Section Eight:
The Good Records of Presidents
* This section is not a record of which president supported or carried out any ideological position. The introduction argued that substituting a political position checklist for humanitarian results is excuse making for one side or the other. It is dishonest, hypocritical, ultimately useless and obscuring of any attempt at honest judgment of the good or evil of presidents.
* And just as there clearly were many evil presidents, there were also a smaller number of good presidents, noble and heroic men who by their actions saved many lives or improved many lives. This section gives proof of that. There were also many more presidents whose legacy is largely indifferent, men of little effect who were largely inconsequential caretakers, men who are largely unknown today for good reason. There are yet other presidents who paradoxically committed both great good and horrific evil, sometimes even on the same issue. Their evil outcomes came sometimes through neglect, at other times through moral cowardice or political convenience, yet other times through willful ideological blindness.
* Anyone who argues that presidents must be tough, that the demands of the job insist upon an immoral or amoral man who must be above morality is really arguing a variation of might is right. Such arguments often come from three main sources; the realpolitik school of thought, beloved by admirers of Nixon and Kissinger; neoconservatives; and other journalists and politicians who are believers in American empire, or at the very least try never to admit Americans or American leaders can ever do any wrong.
* It should be obvious from the evidence presented earlier that Nixon and Kissinger's foreign policy expertise is almost always overrated. At a minimum, even when successful in its goals, the two men were morally reprehensible in the most indefensible way, guilty of no less than playing a direct role in genocide, the latter for which Kissinger is still facing calls for prosecutions for war crimes in much of the world. Kissinger's name will live in as much infamy in Latin America as much as some who worship American presidential power naively or hypocritically admire him.
* Neo conservatism's failures are as obvious as saying “Iraq.” The incompetence of neoconservatives in Iraq and elsewhere is a clear example of ideology ignoring basic facts on the ground. And though they would sneer at such terms, the moral callousness of neo conservatism has been equally disastrous, the wide cause of misery that itself was the central cause of neo conservatism's many failures. Put simply, by their lack of empathy, neoconservatives become very poor predictors of how their efforts will be perceived. Their amoral nature makes them bad analysts and administrators.
* Let the evidence speak for itself: presidents clearly can do evil and must be condemned for it. Just as important, we should remember and honor those presidents who have done right. One can also point to presidents who have done both great harm and great good. The same Franklin Roosevelt who ignored the Holocaust and imprisoned Japanese-Americans and Aleuts also saved many lives with the New Deal, the Good Neighbor Policy, and leading the defeat of the Axis. The GW Bush who tortured mostly innocents and killed possibly over one million in Iraq and thousands in Louisiana with his bumbling partly redeemed himself by the many African lives saved from AIDS.