Before putting LBJ at the top of your list you might want to dig a little deeper. He was a genuinely sleazy individual (Trump Lite) but his list of actual accomplishments that made a genuinely positive difference in so many American lives cannot be ignored. I mean, even Nixon gets credit for getting the EPA off the ground…….
Oh I've dug deep. Why is he at the top? Estimates range from 1.3-3+ million deaths attributed to the Vietnam (unnecessary) war. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440905/
I am a vet of that war and I worked the propaganda machine from the Nixon administration as a radioman on the comm station of the amphibious fleet's flag ship....Nixon is way above Johnson in my estimation as a president who was a crook and hid war stats from the media to fuel his voter base and the profits of war. Hoover who was Nixon's buddy in my view caused the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King as well as Fred Hampton and Malcom X......Trump actually tried to use militia groups to overthrow democracy.....your list is pretty far off from my list of bad guy American leaders.....I don't think Johnson had clean hands but he did let his Texan arms dealer buddies get mega rich from the arms dealer game....Hoover was the most evil guy in DC we've probably ever seen ....Trump just wasn't that bright to begin with. Trump is purely a traitor to the nation....Joe Biden shouldn't be anywhere near that list....Joe's big crime is purely being a career politician who should have retired long ago
yet we've just in two years had almost a million deaths due to denial of safety protocols and lack of quarantining by a president who in Jan of 2020 said "a few people will get the sniffles and it'll go away in the spring when it warms up".......then went out and got infected himself and carelessly gave it to staff members and guys like Chris Christie....we could have had less than 1k covid deaths had we had honest leadership at the beginning of this pandemic....the war in Vietnam went from the 1950s to the 1970s.....the pandemic is still here after a very polarizing ignorant stance towards combating it initially was in practice. A guy asking his citizens to inject bleach from the front office....whew.......he's top of the list of presidential sicko's
As Riverman has noted, blame for Vietnam goes all the way back to Eisenhower. Dig a little deeper. Robert Caro’s (current) three part series on LBJ is enlightening and has been exhaustively researched. Volume Four (dealing more deeply with his presidency) is long overdue (and eagerly awaited). The more Caro dug, the more he found to write about, good, bad or indifferent. LBJ was the last great “politician”. He got things done in the face of opposition because he knew every arcane rule and nuance of the American political system…..and he knew where all the bodies were buried (including those he dug the hole for). He made Mitch McConnell look like a rank amateur politically…..… Edit: Oops, Eagerly awaiting Volume Five. Caro originally intend a three part series. But when he got to digging, he realized he had wildly underestimated. LBJ was a very complex individual. Unlike Trump…………….
I think the 'a pox on both their houses' argument fails at this time. The two parties are NOT the same. False equivalency. One is trying to still overturn a free and fair election while also working to make sure the next election is not free and not fair. There should be a five alarm fire bell going off in the country right now about the GOP / cult party. Democracy is on the brink, if you haven't noticed.
Robert Kennedy couldn't stand LBJ but John gave in and ask LBJ to join the ticket, because he need the southern vote. LBJ also encourage JFK to promote civil rights and buddy up with MLK. That changed the course of the democratic party.
Nixon was actually a Navy vet who was in charge of a supply depot in Bougainville in 1944. He and his mates were attacked strafed and bombed by the Japanese for 30 straight days. It did have a profound effect upon his decision to bomb Hanoi. He was well liked. He set up " Nix's Burger shack" which he gave his buddies Burgers and Beer as a morale booster. Regarding Hoover: He was a viper who ordered surveillance of Americans. Most notably, he despised John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. What a worm!
LBJ was also rude. He would give interviews while he sat on a toilet. He was the only president that had an amphib car. Drive it or run the vehicle as a boat.
Would love to hear more from you about this. I've always been fascinated with JFK and politics of that era... I don't know why Hoover has never been more of a suspect in my mind. But seeing him listed as possibly being involved in all of those assassinations got my mind going. Dude was evil, for sure.
He took shits with the door open during cabinet meetings and once whipped out his Johnson on his ranch and pissed on a secret service agent. Oh, he was an asshole, probably the biggest to sit in the oval office. Plus he caused a lot of death by backing contractors instead of accepting the logical conclusion that Vietnam was unwinnable. He's still probably not in the worst 5 though. He did sign the civil rights bill among other accomplishments. He's probably in the bottom 10-15.