OTHER PRESIDENTS
GEORGE WASHINGTON
“That Washington was not a scholar is certain. That he is too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station is equally beyond dispute.”
—JOHN ADAMS
“Insane.”
—JAMES MONROE
“He may have had a bad past. Who knows, you know? He may have had some, I think, accusations made. Didn’t he have a couple things in his past?”
—DONALD TRUMP
JOHN ADAMS
“He is distrustful, obstinate, excessively vain, and takes no counsel from anyone.… He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probably effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill that can possibly be said of him: he is profound in his view and accurate in his judgment except when knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment.… I like everything about Adams except his politics.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“He is as disinterested as the Being who made him.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“Mr. Adams and his Federalists wish to sap the Republic by fraud, destroy it by force, and elect an English monarchy in its place.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
THOMAS JEFFERSON
“It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds. However wise and scientific as philosopher, as a politician he is a child and a dupe of party.”
—JOHN ADAMS
“A slur upon the moral government of the world.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“Perhaps the most incapable executive that ever filled the presidential chair… it would be difficult to imagine a man less fit to guide the state with honor and safety through the stormy times that marked the opening of the present century.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, I would appoint him Secretary of State, and then suggest to Senator Gore that we both resign so he could become President.”
—BILL CLINTON
“Despite his unimpressive appearance and manner, he was a brilliant fellow with a crystal-clear mind.… It was just that, when it came time for him to act like an executive, he was like a great many other people; when the time comes to make decisions, they have difficulty doing it.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
JAMES MONROE
“If Mr. Monroe should ever fill the chair of government he may (and it is presumed he would be well enough disposed) let the French Minister frame his speeches.… There is abundant evidence of his being mere tool in the hands of the French government.”
—GEORGE WASHINGTON
“I consider Monroe a pretty minor President. In spite of the Monroe Doctrine. That’s the only important thing he ever did more or less on his own, when you really get down to it.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“It is said he is a disgusting man to do business. Coarse, dirty, clownish in his address and stiff and abstracted in his opinions, which are drawn from books exclusively.”
—WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
“His disposition is as perverse and mulish as that of his father.”
—JAMES BUCHANAN
“The single really interesting thing about Adams, I’m afraid, is that he was the only son of a President in our history to become President himself.… He was a conscientious and well-meaning man, and I wish I could say more about his achievements.… I just don’t think there were any events in Adams’ administration that were very interesting.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
ANDREW JACKSON
“I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is the most unfit man I know for such a place.”
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
“[I]ncompetent both by his ignorance and by the fury of his passions.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“A barbarian who cannot write a sentence of grammar and can hardly spell his own name.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“His principles are all subordinate to his ambitions.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“I’ve got to say that our country would have done just as well not to have had Van Buren as President.… My particular reason for not thinking much of him is that he was just too timid and indecisive. I don’t know whether or not he even had any personal philosophy on the role of government; I think he was a man who was always worrying about what might happen if he did this or that, and always keeping his ear to the ground to the point where he couldn’t act as the chief executive, and for that reason he was just a politician and nothing more, a politician who was out of his depth.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“The greatest beggar and the most troublesome of all the office seekers during my administration was General Harrison.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“[A] lively and active, but shallow mind, a political adventurer, not without talents, but self-sufficient, vain and indiscreet.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“Our Present Imbecile Chief.”
—ANDREW JACKSON
“He is as tickled with the Presidency as is a young woman with a new bonnet.”
—MARTIN VAN BUREN
“Some folks are silly enough to have formed a plan to make a President of the U.S. out of this clerk and clod hopper.”
—WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
“Harrison didn’t accomplish a thing during the month he was in office. He made no contribution whatsoever. He had no policy. He didn’t know what the government was about, to tell the truth. About the only thing he did during that brief period was see friends and friends of friends, because he was such an easy mark that he couldn’t say no to anybody, and everybody and his brother was beseeching him for jobs.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Tyler is a political sectarian, of the slave-driving, Virginian, Jeffersonian school, principled against all improvement, with all the interests and passions and vices of slavery rooted in his moral and political constitution—with talents not above mediocrity, and a spirit incapable of expansion to the dimensions of the station upon which he has been cast by the hand of providence.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“[A] politician of monumental littleness.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“He was a contrary old son of a bitch.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“One of the Presidents we could have done without.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Polk… is just qualified for an eminent County Court lawyer… He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no eloquence of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.”
—JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
“I never betrayed a friend or [was] guilty of the black sin of ingratitude. Mr. Polk cannot say as much.”
—ANDREW JACKSON
“[A] bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.”
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
“Polk’s appointments all in all are the most damnable set that was ever made by any President since the government was organized.… He has a set of interested parasites about him, who flatter him until he does not know himself. He seems to be acting upon the principle of hanging an old friend for the purpose of making two new ones.”
—ANDREW JOHNSON
ZACHARY TAYLOR
“General Taylor is, I have no doubt, a well-meaning old man. He is, however, uneducated, exceedingly ignorant of public affairs, and I should judge, of very ordinary capacity.”
—JAMES POLK
“Zachary Taylor was one of the do-nothing Presidents.… When Taylor became President of the United States, I don’t think he knew what to do. I can’t be charitable and say that he failed to carry out his program; he didn’t have any program to carry out, so he couldn’t fail because he had no program. He was elected just as a military figure, and he spent his year in office behaving like a retired general.… A President… must have ideas and imagination as to what’s needed for the good of the country, and he can create conditions that will make him great, or he can take things as they are and do nothing, like Taylor. Taylor certainly became expert at doing nothing.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
MILLARD FILLMORE
“At a time when we needed a strong man, what we got was a man that swayed with the slightest breeze.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Another of those detached, do-nothing Presidents.… He had no regular viewpoint on anything.… He was a man who changed with the wind, and as President of the United States he didn’t do anything that’s worth pointing out.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
FRANKLIN PIERCE
“A small politician, of low capacity and mean surroundings, proud to act as the servile tool of men worse than himself but also stronger and abler. He was ever ready to do any work the slavery leaders set him.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“[A] complete fizzle.… Pierce didn’t know what was going on, and even if he had, he wouldn’t of known what to do about it.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Pierce was a nincompoop.… It was Pierce’s foolish notion that he could cool down the slavery question and make people forget about it by doing two things: filling his cabinet with people of different viewpoints, and concentrating almost entirely on foreign policy and territorial expansion instead of slavery problems. But the net result was that his cabinet members kept bickering with each other and didn’t accomplish much, and Pierce’s moves in other directions didn’t distract people’s attention from the slavery problems for a minute.… Pierce was one of the best-looking men ever in the White House. He was also one of the most vain, which I guess was on account of the fact that he was so good-looking. But though he looked the way people who make movies think a President should look, he didn’t pay any more attention to business as President of the United States than the man in the moon, and he really made a mess of things.… Pierce was the best-looking President the White House ever had—but as President he ranks with Buchanan and Calvin Coolidge.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“[Pierce] always had the stomachache or a pain in the neck when there was a shooting engagement in Mexico.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
JAMES BUCHANAN
“It was as far as I could send him out of my sight, and where he could do the least harm. I would have sent him to the North Pole if we had kept a minister there!”
—ANDREW JACKSON, on why he appointed Buchanan his Minister to Russia
“All his acts and opinions seem to be with a view to his own advancement.… Mr. Buchanan is an able man, but is in small matters without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid.”
—JAMES K. POLK
“[O]ur present granny executive.”
—ULYSSES S. GRANT
“Buchanan… hesitated and backtracked and felt that his constitutional prerogative didn’t allow him to do things, and he ended up doing absolutely nothing and threw everything into Lincoln’s lap.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Mr. Lincoln has been and is to the extent of his limited ability and narrow intelligence [the abolitionists’] willing instrument for all the evil which has thus far been brought upon the country.”
—FRANKLIN PIERCE
“If Lincoln had lived, he would have done no better than [Andrew] Johnson.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
ANDREW JOHNSON
“Professing to be a Democrat, he has been politically if not personally hostile to me during my whole term. He is very vindictive and perverse in his temper and conduct. If he had the manliness or independence to manifest his opposition openly, he knows he could not be again elected by his constituents.”
—JAMES K. POLK
“I have never been so tired of anything before as I have been with the political speeches of Mr. Johnson.… I look upon them as a national disgrace.”
—ULYSSES S. GRANT
“He is such an infernal liar.”
—ULYSSES S. GRANT
“He is a scientific Goth, resembling Alaric, destroying the country as he goes and delivering the people over to starvation. Nor does he bury his dead, but leaves them to rot on the battlefield.”
