Measuring Good and Bad Presidents: Why Academic Historians Are Wrong
This article was first posted at CNS News. I recently watched an academic panel on C-SPAN devoted to “The Worst Presidents In American History.” It was sponsored by the Organization of American Historians. As is true of so many academic panels today, it was “diverse” in the sense that the participants were of different races […]
The Framers’ Bloopers
The Constitution’s Framers were very great men, but they were not gods. They made mistakes. By “mistakes,” I’m not talking about matters of political judgment, such as how much to accommodate slavery. I mean drafting errors of the forehead-slapping kind. Consider first a matter of style: The Constitution in its final form was drafted by […]
John F. Kennedy, RIP
History tends to correct the errors of contemporaneous perceptions, and on the 50th anniversary of his assassination there were far fewer mentions than in prior years about President Kennedy’s “greatness.” I was coming of age when President Kennedy was shot, and well remember the shock, first in my high school study hall and next in […]