r/Presidents

“One spring day in 2003, I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang. It was Ashley Estes, the president's personal secretary.

"The president wants you now. Get up here," she said. I had no idea what was happening. Was I missing a historic meeting? Did a world crisis just start? Ashley pointed me to the Oval Office. The president was standing alone behind his desk, looking out the window. His back was to me.

"Eric, can you see it? A duck is walking across the South Lawn," he said. He must have thought it would make a great photo.

I walked up next to him, looked out the window, and only saw lush, green grass. "It's gone now," he said. "Maybe you can catch it next time."

Still catching my breath, I walked back to my office thinking, "My job is unbelievable."” - Excerpt from “Front Row Seat: A Photographic Portrait of the Presidency of George W. Bush” by Eric Draper.

We did it, old Abe, and it all started with you!

Fillmore did not have a formal education and did not go to college so he thought he didn’t deserve that degree(he probably didn’t). Another President who declined an honorary degree was Cleveland from Harvard.

FDR is not my favourite president, nor the one I know the most about, but this is hands down (pun absolutely intended) presidential portrait.

Background: the artist Douglas Chandor (1897-1953) initially wrote to FDR in late 1944 proposing a painting of the president, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin to memorialize the Yalta Conference. You can see the sketch of the potential painting in the bottom-left corner. Chandor completed a portrait of Churchill, which you can see in London’s National Portrait Gallery, but Stalin declined to be painted. Thus, the Yalta Conference painting Chandor envisioned never came to be.

The incompleteness of this painting is what makes it so great, in my opinion. The sketches of the hands illustrate Chandor’s creative process - each one highlighting a slightly different essence of FDR. In a strange way, the collection of hands gives the viewer a summary of FDR as a man and a politician: an intellectual, a legislator, pensive man, a diplomat. According to the National Portrait Gallery:

> Chandor believed that hands revealed as much of a person’s spirit as his or her face would, and therefore experimented with multiple configurations and gestures, scattered across the bottom of the canvas. Roosevelt, however, was dismayed by the attention Chandor paid to his hands, dismissing them as “unremarkable” and likening them to “those of a farmer.”

The hand in the bottom-left corner doing the signature is a fitting creative touch.

FDR died before the portrait could be completed.

I would love to know your thoughts on this painting, as well as your favourite presidential portraits.

Source

I am a Canadian who loves American history and I got these pins in the mail today from eBay. I also have other presidential memorabilia.

In this post, I analyze LBJ's foreign policy to see if it should be judged positively outside of the Vietnam War. u/Honest_Picture_6960 made an excellent post covering some of the same material earlier this week and I want to give a shoutout to that user for writing such a detailed and thoughtful post. Here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Presidents/comments/1sda53c/foreign_policy_wins_of_the_lyndon_b_johnson/

If you take the Vietnam War out of the equation, LBJ's foreign policy is a mixed bag. He actually had some notable successes: the Outer Space Treaty ensured the peaceful use of outer space, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty mitigated the nuclear arms race. As u/Honest_Picture_6960 pointed out, LBJ helped diffuse the Six-Day War, and he avoided a major crisis when France withdrew from NATO. Crucially, LBJ assisted India during a time of famine there, possibly saving millions of lives. When I first read about this, not only did my opinion of LBJ improve dramatically, I was prepared to do what many on this sub have called me to do: rank LBJ higher than JFK.

However, India is also where we start to get into the more problematic aspects of LBJ's foreign policy. India was a non-aligned country during the Cold War and it was open in criticizing the Vietnam War. LBJ retaliated by limiting food aid to India, and he only reopened full access to aid once India promised not to be so critical of the Vietnam War. (This lines up with how LBJ retaliated against domestic critics of the war like Martin Luther King or Hubert Humphrey, his own vice-president). While deliberately cutting off food aid to people might not have been illegal at the time, under modern international law as established by amendments to the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, this is a really serious violation of human rights. Simply on a moral level, it's horrible to take food away from starving people to coerce their government to remain silent about an unjust war. Obviously, we don't apply laws retroactively, but I'm invoking modern law to show just how awful it was for LBJ to limit food aid as a political weapon.