—JOHN TYLER
“He has done more than any other President to degrade the character of cabinet officers by choosing them on the model of the military staff, because of their pleasant personal relation to him and not because of their national reputation and the public needs.… His imperturbability is amazing. I am in doubt whether to call it greatness or stupidity.”
—JAMES GARFIELD
“He combined great gifts with great mediocrity.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“[T]he worst president in our history.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Ulysses Simpson Grant’s period in office seems to prove the theory that we can coast along for eight years without a President.… Grant’s period as President was one of the low points in our history.… I don’t think Grant knew very much about what the President’s job was except that he was Commander-In-Chief of the armed forces. That was the thing, I think, that impressed him more than anything, and he was pretty naïve or ignorant about everything else… He wasn’t even a chief executive; he was another sleepwalker whose administration was even more crooked than Warren Harding’s, if that’s possible.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“The policy of the President has turned out to be a giveaway from the beginning. He has nulled suits, discontinued prosecutions, offered conciliation everywhere in the South, while they have spent their time in whetting their knives for any Republican they could find.… No nickname can be pinned to him.”
—JAMES GARFIELD
“He had no real hold upon the country. His amiable character, his lack of party heat, his conciliatory attitude towards the South alienated rather than attracted the members of his party in Congress.… The Democrats did not like him because he seemed to them incapable of frank, consistent action.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“Elected by a fluke and knew it.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
JAMES A. GARFIELD
“I am completely disgusted with Garfield’s course.… Garfield has shown that he is not possessed of the backbone of an angle worm.”
—ULYSSES S. GRANT
“He was not executive in his talents—not original, not firm, not a moral force. He leaned on others—could not face a frowning world; his habits suffered from Washington life. His course at various times when trouble came betrayed weakness.”
—RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
“A smooth, ready, pleasant man, not very strong.”
—RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
CHESTER A. ARTHUR
“Nothing like it ever before in the Executive Mansion—liquor, snobbery, and worse.”
—RUTHERFORD B. HAYES
“[A] nonentity with side whiskers.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“The only thing that stands out about Arthur is that he took all the wonderful furniture that had been brought to this country by Jefferson, Monroe, and several of the other presidents of that period and sold it in an auction for about $6,500.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
GROVER CLEVELAND
“What in the world has Grover Cleveland done? Will you tell me? You give up? I have been looking for six weeks for a Democrat who could tell me what Cleveland has done for the good of his country and for the benefit of the people, but I have not found him.… He says himself… that two-thirds of his time has been uselessly spent with Democrats who want office.… Now he has been so occupied in that way that he has not done anything else.”
—WILLIAM MCKINLEY
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
BENJAMIN HARRISON
“Damn the president! He is a cold-blooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old psalm-singing Indianapolis politician.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“The President is not popular with the members of either house. His manner of treating them is not at all fortunate, and when they have an interview with him, they generally come away mad.”
—WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
“I tend to pair up Benjamin Harrison and Dwight Eisenhower because they’re the two Presidents I can think of who most preferred laziness to labor.… There’s not much else you can say about Harrison except that he was President of the United States.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
WILLIAM MCKINLEY
“An honorable man… but not a strong man. I should feel rather uneasy about him in a serious crisis.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“McKinley didn’t turn out to be much of a President.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“The man is a demagogue and a flatterer.… I hate a flatterer. I like a man to tell the truth straight out, and I hate to see a man try to honeyfugle the people.”
—WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
“A megalomaniac.… My judgment is that the view of… Mr. Roosevelt, ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President is an unsafe doctrine, and that it might lead under emergencies to results of an arbitrary character, doing irremediable injustice to private right.”
—WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
“He is the most dangerous man of the age.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“What’s the use of wasting good serviceable indignation on him?”
—WOODROW WILSON
“Utterly without conscience and regard for truth, the greatest fakir of all times.”
—WARREN G. HARDING
“Well, the mad Roosevelt has a new achievement to his credit. He succeeded in defeating the party that furnished him a job for nearly all of his manhood days after leaving the ranch.… The eminent fakir can now turn to raising hell, his specialty, along other lines.”
—WARREN HARDING
“Theodore Roosevelt was always getting himself in hot water by talking before he had to commit himself upon issues not well-defined.”
