Leadership Under Fire: A RANKING OF THE PERFORMANCE OF THE PRESIDENTS WITH RESPECT TO THE PRINCIPLES PRESENTED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND ADAM SMITH'S THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

By Dr. G. Preston Burns

ADAM SMITH was a Scottish philosopher who developed a theory of government that would promote his free market capitalistic ideas. This system, if followed carefully would create the wealthiest and most successful country ever. His book called The Wealth of Nations, which described his proposed system, was published in 1776. Our founding fathers read and studied his writings over the next ten to twelve years, melded it with our Declaration of Independence and produced our constitution. Alexander Hamilton, perhaps our most intelligent founding father, spent most of his years as Secretary of the Treasury under President Washington developing and implementing policies that would facilitate and promote Smith's ideas. Over the next 125 years our country closely followed Smith's teachings and we did become the richest most powerful country the world had ever seen. This treatise examines the lives of the presidents, giving insight into what in their formative years helped shape their philosophy of leadership. It also addresses how well they followed Smith's teachings while in office. Since 1913, we have had four significant turns away from Smith's guidance, which have cost us much blood and treasure. The last turn began in 1988, and we are still dealing with its ill effects.

This is a concise history of the United States as seen through the lens of the lives and times of the presidents.

-GERALD DALTAN, Retired attorney, Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The theme of the book seems to be that knowledge is power, which produces confidence and courage, which leads to good decisions on difficult issues. On the other hand lack of knowledge is weakness, which leads to fear and anxiety, which elicits poor decisions. The better prepared a president is before he enters office the better he will perform while in office. This work spells out what good preparation is all about!

-ESTELLE BRRENTINE, Former teacher and coach, North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Some of the information revealed in this text may cause many readers to re-evaluate some of their favorite presidents. This treatise should be used as a guide for the selection of candidates for the office of President of the United States and other high level positions in the federal government. Educators of government should find this book to be an excellent resource.

-CAROL MURRAY, Former educator, Fairfax County, Virginia.

The excellent summary of the characteristics of the presidents as shown in the charts will hopefully encourage further investigation of the importance of history as related to the political choices we make. The charts will enable teachers to easily assign classroom activities such as debates and to encourage lively discussions, all relating to the results of the various categories. It may even spark renewed interest in the works of Adam Smith.

-JUDY JEFFERSON, Former teacher, Cobb County, Georgia

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685267537

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface

The Ranking System

Criteria for Selecting Future Candidates

The Essence of Adam Smith

George Washington

John Adams

Thomas Jefferson

James Madison

James Monroe

John Quincy Adams

Andrew Jackson

Martin Van Buren

William Henry Harrison

John Tyler

James K. Polk

Zachary Taylor

Millard Fillmore

Franklin Pierce

James Buchanan Jr.

Causes of the Civil War

Abraham Lincoln

Andrew Johnson

Ulysses S. Grant

Rutherford Birchard Hayes

James Abram Garfield

Chester Alan Arthur

Grover Cleveland

Benjamin Harrison VIII

William McKinley Jr.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

William Howard Taft

Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Warren Gamaliel Harding

John Calvin Coolidge Jr.

Herbert Clark Hoover

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Harry S. Truman

Dwight David Eisenhower

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Richard Milhous Nixon

Gerald R. Ford

James Earl Carter

Ronald Wilson Reagan

George Herbert Walker Bush

William Jefferson Clinton

Conclusion

Bibliography

Summary of Grades

Presidents Characteristics Chart

Analysis of the Charts

About the Author

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Leadership Under Fire

A RANKING OF THE PERFORMANCE OF THE PRESIDENTS WITH RESPECT TO THE PRINCIPLES PRESENTED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND ADAM SMITH'S THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Dr. G. Preston Burns, Jr.

ISBN 979-8-88851-474-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-775-9 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68526-753-7 (Digital)

Copyright © 2020, 2023 Dr. G. Preston Burns, Jr.

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Preface

This treatise is a reaction to the ranking of the presidents by our academia. I have ranked them by looking at their lives and deeds through the lens of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. This is essentially like our America First policy. Since our academia does not agree with these principles, their ranking often varies dramatically with mine. Five of their top eleven presidents do not get out of my bottom ten! The criteria they use are essentially unmeasurable and vague. I have chosen a set of criteria that is much more easily recognized and facilitates the ranking process. The presidents who happened to line up well with these criteria have brought great prosperity to the United States and our people. Those presidents who lined up poorly with the criteria often put the United States in great danger and, in many cases, brought great harm and destruction to us.

