FDR served from 1933 to his death in1945.
Harry Truman served out the remainder of his term and was elected president in 1948.
Dwight Eisenhower, a national hero, was president from 1952 through 1960.
John F. Kennedy presided from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.
Lyndon Johnson, his VP, served out the remainder of Kennedy’s term and was elected president in 1964
Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, was elected president in 1968 after a failed attempt in 1960 and served until 1974 when he resigned under pressure from the Watergate scandal.
Gerald Ford, his VP, served out the remainder of Nixon’s term
Jimmy Carter was president from 1977 through 1980.
Ronald Reagan then was elected to two terms through 1988.
George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s VP, was elected president in 1980 and served one term.
Bill Clinton next served two terms through 2000.
George W. Bush, son of the 41st president, was elected to serve two terms through 2008
Barack Obama next served two terms through 2016.
Donald Trump was elected to one term through 2020.
Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, was elected president for a term scheduled to end in 2024.
It is interesting to note that of the six VP’s that went on to be president, only one has been re-elected and he was not able to complete his second term due to a scandal.
All Time Hero of the Left
December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy” according to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It should; not for what the Japanese did but for presidential blunders that make Afghanistan look like, oops, sorry.
To flesh out history a bit, in the late 1930’s, the U.S. was under pressure to stop selling oil to Japan because of their invasion of Manchuria and China. FDR’s vacillation on the subject left it up to an advisor to tell a Japanese tanker which pulled into the West coast, looking to fill up, that we would sell them no more oil. Roosevelt then moved the Pacific fleet from the West coast to Pearl Harbor where the admiral in charge of naval operations was not on speaking terms with the general who commanded army troops.
Japan was faced with creating a long and vulnerable supply line for an alternate source of oil in the South Pacific and took advantage of our fleet bottled up in Pearl Harbor to inflict serious damage on our naval operations. Routine scouting would have warned us of their approach, but everybody took Sunday off. Instead, Roosevelt moralized about a sneak attack, which begs the question, do attacking military forces usually call ahead to warn their adversary?
FDR received media acclimation, not criticism, for presiding over the deepest and longest economic malaise in our history before leading us into World War II.
Media “Villains”
Ike, as Eisenhower was affectionately known, was a national hero for guiding allied forces to victory in WWII. The fifties were a decade in which I graduated from high school and college and served my obligatory two years in the army while Ike was guiding the transition from war time production to civilian luxuries. The media characterized him as a bumbler more at home on a golf course than the oval office.
In his retirement speech, he warned the nation of the “military-industrial complex” and left with a national budget of $79 billion for the year 1960 while beginning to build the interstate highway system. It is worthwhile reflecting that the per capita cost of the federal government, adjusted for inflation, tripled in the ensuing 60 years.
Ronald Reagan became president when interest rates and inflation were in the high teens. Characterized as a “B level” dimwit cowboy movie actor by the media, he restored prosperity before leaving office and set the stage for Soviet Union dissolution.
Donald J. Trump not only refused to “play their game”, he set out to destroy it with wholesale obliteration of regulations which had been piled up for years to the benefit of special interests. In the course of his presidency, he elevated the economic status of every minority group those special interests relied on for power. To make him go away, the media slandered him every day for four years.
Bush-whacked
In 1990, U.S. ambassador to Iraq under George H.W. Bush, April Glaspie in a meeting with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein told him, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”
Two weeks later, Saddam invaded Kuwait.
That occurrence set off a chain of events with far reaching consequences. Saudi Arabia having no assurance that Hussein would stop in Kuwait, hastened to bolster its own defenses using help from American military in lieu of offers from Osama bin Laden to provide protection. Nine eleven followed in retaliation for placing foreign troops on sacred Saudi soil.
President George W. Bush, son of H.W., later invaded Iraq to eliminate Saddam and provide an opportunity for Iraqi’s to create their own democracy. Instead, it created the frontier between Sunni and Shia Muslims and removed a large obstacle to Iran’s access to Lebanon and the Mediterranean.
Medi-Ocre
The mediocrity referenced in Machiavelli’s observation is derived from the Greek medi-ocre which literally translated means halfway up the mountain. It’s doubly appropriate when you consider someone half-way up the mountain can see only see half the picture until they reach the summit.
With the exception of Eisenhower, Reagan and Trump, this weakness has limited the capacity of all those we chose to govern our democracy in my lifetime.
the composte heap 