—CALVIN COOLIDGE
“He didn’t get a heck of a lot done.… He ended up adding up to more talk than achievement.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
“[A] flub-dub with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“Taft meant well, but he meant well feebly.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“[A] fat, jolly, likable, mediocre man.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
WOODROW WILSON
“He is a silly doctrinaire at times and an utterly selfish and cold-blooded politician always.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“A damned Presbyterian hypocrite, and a Byzantine logothete. An infernal skunk in the White House.”
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
“I regard him as a ruthless hypocrite and as an opportunist, who has not convictions he would not barter at once for votes.”
—WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
“I feel certain that he would not recognize a generous impulse if he met it on the street.”
—WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
“I saw a snapshot photograph of him the night he landed in Washington… it was about the most pathetic picture I have ever seen. He really looked like a perfectly helpless imbecile.”
—WARREN HARDING
“Harding is incapable of thought, because he has nothing to think with.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“He has a bungalow mind.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“It is heartbreaking to be so near as we are to a fool of a President.… He is often ridiculous.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“He was not a man with either the experience or the intellectual quality that the position needed.”
—HERBERT HOOVER
“He voted in a way that he hoped would make him popular with other people in his party even when his personal convictions ran the other way.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“He sat with his feet in his desk drawer and did nothing.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
HERBERT HOOVER
“I have the feeling that he would rather see a good cause fail than succeed if he were not the head of it.”
—WOODROW WILSON
“The smartest geek I know.”
—WARREN G. HARDING
“That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.”
—CALVIN COOLIDGE
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
“[A] chameleon on plaid.”
—HERBERT HOOVER
HARRY TRUMAN
“[A] lot of people admired the old bastard for standing by people who were guilty as hell, and, damn it, I am that kind of person.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“Ninety-six percent of 6,926 communists, fellow travelers, sex perverts, people with criminal records, dope addicts, drunks and other security risks removed under the Eisenhower security program were hired by the Truman Administration.”
—RICHARD NIXON
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
“Why, this fellow don’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.… A glamorous military hero, glorified by the press.… If Eisenhower should become President, his administration would make Grant’s look like a model of perfection.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“The trouble with Eisenhower is he’s just a coward. He hasn’t got any backbone at all.… Ike didn’t know anything, and all the time he was in office he didn’t learn a thing.… In 1959, when Castro came to power down in Cuba, Ike just sat on his ass and acted like if he didn’t notice what was going on down there, why, maybe Castro would go away or something.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“I don’t know how many times I pulled that bumbling, brainlack bubblehead’s chestnuts out of the fire and he never thanked me once.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“Eisenhower was far more complex and devious than most people realized.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“I never liked Kennedy. I hate his father. Kennedy wasn’t so great a Senator.… However, that no good son-of-a-bitch Dick Nixon called me a Communist and I’ll do anything to beat him.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“[The Kennedy administration’s] difficulty appears to stem primarily from an inadequate understanding of our American system—of how it really works, of the psychological, motivational and economic factors that make it ebb and flow.”
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
“Every time I came into John Kennedy’s presence, I felt like a goddamn raven hovering over his shoulder.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“I had more women by accident than he ever had by design.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“The enviably attractive nephew who sings an Irish ballad for the company and then winsomely disappears before the table-clearing and dishwashing begins.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“Kennedy concentrated on building up what I characterized as a ‘poor mouth’ image of America.… He seized on every possible shortcoming and inequity in American life, and promised immediate cure-alls.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“John was great, but all John had was the press. He was still an elitist; he didn’t like the rope line.”
—GERALD FORD
“Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.”
—RONALD REAGAN
“JFK’s a hero, and helpful if you’re going after the blue-collar votes—the same way Franklin Roosevelt is.”
—RONALD REAGAN, on his tendency to quote Kennedy in speeches
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“He is a small man. He doesn’t have the depth of mind nor the breadth of vision to carry great responsibility.… Johnson is superficial and opportunistic.”
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
“I cannot stand Johnson’s damn long face. He just comes in, sits at the cabinet meetings with his face all screwed up.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Some leaders are masters of intrigue, spinning webs of deception, planting suggestions that the unwary will take as promises, wheeling and dealing, constantly, even compulsively, plotting and maneuvering. For Lyndon B. Johnson, this was second nature.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“Henry Clay always said he’d rather be right than president. Now President Johnson has proved it really is a choice.”