The criteria used to evaluate the presidents over the last many years seem to be more academic and theoretical than actually useful to examine their performance in office. The lists included moral authority which depends on the existence of truth, vision which is equally vague, and crisis leadership which went unexplained. These first three were difficult to understand let alone measure. When ability to persuade the public was mentioned, I immediately thought of Adolph Hitler who was the master of public persuasion. This cannot be a good measure.

The criteria that I use suggest attributes that just about everyone would expect a president to exhibit. These included proven leadership in a crisis; education on all subjects related to the presidency such as micro and macroeconomics; military affairs and capabilities; business knowledge both domestic and international, both large and small; knowledge of the major cultures of the world gained through studying history and private foreign travel; and obviously, courage. These would also have to line up with the principles presented in the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. After reading and studying their biographies, I discovered that many of them had very few of these attributes; furthermore, it appeared that several of the presidents actually committed acts that were detrimental to the United States and our people. I realize that it is sometimes difficult to determine someone's motives, but in more than one case, they let the cat out of the bag. On further inspection, it becomes reasonably clear. If a president's acts have turned out poorly, they received a poor grade; however, if I was able to determine that the acts were intentional, they received a worse grade.

Most readers of this work will gain insight into the early lives of the presidents and the events that shaped their leadership philosophy as president. It's a short read filed with facts and oddities about their lives. It points out their accomplishments and failures while in office and their effects on the United States while in office and much later after they left office. I tried to include events that were particularly pertinent to the criteria. I also point out the common attributes of the most successful presidents and those who failed. It is relatively easy to pick out the good presidents using my criteria. Their good deeds are discussed at length in their biographies. If a president has a dark side, it is much more difficult to ascertain. The negative information is conveniently left out and takes much more research to discover. It is not an error of omission. It is simply an omission. If you look at the last page of my book, there is a summary of the presidents' grades. You might be in for a big surprise. Hopefully, you will find that I have defended my positions well.

If this information could get into the hands of the school districts around the country, their American history teachers could benefit greatly, along with our children and grandchildren. Most of this information is not presented at the high school level or college level. I think this is American history in a nutshell with advice on what a presidential candidate should know before he or she ever runs for office. Actually, all politicians aspiring to national office along with television opinion show hosts could benefit. This information should perhaps be used to help evaluate and select future candidates, especially for national office. Fortunately, we have been blessed with many better presidents than bad ones. This is reflected in their respective grades with many more As and Bs than Ds and Fs being issued.

The Ranking System

In contemplating the criteria for ranking the presidents, I had to go back and think about the origins of our democratic republic and on what it was founded. On first inspection, it would seem that our Constitution must be the document with its set of ideas. But where did the Constitution come from? It would be easy to say that it at least, in part, was derived from the Declaration of Independence. Having no new ideas presented in this document, it then became clear that it was derived from previous writings of thinkers and philosophers over the previous one hundred years, going back to John Locke of England, about the rights of man. I think it follows that all of the Founding Fathers knew about their writings and agreed with their principles. They helped write it and signed it, risking their own lives and fortunes.

In the latter half of that same one-hundred-year period, another philosopher and thinker was contemplating a system of government, but this time it targeted the commercial and industrial aspects of government. It was a treatise on industrial capitalism, and it illustrated how trade was guided by the invisible hand of the marketplace, which would result in the greatest benefit to the society. Countries following his principles would become wealthy. The book was published on March 9, 1776, by Adam Smith, a Scottish philosopher, and is widely known as The Wealth of Nations. Incredibly, it came just in time for our fledgling nation to take advantage of this new philosophy.

By the time of the writing of our Constitution, nearly all of the founding fathers had read and studied the 1,200 or 1,300 pages of this three-volume publication. Our Constitution was the result of the melding together of the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Within one hundred years, this tiny agrarian society of less than 2.5 million people, with no manufacturing and no military to speak of, became the richest, most powerful country in the world. Since then, we have almost exponentially outperformed the rest of the world. The gap continues to widen. We also remained the freest people in the world.

In rating the presidents, I have to think of how closely they have followed the combined philosophies and how ably they were prepared to defend the principles. Nothing much has changed over time with respect to the rights of man as expressed at that time. The one thing that did change was that we actually achieved our independence. As far as principles are concerned, nothing should have changed. We have had to deal with monopolies and trusts, the magnitude of which no one could have possibly conceived of in the 1700s. Also, with the coming of electricity and running water, decreasing-cost industries have had to be regulated to be compatible with our system.

The stock market speculation had to be addressed because of the ill effects it could have on the economy. International trade had to be adjusted for Socialist and Communist countries that subsidized their industries in an attempt to put ours out of business. Artificially manipulating the value of their currencies can further damage our country's industries and must be evaluated and adjustments made. The most recent problem that will likely have to be dealt with is our immense high-tech companies with their unseemly control of our lives. I expect a good outcome.

