I am a professor of history and chair of the panel. For those tweeting, the tag for this session is oah badpres and you might want to add the tag oah2016. The theme is on leadership. As 2016 is a president ial election year, the Program Committee assembled a roundtable of scholars willing to talk about president ial leadership, what about its failures gather rather than its successes. This seems particularly timely as the trump juggernaut rolls forward. Just yesterday the clinton and Sanders Campaign engaged in a verbal sparring match about who is the most unqualified to be president. So things are getting interesting. The panel we have here today, all of these scholars, have written about president s who were bad in their own special way. Although it didnt occur to me it did occur to me on the train coming up that bad to whom might be an important qualifier. What did it mean to be a bad president . What counts as bad . How do we define a bad president . And specifically, who might have been the worst president ever. Our panelists are david greenberg, associate professor. Are you cool professor now full professor now . Sorry, a little inside baseball. Associate professor of history end of journalism and media studies at rutgers university, new brunswick. He is an author of books about nixon and coolidge and a wonderful recent book, and insight history of the american presidency. A timely moment. Good work, david. A history of the white house spin machine. Formally an active editor of the new republic, is a longtime contributor to slate and now writes a history column or politico. To davids right, although not politically, is annette gordonreed. A Charles Warren professor and scholar of American History, she has published six books. Among them a book in 2008 which won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. A leading and field changing scholar, her most recent book is about Thomas Jefferson into the empire of imagination into actually, and and peter will be signing that book outside in the book exhibit after the plenary. For those of you got a program early, one of the panelists will not the here and Jacob Weisberg has agreed to join us which is very exciting. He is a veteran journalist and Political Writer and currently chairman of the slate group. He is the author of a book about the bush tragedy which was a New York Times bestseller in 2008. He cowrote in in uncertain world, which was published in 2003. His first book was published in 1996 and his newest book, a biography of Ronald Reagan, one of my candidates for worst president ever, was published in 2016. That is the order we will go in and we hope you all have your ideas for worst president ever. Let us begin with david. David thank you. It occurs to me that we all have written looks for that to american president s series of calvin coolidge, Ronald Reagan, and Andrew Johnson. So some of them can probably be in our mix today. It occurred to me as people were saying before, this will panel could be rendered moot by the next election. [laughter] so, maybe it would be better to have this in 2017. As people saw my name on this and the question was, so, who is your choice . I really did not address the question that way. We can get to that end i can drop some candidates but i want to talk about, what do we mean by worst . Because i think when we think of great president s, the criteria are pretty clear. We might quibble a little bit but there is a very small number that probably all of us would put there at the very top, you might call it tthe Anna Karenina president , a lot of them are bad in many ways. But i want to look at what makes these the worst. First of all, the completely insignificant and forgettable president s. As an historian of the 20th century, i am like everyone else, having trouble with all of those 19th century, which of the whiskers, which had the sideburns, which was which . Someone like Millard Fillmore could easily be a candidate for worst. I took the trouble to go to whitehouse. Gov and this is what they said about Millard Fillmore there. Millard fillmore demonstrated Millard Fillmore demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competance some not a lot, some. He demonstrated an uninspiring man could make the American Dream come true. This is on whitehouse. Gov, they should be building him up, i think. One kind of worst president is the forgettable, the insignificant. There was a great bit on the simpsons years ago, the forgotten president s. You will not see us on any dollars or cents. Millard fillmore. And William Henry harrison, i died in 40 days. Then we get to the president s who were bad in another way. Who faced crisis and did a terrible job. These are serious candidates for the worst we should talk about. Herbert hoover, obviously he comes to mind here. Someone who, before his election, i have been talking my book republic of spin, and had this Great Campaign film in 1928 called master of emergency. He was seen as this wizard. He fed europe after world war i, during the mississippi flood of 1927, the worst Natural Disaster in American History before katrina. He was deputized, pulling horses out of the river and feeding bedraggled children. But then he gets an emergency and doesnt do anything. He does a little bit, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation toward the end, but largely on all counts, he could not rise to the challenge. It is interesting having written about coolidge, he has a whole cult of conservative admirers. Trickle down economics, Ronald Reagan, but hoover the conservative also renounced him. So he really has no fans at all. Another possibility and a comment about reagan suggested, what about president s who did a lot, but in a direction we do not like . A lot of people do still see Ronald Reagan this way. I think