[Vision2020] Harding & McCain: academic vs Presidential performance

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Monday 06 October 2008 12:31:18 lfalen wrote:
> It has been said that John McCain was a poor student. It may be worth
> noting that Grant was near the bottom of his West Point Class. He beat
> those that were at the top of the class. Roger

Many observers, both conservative and liberal, rank the Grant presidency quite 
poorly. One listing shows only Harding and Nixon exceeding Grant's failures, 
particularly his tolerance of corruption. Grant and McCain may have similar 
academic performance at a military academy, but Grant's presidency is hardly 
a positive recommendation as a template for a presidential successor.

Here are three paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on U. S. Grant:

"The first scandal to taint the Grant administration was Black Friday, a 
gold-speculation financial crisis in September 1869, set up by Wall Street 
manipulators Jay Gould and James Fisk. They tried to corner the gold market 
and tricked Grant into preventing his treasury secretary from stopping the 
fraud. However, Grant eventually released large amounts of gold back onto the 
market, causing a large-scale financial crisis for many gold investors. Jay 
Gould had already prepared and quietly sold out while Fisk denied many 
agreements and hired thugs to intimidate his creditors.

The most famous scandal was the Whiskey Ring of 1875, exposed by Secretary of 
the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow, in which over 3 million dollars in taxes 
were stolen from the federal government with the aid of high government 
officials. Orville E. Babcock, the private secretary to the President, was 
indicted as a member of the ring but escaped conviction because of a 
presidential pardon. Grant's earlier statement, "Let no guilty man escape" 
rang hollow. Secretary of War William W. Belknap was discovered to have taken 
bribes in exchange for the sale of Native American trading posts. Grant's 
acceptance of the resignation of Belknap allowed Belknap, after he was 
impeached by Congress for his actions, to escape conviction, since he was no 
longer a government official.

Other scandals included the Sanborn Incident involving Treasury Secretary 
William Adams Richardson and his assistant John D. Sanborn. Another was a 
problem with U.S. Attorney Cyrus I. Scofield. The Crédit Mobilier of America 
scandal also ruined the political career of his first vice president, 
Schuyler Colfax, who was replaced on the Republican ticket in the 1872 
election with Henry Wilson, who was also involved in the scandal."


Ken