After completing my formal training in dentistry and spending the next eight to ten years honing the skills and learning the business, I then decided to branch out and read something different. I knew very little about World War II, so I dived in and started with the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a 1,500-page doorstop by William L. Shirer (1950, 1966). It was, essentially, the life and times of Adolf Hitler, and that made the history come alive.

It was not until my daughter started at the University of South Carolina that I really became interested in history. While browsing through the bookstore helping her find her textbooks, it occurred to me that I should perhaps take a course myself. Obviously, living in Virginia, I would not be going to classes in South Carolina, but I could buy a textbook and take it home with me to read and study myself. I started looking for a three-hour course with one textbook, thinking that would be an easy start. I picked a course with a book of about six hundred pages of fine print and no pictures. It was the 4,000-year story of The History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, published in 1988. Wow, was I surprised! I was not able to read and understand a single page without looking up at least one or two events referred to in the text in an encyclopedic dictionary. It took weeks to read it, and at the end, even though I had grown up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, near the center of United States history, and had graduated from the University of Virginia and Dental School, I realized I knew very little about the world. I needed to catch up!

Over the next nine or ten years, I read and studied the history of nearly every important country in the world, both modern and ancient, however, not the United States! By about 1999, I began to notice biographies for sale at one of my favorite stores. There seemed to be a flurry of books being published, so I read them as they came out. They were biographies of people like Churchill, Stalin, Katherine the Great, etc. Then came many of our early American heroes—Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and others. These books made United States history exciting for me, and at some point, I decided to read the presidents' lives as they came available. By January 2019, I decided to make an effort to read all of the presidents' lives as a way to learn United States history.

I did not read them in chronological order. When I came to Buchanan, Worst, President, Ever was the title of the book. I had always heard that the presidents from 1836 to 1860 were all very bad. This group was hardly even mentioned in the American history classes I took in high school or at the University of Virginia. Once I had finished that whole group, I thought maybe I should try my hand at ranking the presidents, since it appeared that some of them were very good. I recently completed my last president's life, Warren Harding. This left me with a new dilemma. What would be my criteria? I decided to look at the criteria used in a recent ranking by a combination of historians, which raised more questions than answers.

In looking at some of their criteria, say moral authority, I'm not sure what that means! After looking at Wikipedia, it certainly appears that it is highly theoretical and academic. It appears that it depends on the existence of truth and asks if the person follows his own truth. It depends on which truth you are talking about. Would it be that of Karl Marx, Adam Smith, or some religious truth, say that of Mohammad, Buddha, Christian, or yet another? One would like to think that each president has followed his own truth, in which case, we might be able to analyze his actual actions and deeds and get a better appreciation for his work, either good or bad.

Another one is the pursuit of equal justice for all. If you look at the presidents before Lincoln, all would fail. Lincoln, only at the end of the war in early 1865 and near the end of his life, asked for the Thirteenth Amendment to be passed. He had not been an abolitionist before that time and would have failed in over 97 percent of his presidency. After Lincoln, with the exception of Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, all would pass. Although it is an important concept, it only applies to maybe three or four presidents. Certainly, we should keep this in mind.

The idea of having a vision follows along the same path as moral authority and may be more theoretical and academic than useful. I prefer to judge people on their actions.

The ability to have good relations with Congress may be something that the president has little control over. All is well if his party affiliation is the same as both Houses of Congress; in which case, he would get along with them. If both Houses of Congress are aligned against him, then he will not, unless he gives in to the opposing party as Bill Clinton did after the midterms in 1994. In the case of being aligned with one House or the other, the relationship will be mixed. This does not appear to be very relevant.

Crisis leadership may be one that is hard to apply in modern times. Today's military would never see the top-ranked leader on the front line of battle, as was George Washington during the battle of New York. He, along with the entire colonial army, was about to be massacred, and he knew that that would mean the collapse of the whole revolution. The attacks on 9/11 represent quite a different type of crisis. In this latter case, the attacks were not followed up with more and/or worse attacks. The episode, although terrible in every respect, came and went like a hurricane. The enemy was not at the gate. It was handled very well. President Bush was never personally at risk, other than at game three of the World Series in New York, a brave move.

The one that gives me greatest pause is the ability to persuade the public. The episode that first comes to mind was within the first history that I read after finishing school. Hitler had an excellent public speaking ability. It was honed over many years, speaking in bars and cafés in Vienna. He worked hard at it, and when he spoke to the Germans, he had perfected his ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy. If one happens to have the wrong agenda, his audience can easily be led down the wrong path. This brings to mind the old expression that he who speaks well in public is often given credit for being much wiser and smarter than he really is. To me, great speaking ability just raises a red flag.