if we were to have held this conference 20 years ago, 25 years ago, probably a lot of would be saying Ronald Reagan. But i think now, even among liberals who do not generally approve of the direction he took the country, it is hard to say he was the worst. He was reelected, he did accomplish a lot of his goals and i, at least, am uncomfortable at putting the worst label, simply as a matter of my own political judgments as opposed to historical judgments, if we can make that distinction. Maybe it is untenable but i would like to put that out there. Another interesting figure i do not think many would put is the worst, but certainly his reputation has come down recently is Andrew Jackson for his indian removal policy. Certainly we look back on that with shame and disapproval. But again, jackson was somebody who accomplished a tremendous amount, who transformed the nature of american democracy, we do we really think it could make him the worst . Probably not. The final category, president s who do damage to the country in ways that Transcend Party and politics. What they did was really not about having policies that were too liberal or too conservative or took is too far in this direction or that, but were just corrupt. Abusive of power. This is where i do come back to Richard Nixon. When i wrote nixons shadow, my first book, there was a kind of rehabilitation of nixon in the air. Saying, look at these liberal policies on the domestic front. I think in the time since that book came out, and i argued against that by the way, but i think in that time, that has dissipated. What is now talked about and what is remembered by younger people, the only president to resign. I am not a crook. Watergate. That is nixons lasting legacy. For his abuses of power, deemed such by a bipartisan majority. Unlike the clinton impeachment we or the Andrew Johnson impeachment even, this was not a power struggle between two sides. It was Barry Goldwater and other republicans from left to right as well as democrats who wanted nixon to go. So, i attempted to say richard i am tempted to say Richard Nixon is the worst but we are open to discussion. Annette . Annette i did think a little bit about who was the worst. I was asked to do a biography of Andrew Johnson for a times book series and it was something i had never thought i would never be doing, that whole era is important but it does something that is in some ways more heartbreaking than slavery. To think of people that are hopeful and at the same time having their hopes dashed. I did think about what it meant to be the worst president , because every year i was a part of a survey where they ask us to list people. The year i did johnson, the year the book came out, he made it all the way to the worst. Buchanan had usually been at the very bottom but that was a thumbs up for buchanan. Buchanan was usually there, but andrew snuck past them to take the top or the bottom rung, how ever you want to put it. I was thinking about how you make the determination. In some ways the way david was speaking, buchanan i would say would be the worst if you are thinking about someone rising to a particular challenge. He was in a set of circumstances that were extremely difficult. To say well, you should have done this or you should have done that in a situation that is almost intractable. An Irresistible Force meeting an immovable object. What happens . Would you do . People say he did not act. He was passive. But that seems to be a tough situation. Johnson, on the other hand, had people who were competent, who were willing to go forward, with whom he could have worked if he did not just have a really serious flaw that he hated black people. Because he hated black people, he was not really willing to go along with people. You had a congress, people who would work with him. People who had a plan for reconstruction, a plan to go forward. Someone who could have stopped some of the violence going on in the south against africanamericans. So you have buchanan, who was facing a crazy situation and to did not do some of the things he was supposed to do, but it is hard to think of what wouldve happened in that timeframe. People might offer some suggestions about how we might have gotten out of it. Then you have someone like johnson who could have done better. There was a way forward and because of his stubbornness, not just disliking black people, it was his stubbornness. He sent the country back considerably. A lot of things we have had to deal with over the past decade were problems that maybe we could have, if not overcome, we could have started to overcome if he had better able to manage himself. If he could have been larger than himself. That is what you want in a good president. The people you were alluding to were people who can rise to the occasion, who can step out of their own petty prejudices and realize there is something bigger than themselves. He could never do that. We can understand why. He was someone who worked his way up from nothing. I am damning him with faint praise. He worked his way up from nothing, he was illiterate until his early 20s. His wife taught him to read. He occupied every Office Anybody could have all the way up to the presidency. Someone who rose this way, he said, im right, i know i am right. That was a quote from him and that is the way he went through the world. That is a tough way for a president to be. Inflexible person who thinks he knows it all. So he is a candidate for one of the worst president s. Buchanan and Andrew Johnson go back and forth. Depends on who one you are looking for. Someone in a difficult situation and cannot figure out how to get out of it. In hindsight, we have the benefit of hindsight and we could say, if you done this, he couldve done that, but im not comfortable with that idea. He had