[ClearCase_guy]

I like Coolidge a lot. I like Reagan also. I think Reagan could have done a better job on immigration, so my first instinct was to put Coolidge as #1 — but raising my eyes up from the domestic scene, I recall that Reagan also won the Cold War and so I’ll say Reagan was #1.

[November 2010]

My list since 1900 in order — From Great to “Helped Destroy the Country.”

Coolidge
Reagan
Harding (only because of Tea Pot dome, otherwise he’d be #1)

Eisenhower
Kennedy
Theodore Roosevelt
Truman
Clinton
Bush I

Hoover
Bush II
Carter
Lyndon Johnson
Wilson
Nixon
Franklin Roosevelt
Obama

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Coolidge had no taste for war, or personal aggrandizement. After World War II, the U.S. appeared to have been handed a war it never sought, but appearances deceive. Coolidge's predecessor, Wilson, poked his nose into a European war he had vowed to avoid and unleashed demons we are still living with. Had Europeans been forced to settle their own affairs, the results would probably have been better all around. The Germans surrendered in part because of U.S. intervention and in part because of promises made by Wilson of a fair peace. The British and especially the French extracted reparations from a prostrate Germany, setting the stage for the next War. The cold war was an indirect consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, the misbegotten spawn of Jimmy Carter's spiritual model.