In evaluating the presidents, in addition to the Declaration and Adam Smith, I have used other parameters to help explain their successes or failures. Below is a list of the guidelines I have used to evaluate the performances of the presidents while in office and the lingering effects of their actions after they have left office.

Did the president have great knowledge of the founding documents? For the earlier presidents that would mean having read and studied the Wealth of Nations and the Federalist Papers, later presidents would need to add democracy in America published in 1835 by Alexis De Tocqueville and still later presidents The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek published in 1944.

Did the president understand the times and conditions that surrounded the writing of the Constitution? This would include interpreting the Constitution using definitions of the words as defined at the time of the writing, not some modern definition of an old word. Were the policies he enacted contrary to the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and/or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations?

Did his policies cause harm to the United States or its economy? Did he intentionally cause harm to the people of the United States for political or personal gain even though his actions may have been constitutional?

Were the issues of his time in office handled well and to the benefit of the American people?

Did the president's actions actually save the United States from disaster?

Did he show solid leadership under great stress?

Was his education sufficient for the times and if not did he self-educate himself on his deficiencies?

Did he have sufficient business experience to handle the economic issues of the day?

Did he have knowledge and understanding of the major cultures of the world?

Did he have the courage to make the right decisions on both foreign and domestic issues?

Any rating system is necessarily subjective although I think it will be clear that most of the guidelines above are somewhat more objective and do help in the evaluation of their actions both good and bad. Because of the different requirements presented at different times in our 250-year history, assigning the presidents in numerical order may not do them justice. I have decided to use the grading system, A through F with +s and −s to evaluate their performance for the time period in which they served. I have also added the grade of Incomplete (Inc.) to designate the three presidents who died in office and whose term was too short to have had any effect on United States policy. It might be an academic exercise to speculate what grade they might have received based on their life story. If they met all of the guidelines, they may have received an excellent grade.

The descriptions of the different presidents' lives that follow are intended to give the reader a good understanding of who they really were, where they grew up and under what circumstances, and the values that helped shape their lives. I have tried to point out events in their lives that connect to the guidelines that I have set forth, which will help to explain their actions while in office.

Criteria for Selecting Future Candidates

In trying to arrive at these criteria, it seemed reasonable to look at the lives of the most successful presidents and try to determine what was in their backgrounds that prepared them so well for the areas in which they excelled. No president meets all of the criteria; however, Washington comes very close especially considering the times. Many of the criteria apply only to more modern periods.

After Washington, we come to James Monroe who was well educated for the time, showed courage and ability in leading troops under fire, ran his farms which was the business of the day, and dealt with foreign leaders extensively and quite successfully over many years. He was also a self-educator as evidenced by his switching back to the Federalist's ideas once he was in control of our government.

Another example would be Herbert Hoover who traveled the world extensively as a result of his own business. His travels took him to China, South America, Africa, Australia, Indo China, and many others. Travel in the late 1800s was still very difficult, and many of the places he went would very well be out of reach even today because of their remoteness and the dangers involved. He completely understood the world, its cultures and its leaders, which gave him the ability to save Europe from starvation during and after both world wars when no one else was competent to do so.

Eisenhower is another good example. He was probably the best at solving international relations problems since as a great general he studied the personalities and training of not only his own leaders and generals but those of the leaders, generals, and cultures of his enemies. Since we had enemies all over the world, he had to have great knowledge gained through self-education. As president, with that great knowledge, he stopped four or five wars before they had a chance to start and secretly overthrew three foreign countries' governments without firing a shot.

Finally, Ronald Reagan used his college economic training to understand Milton Friedman's economic theories to create the longest sustained period of growth and prosperity that our country has ever had. Some unknown innate ability gave him the ability and wisdom to defeat the Soviet Union.

It would certainly be wonderful to nominate candidates today for the presidency that could meet all of these criteria. While that would not likely be possible, it would certainly be a worthy goal.

The criteria I have selected will be much simpler and, therefore, will be more easily understood, making them more meaningful in many ways. I will list these below and render an explanation:

Proven leadership of men in a military crisis. This means experiencing battle and successfully leading his men under direct fire against an enemy when he and his men have a great risk of being killed or the whole unit being annihilated. Those who have had this type of experience seem to have performed better in the presidency.

Education, either attained through formal training or self-education following the end of their formal education, is high on the list. This subject should include history, both American history—including lives of the presidents—and world history; some law, especially business law; military affairs, including leadership, tactics, strategy, and logistics; economics,