something in hand, very talented men who were there and would have been willing to help and he would not accept the help. So we will talk about the absolute worst those are my two candidates. But the new people reagan, when i did the surveys i would put reagan in, as i recall. I stopped doing them, but Ronald Reagans in the top, not weak as not because i enjoyed what he did or i thought he did the right thing, but he did do what he set out to do. He made a movement and there were a number of people who went on with him and and that sense, he was effective as a president. So i would not ask him. I thought the task was to combat who had been an effective president , he was not one of my favorite people. I think a lot of what he accomplished was extremely problematic. Some people might suggest bush. If sean were here, he wouldve probably said george w. Bush. He wrote a whole article about it, so we would have known his answer already. You know, that is a candidate but it is too soon to tell, you know . We do not know which things he will be given credit for 100 years from now, 50 years from now, it depends upon how things turn out. I feel more comfortable talking about people from the 19th century. Next in, maybe not. The resignation, vietnam, paris peace talks and so forth. Some really unconscionable stuff. So he is a modern person i might throw into the mix. Thank you. I am sorry i was not able to be sean, but i am pleased to be considered a scholar by implication of being on the panel. I am really a journalist who has written about 20thcentury political history, particularly, contemporary history. I did argue, sort of, at a disastrous event. Being invited to participate here put me in mind of it. At the end of the george w. Bush presidency, i participated in an intelligence squared bait in new debate in new york and argued the affirmative of the proposition, result george w. Bush was the worst president. On the other side was call rove and bill kristol. Karl rove and bill kristol. We did not do johnson. On my side was a very elegant british journalist named Simon Jenkins and on the way in, he told me he thought it would be very poor manners to criticize an american president in his own country. And i said, ok im out here on my own. And karl rove argued the proposition of not just george w. Bush was not the worst president of the last 100 years, but of course the best president of all time. Bill kristol took a shrewder tack and said george bush was not good, but not the worst. Hoover, carter, nixon. They actually won the vote but i still suggest karl rove stacked the whole in his favor ahead of time. I think, when we think about the whole question, first model all first of all, we have to knowledge acknowledge it is a parlor game. But it is a really fun parlor game for nerds like me. You can do the same thing with baseball players. We had a debate about who the cultural figures should be up there were a Mount Rushmore for culture and of course the decision was, they should not have carved that stuff in the stones at all. But, you know, the part of the reason it has to be a parlor game and not go beyond that, is youre making comparisons that are sort of absurd in a way. How do you compare harding and the mexican war. But i do think when people play it, at whatever level of seriousness including the surveys and that was talking about that she stopped participating in, they are really thinking about the same qualities, the same issues. When we think about great president s, you are asking, did they have big accomplishments . Did they create the National Parks . Did they create the new deal . Did they play a role in ending the cold war . That is at the top of the list. But embedded in that is a political argument about what accomplishments we think are admirable. There are the slightly different questions of whether they had a big impact for good or bad. Whether they were consequential. I did a welltimed interview with barack obama in 2007 when he was thinking about running for president. He talked about it with me and he talked to me about it before he talked about with other people and described being in the washington hilton where they had the washington correspondents dinner. And looking at this long row of black and white photographs and his decision was really about whether he would be one of the consequential ones. He did not want to run for president just to be president. Sure. Exactly. Lo and behold, he ended up running. And you know, i think, did a president change politics and society in a meaningful way. Then there is a meaningful question, do we admire them as people . Do they embody something about the National Character . That gets down to other qualities were they great writers like lincoln . Were they eloquent . That gets into personal qualities that go beyond just what they did as president. For bad president s, it is the flip side but different. Did they have large negative accomplishments . Those can be active or passive failures. Did they escalate a war . Did they get drawn into a war . Did they fail to act in an economic crisis, like hoover . Did they drop an atom bomb . Did they drop two atom bombs . All of the president surrounding the can on both sides were surrounding lincoln on both sides were tasked with failing to prevent the civil war and failing to manage its aftermath in a better way. As a predictor of being labeled as bad it is proximity to lincoln, the number one indicator. The other side is, did they not have were they not consequential, did they not have a big impact . Ford, carter, and through no special fault of their own, James Garfield and william mckinley. It does not make you a bad president to get assassinated after 40 days, but it does not make you a good one, either. Lastly, did the person have bad character, like nix