Tricky Dicky was reckoned smart enough; from even before his inauguration, he was eager - even desperate - to get out of the whole IndoChina mess but the Politbureau in Hanoi balked him at every turn and he left the White House in ignominy as an Unindicted Co-Conspirator - but he reinvented himself as a Wise Elder Statesman later on..

Smart is as smart does; Harry Truman was a brilliant President, but he felt ambivalent about the Korean War to his dying day.

. Jimmy Carter was humiliated by the bearded obscurantists of Tehran and his Presidency is recalled with a grimace - although he engineered a lasting *Cold Peace*
between Egypt and Israel.

Ron Reagan was suffering from the visible signs of the onset of dementia while he was still in office but he is remembered with great fondness and even has an aircraft
carrier named after him.

Ike kept his nerve over the Taiwan Straits and much more too.

didnt realise that benjamin franklin was not president, was always under the impression that he is

Teddy Roosevelt was one of the best US Presidents regardless of IQ, he broke up the corporations(JP Morgan) and did a lot for the average worker, sadly things are going back to where they were.

one wonders how those IQ's were calculated....

lot's of folks talk about wanting money as liking 'dead presidents'.

Ben's on the 100, Alex is on the 10 (and there's others on higher non-circulating bills), neither one was pres and, in fact, Alex wasn't even born in the US.


Cheers


Bertros

Little know fact. H.W. Bush was shot down in WWII, and there are pictures of him being rescued by a US sub. Billy Clinton may have been smart enough to work his way into the corrupt US political system, but not smart enough to hide his sex predator life, where JFK was just a smart p*ssy hound and unlike slick Willy chose good looking women. (btw/ Ben Franklin was also reported to be a women chaser.) Truman was an idiot that let the opportunity pass to squash Russia and China a la Patton and McArthur and we are still paying for that mistake and so will our children be. TR may have been the best president we every had. A real no bullshit mans man. TR where are you when America needs you the most?

There are Japanese who witnessed Bush's plane crashing and the crew being rescued by submarine. They were astounded by the resources of a country that could use subs to rescue airmen. In the last year or so of the war there were always subs off islands being attacked to rescue downed airmen.
Bush was shot down off the sister island to Iwo Jima which had the Japanese port for Iwo Jima.
American subs didn't have much to do towards the end of the war, every Japanese merchant ship had been sunk by aircraft or submarines!

Sailorman is sound most of the time but the idea that it would have been a good idea for Truman to have crushed the USSR and Mao's China (and maybe the Commies in Eastern Europe) and so was the sort of stuff that Goldwaterites peddled in my teenage years - in the late 40s and early 50s the US public (very sensibly) wanted a good life, not a
series of hideous costly and open-ended wars to impose ""Freedom"" of people with very different ideas ...

Need one mention Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and now Syria ?