Just following up on some prior posts about decent presidents and historically accurate movies. As a reminder, I had thought that Grant should be included on the list of basically decent people who had been president. Some more Q&A yesterday at E-V.com.
A.M. in Mexico City, Mexico, asks: In answering
the question from T.S. in Anaheim, about good people who served as president, you wrote: “With this said, based on available evidence, we think it’s fair to consider Carter to be the most ‘good’ a person to ever have served as president. We would say the pretty clear runner-up is John Quincy Adams. Others in the conversation are Lincoln, William McKinley, Gerald Ford, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”My question is: why not mention Ulysses S. Grant? I had the impression that he was a good man, although one who
ultimately fell prey to scams, do to his overly trusting nature. Is there some reason that you don’t see Grant as a good
person, at least compared to the others that you listed?Also, who would you say were some of the worst human beings to be president?
(V) & (Z) answer: There were another half-dozen that we seriously considered, but excluded because of one black mark or another. Grant was literally next up, but we did not include him because of his antisemitic General Order No. 11. Not enough to condemn the man and his life’s work, but enough to keep him out of the “nice guy presidents” top five. Others we seriously considered, and set aside, were James A. Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Keep in mind, this is about personal qualities, not policy.
As to worst human beings, that is very difficult. Obviously, owning slaves, or wishing for the death of Native
Americans, or embracing imperialism are deeply problematic in our day, but were less so in generations past. So, while
we could answer your question with the five slave-owning-est presidents and be done with it, we don’t think that tells
you very much.So, we are going to limit ourselves to presidents whose jerk behavior was jerk behavior even by the standards of
their day. And we would say the five worst, even when correcting for era, were Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon B.
Johnson, Richard Nixon and convicted felon Donald Trump. That is not to say that these men were all jerk-ish, all the time.
Certainly, they all had their redeeming features, too. Well, most of them did.
R.B. in Owings Mills, MD, asks: Last week,
you had a lot to say about historical accuracy in films and TV. Now that the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution is upon us, would you be willing to say something about the films and shows based on that time period that you would consider most (and least!) accurate? (You already commented on Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, so we can skip that one). For instance, how is April Morning (1998)? The Crossing (2000)? Mini-series like John Adams or Sons of Liberty? It’s very timely to have some good recommendations for historical drama of the nation’s founding—and alternatively, to know what to avoid.On a different note: About Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, you wrote, “There’s all kinds of other stuff in the film that’s ridiculous (like the counterattack on Tokyo, which did not happen).” I thought it was very clear that the film was portraying the Doolittle Raid in April 1942, which most certainly did happen. Am I missing something?
(V) & (Z) answer: Starting with your latter question, it was portraying the Doolittle Raid, but the film’s version and the real thing have little to do with each other. Having just written a capsule on The Ministry of
Ungentlemanly Warfare, another film that takes a real event and makes it into something that is basically fiction, we meant to add some verbiage to the Pearl Harbor capsule communicating our meaning. But we were jumping around as we wrote that section, and forgot to go back and add that verbiage.As to your former question, (Z) is not the ideal person to answer that. Since the Revolutionary War is not his area,
he is somewhat less likely to see those films and TV programs, unless they happen to overlap with one of his general
areas of interest, like politics. So while he can say that John Adams, 1776 and Hamilton are all solid (within their respective frameworks), he can’t speak to the larger corpus of Revolutionary-era films.That said, the folks at The Journal of the American Revolution put together a list a couple of years ago, and it will tell you most of what you want to know. They have good things to say about The Crossing, and much less good things to say about April Morning. They did not bother with Sons of Liberty, as that is the History Channel taking a book (and a historical era) and aggressively dramatizing it. The History Channel is an entertainment operation, not an educational operation, and the next time they come within a country mile of fidelity to the historical record will be the first time.
T.H. in Oakland, CA, asks: I recently watched the movie The Apprentice, a dramatization of Donald Trump’s relationship with Roy Cohn. Could you comment on how accurately this movie utilized historical facts?
(V) & (Z) answer: When the filmmakers were confronted with things that are hotly disputed, like whether or not Donald Trump (before he became a convicted felon) raped his first wife, or whether he used amphetamines to control his weight, they favored whatever version of events was more scandalous. That said, while certainly accepting some rumors as fact, they did not make things up out of whole cloth. And they did a very fine job of capturing the dynamic between the two main characters, and how that dynamic evolved over time.