Foreign Policy asked 1,615 international relations scholars from 1,375 U.S. colleges, “Who was the most effective U.S. secretary of state of the past 50 years?” The Washington Post,
The winner? Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry A. Kissinger, who was secretary for four years during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Since the Vietnam thing didn’t turn out so well, the scholars must have been grading him on openings to China and the Soviet Union when he was at the National Security Council?
Kissinger got 32.21 percent, extraordinary in such a large field….
Then, dead last, is John Kerry. He got a total of two votes of the 660 scholars who responded. Tied Eagleburger’s 0.31 percent, but the magazine lists him at 13th.
It’s probably better to be at the opposite end of the list from Henry Kissinger. (If he was given the prize for going to China, we should note that Nixon, Kissinger’s boss, had made it impossible for anyone else to go earlier, by relentlessly red-baiting anyone who tried, from 1949 onwards.)
Meanwhile, what did scholars think of W’s presidency?
“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”
Is it true that many people in King County dislike the military? Are you one of them by chance? Just curious.
He is, but doesn’t have the seeds to come out and say it
I thought so.