casual student of American history. The Whisky Rebellion is laid at the doorstep of George Washington, as is the internment of Japanese Americans at that of Franklin Roosevelt. Some, like the scheme to settle newly freed black slaves on the island of Santa Domingo during the Grant Administration, are more obscure. Two Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, get blamed for two major mistakes. Some Presidents, such as Lincoln and-curiously-Bill Clinton get left off the hook entirely.

One problem I had with the book is a kind of moralizing tone throughout it that seemed to say, "Why couldn't these men have behaved more like 21^st century enlightened liberals." The problem is that most of the Presidents in Failures of the Presidents are not liberals, in the modern sense, enlightened or not. They had the values and beliefs of their time, not ours. Judging them too much by the standards of 2008 smacks of a practice known as "presentism."

For instance, the authors deplore the efforts made in the wake of the Spanish American War to make the Philippines a colony of the United States. Most people, at least in the West, know now that it's not a good or moral idea to try to create empires out of countries we now call the Third World. But it was a very popular concept in the early 20^th Century. Besides, as the authors point out, the Philippines became a stalwart ally of the United States, fighting the Japanese during World War II, and fighting terrorists in the modern era.

Failures of Presidents contains a couple of howlers. Here is one passage from the end of the chapter on FDR's internment of Japanese Americans.

"When the incarceration and torture of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the years since September 11^th, 2001-including US citizens suspected of collaborating with terrorist organizations-and little known provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act that allow for warrantless wiretapping and arrests and confiscations and arrests without cause, many Americans worry that the internment camps of the 1940s might reappear."

One is almost at a loss for words. Besides being a total distortion of what is really going on, with loaded words like "torture" and putting the phrase "enemy combatants" in quotes, the passage seems to suggest that locking up dangerous terrorists is the equivalent of interning Japanese Americans. This is laughable on its face, considering that President George W. Bush has not interned Arab Americans and has vigorously prosecuted hate crimes against American Muslims.

Then there is this at the end of the Jimmy Carter "malaise" chapter:

"Perhaps Carter was ahead of his time. To a generation beset by rising oil prices and fears or irrevocable climate change from carbon emissions and a nation wishing to "free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil," as all the candidates say, Carter's policy ideas seem to have been vindicated."

Well, actually, no they haven't. In the first place, Carter was not the first American President to suggest that American addiction for foreign oil was a bad thing. That honor goes to one Richard Nixon, during the first energy crisis.

In the second place, while Carter had good intentions, his "policy ideas" were laughably dysfunctional. If one wanted to increase the production of domestic oil, then Carter's Windfall Profits Tax was the last thing one would have proposed. The onerous, complicated, a burdensome Windfall Profits Tax inhibited the production of domestic oil. Boondoggles such as synfuel and a scheme to extract oil from shale only wasted money and did not produce a drop of domestic oil.

The most controversial chapter is undoubtedly the one on George W. Bush and the War in Iraq, The authors provide a warning against judging a historic development too soon.

"In 1971, Henry Kissinger asked Chinese foreign minister Zhou En-lai the historical impact of the French Revolution of 1789. "Too soon to tell," En-lai responded.

"In the lame duck months of Bush's presidency, in the midst of an election campaign, and with his popularity ratings cratering, by En-lai's reckoning, it is at least 200 years too soon to assess Bush's impact on history, and especially the Iraq invasion."

Unfortunately Failures of Presidents try to assess those things anyway. The authors paint a very dire, often exaggerated and one sided , account of the War in Iraq. But most if not all of the account takes place before the Surge and related developments such as the Anbar Awakening. Al Qaeda and the Shiite militias have been all but defeated. Political stability and economic vigor are returning to Iraq under the first functioning democracy in the Arab World. It may well be that the authors were too quick to judge the War in Iraq a mistake.

The pollster Scott Rasmussen has found that a plurality of Americans, 41 percent, has concluded that the War in Iraq was a success. That contrasts to a finding that 57 percent thought the war a failure as recently as August 2007. We may not have to take two hundred years to assess the War in Iraq or the Bush Presidency. We may find that both were great successes.

Source: Failures of the Presidents, Thomas J. Craughwell with N. William Phelps, Fair Winds Press, 2008
War on Terror Update, Rasmussen Reports, September 30th, 2008