At Shell Ridge, Monday

TIME (?was it?) ran a poll for best and worst Presidents during your lifetime: of course, this limited the field somewhat. Clinton, not surprisingly, ended up on both lists, as the best, second to Reagan, and as the worst, tied with Nixon.

My own list would be different. I always think of Ford when we list "best." It took an act of statesmanship, not politics, to pardon Nixon when the country was out for blood. This cost him the 1976 election, and he had to have known it would. However, he said it was the best thing for the country, and until this week I'd have agreed. I read an Arkansaas Democrat-Gazette editorial that claimed that the Nixon pardon is what fueled the mess of today. They said that if Nixon had been prosecuted, there would have been closure. The editorial also suggested, referring to the Ford censure proposal, that Ford had hit his head on another airplane door! I do agree. It only works to shame someone if that person is capable of shame. The D-G said: "A lecture and a good grounding has been known to straighten out a wayward teenager, but it may be too late to use the same technique on a perpetually adolescent president."
Frankly, I can see him standing, head bowed, in the well of the Congress being read the riot act, and winking at the camera.
(This one's for you, Al!) Arianna's column of this week compares Ford and Carter as ex-Presidents, and she thinks Carter is better.

Back to my ranking: if not Ford, I have another "best" who didn't make the list. Truman. I think, knowing what he knew then, that using the A-bomb was the right thing to do. People who talk about the horror of it may not know about the Tokyo firebombing. The Japanese warlords weren't going to quit anytime soon. And Truman didn't pass the buck, unlike a certain current resident of the White House.

As for worst, it's a Clinton-Nixon tie. Nixon did have some foreign policy breakthroughs, which is more than can be said for Clinton. (We'll see about Ireland. But they were going to have to come to the peace table with whoever was President.) Clinton has troops in Bosnia for what looks like forever, despite his claims that it wouldn't happen. Haiti? Somalia? Or, for that matter, Waco? (I'm going to talk myself into putting him lowest, in a minute.) Fuel rationing and price controls were Nixon things which were awful.

Johnson, too. Kennedy may have gotten us into VietNam, but at least he had grace and charm with it. Johnson was just a macho pig.

FDR was still alive when I was born, but I remember nothing about him. I just assumed "President" was Truman's first name. When my grandfather talked about Dewey, I saw one of Donald's nephews. I liked Adlai Stephenson, mostly because of his name. I'd also seen pictures of him and Eisenhower, and liked Adlai better. I had a mad crush on Jack and Jackie. Then when I was old enough to vote, 21 in those days, I bought Nixon's claim for a "secret plan" to end the war. (So secret, he never figured it out himself.) Thoroughly disgusted, I voted for McGovern, then. (These were both absentee ballots, one in Louisiana before we went to England and one in England before we came back. Travelling in November is the pits.) If everyone who had, during the Watergate mess, the bumper stickers which said "don't blame me, I voted for McGovern" actually HAD voted that way, Nixon would never have won. However, I really did. Then in 1976, in California, I discovered the Libertarians. Apart from voting for Bush and for Dole as anti-Clinton votes, I haven't voted Demopublican since.