Then we come to Indonesia. For all that LBJ agonized over being seen as an appeaser for "losing" South Vietnam, he actually succeeded in stopping the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. He did so by increasing US aid to Indonesia. Yet this came at a high price. For context, previous presidents supported Indonesian leader Sukarno, a democrat who was also non-aligned in the Cold War. But LBJ backed general Suharto, who seized control in a military coup. With help from the Johnson administration, during and after his rise to power Suharto purged Indonesia of suspected communists. The US provided information, funding, and weapons to Suharto. All in all, with American assistance Suharto killed between 500,000 and 2 million suspected communists, many if not most of whom were innocent. LBJ knew of the killings but he did nothing to stop them and he continued giving money and weapons to Suharto. LBJ's actions in Indonesia make the Vietnam War all the more foolhardy; LBJ already achieved what he wanted in stopping communism in Southeast Asia so it didn't matter what happened in Saigon. The government could've fallen and LBJ could still have claimed credit for stopping communism in Southeast Asia.

One overlooked aspect of LBJ's administration is his 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic. While the intervention succeeded in getting Americans out of the country, it also succeeded in tipping the scales so that authoritarian Joaquín Balaguer would take power. Balaguer oversaw widespread suppressions of civil liberties and numerous murders of political dissidents.

I'm not saying any of this to bash LBJ. As I've said before so many times on this sub, he was a great domestic policy leader and I even made a post acknowledging him as this sub's choice for America's 10th best president overall. There's a strong argument for that ranking given how important his civil rights achievements were for the country. Unfortunately, LBJ really struggled as a foreign policy leader. He had an arrogant view of America's role in global affairs and a condescending attitude towards most other countries, seeing them as insignificant compared to America's power and might. I have to say that despite being very liberal domestically, LBJ often reminds me of George W. Bush in terms of his foreign policy arrogance and narrow view of the rest of the world. It's hypocritical to condemn Republican presidents like Reagan or Bush the Younger for their harmful policies while giving a free pass to LBJ, whose policies led to the deaths of millions of people in Southeast Asia. I don't like Reagan or Bush as presidents, but LBJ's actions probably harmed more people than theirs did, so I don't feel comfortable glazing him while bashing presidents whose policies - while terrible - weren't as destructive as LBJ's foreign policies. It's possible for LBJ to be both a great social reformer and a tragically destructive foreign policy leader. When I travel abroad, there's a reason that LBJ isn't one of the most beloved presidents among non-Americans.

If I were grading LBJ's foreign policy outside of Vietnam, I'd give him a C+. But with Vietnam, I give him a D-. The only thing that saves him from being in F is the fact that he likely did save lives in India, even if that humanitarian act was compromised by him playing politics with peoples' lives. However, on domestic issues he was S tier, averaging him out to be a B+ president.

If you straight up look at pictures of the Presidents, I guess it’s a pretty straight answer- H.W.

However, he was a fighter pilot in WW2, captain of the Yale baseball team, survived heavy fire while FINISHING his bombing run, and evaded capture from the Japanese for 4 hours. Plus he survived from being eaten by the Japs. He was no coward and certainly not a nerd.

So I’m going with harry Truman. Poor vision, not athletic, played piano and read a lot, skipped a grade, etc. He served in WW1, but the evidence is clear he was a geek.

For this post I will be talking about modern politics (1960-2012) and anyone is welcomed to use even further elections but I’m not entirely well versed on those so I’m happy to learn.

Anyway, it seems to me that there’s this big deal where people think picking a running mate will significantly change the outcome and the only election I think that works is 1960. You have a Northern Democrats (Kennedy) who needed to appeal to the South or else he would’ve easily lost the election so the only person that could’ve carried it was Johnson. I will argue that Johnson is the only candidate during that time that would carry Texas. If you picked someone like Stuart Symington Kennedy could maybe pick off southern states like Missouri or North Carolina.

By and large every election after that doesn’t seem to really change in anyway if you change the running mate. Sure, you might change the competency and wit but I don’t think H.W. Bush picking Colin Powell or Jack Kemp over Dan Quayle would’ve changed a thing. Obama and Biden are the only one I can see making an argument for a young/old ticket of experience and energy. I don’t think picking a VP will “carry” a region as a lot of people like to say especially since most VPs already come from safe regions.

Does Bob Graham change the Florida outcome in 2000? Maybe. Curious to see what everyone thinks

this haircut and facial hair combo should be considered a war crime.

I am a canadian who loves American history. this is my collection of us presidentmail memorabilia. I also have a magazine for J Hoover but couldn't find the pic.

(the image is very vertical and I'm not sure how Reddit handles these things.) (sorry)