—GERALD FORD
RICHARD NIXON
“He is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar.… He’s one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.”
—HARRY TRUMAN
“I just haven’t honestly been able to believe that he is presidential timber.”
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
“If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, on being asked to name one major decision Nixon had taken part in during his administration
“He is a filthy, lying son-of-a-bitch, and a very dangerous man.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“He’s a cheap bastard; that’s all there is to it.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“I cannot believe that the majority of American voters would want to entrust the future to Mr. Nixon.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person between Nixon and the White House.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“When you compare Nixon and Goldwater, Goldwater seems like Abraham Lincoln.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“If I’ve done nothing else for this country, I’ve saved them from Dick Nixon.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“I just knew in my heart that it was not right for Dick Nixon to ever be President of this country.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON, after listening to one of Nixon’s campaign speeches
“He’s like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths, and then turns around and runs backwards. You’ll see; he’ll do something wrong in the end. He always does.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“Mr. Nixon was the 37th President of the United States. He had been preceded by 36 others.”
—GERALD FORD
“I don’t think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did—lying, cheating and distorting the truth.… I think that my religious beliefs alone would prevent that from happening to me.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“In two hundred years of history, he’s the most dishonest President we’ve ever had. I think he’s disgraced the Presidency.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“You cannot lead a divided state. That was my problem with Richard Nixon. He divided the country. The leader’s job is to unite.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH
GERALD R. FORD
“Ford’s economics are the worst thing that’s happened to this country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“He’s a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.”
—LYNDON B. JOHNSON
“He just flew all over giving speeches and putting wreaths on things. Now does anyone remember anything Ford said?”
—RICHARD NIXON
“Mr. Ford has shown an absence of leadership, and an absence of a grasp of what this country is and what it ought to be.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“As far as I’ve been able to discern, President Ford approaches—or avoids—the duties of the White House with equanimity and self-assurance.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“Gerald Ford was a Communist.”
—RONALD REAGAN (he later claimed he had meant to say he was a “Congressman”)
“Carter scares the hell out of me.… He’ll come close to making us a number two power.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“Jimmy Carter wants to speak loudly and carry a fly swatter.”
—GERALD FORD
“I think he’s the weakest President I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
—GERALD FORD
“God help us. I really mean that.”
—GERALD FORD, on the prospect of Carter being re-elected in 1980
“He can be a real pain in the ass, but we get along.”
—GERALD FORD
“I think Jimmy Carter would be very close to Warren G. Harding. I feel very strongly that Jimmy Carter was a disaster, particularly domestically and economically.”
—GERALD FORD
“I had a dream the other night. I dreamed that Jimmy Carter came to me and asked why I wanted this job. I told him I didn’t want his job.… I want to be President.”
—RONALD REAGAN
“I have no desire to see myself on television.… I don’t want to be a panel of formers instructing the currents on what to do.… I’m trying to regain a sense of anonymity. I didn’t like it when a certain former President—and it wasn’t 41 or 42—made my life miserable.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH
RONALD REAGAN
“Reagan is not one that wears well. Reagan on a personal basis is terrible. He just isn’t pleasant to be around. Maybe he’s different with others. No, he’s just an uncomfortable man to be around… strange.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“He was probably the least well-informed on the details of running the government of any president I knew.”
—GERALD FORD
“He doesn’t dye his hair. He’s just prematurely orange.”
—GERALD FORD
“If President Reagan could be an actor and become President, maybe I could become an actor. I’ve got a good pension. I can work for cheap.”
—BILL CLINTON
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
“He may not be a strong leader.”
—RICHARD NIXON
“Every time Bush talks about trust, it makes chills run up and down my spine. The very idea that the word ‘trust’ could come out of Mr. Bush’s mouth after what he’s done to this country and the way he’s trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system.”
—BILL CLINTON
“I don’t think Bush would have liked Elvis very much, and that’s just another thing that’s wrong with him.”
—BILL CLINTON
“He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength. There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, responding to a question about whether he sought his father’s advice prior to the invasion of Iraq
“This guy loves the rope line—and the rope line loves him.”
—GERALD FORD
“When I was president, I said I was a Ford, not a Lincoln. Well what we have now is a convertible Dodge.”
—GERALD FORD
“He’s a typical Chautauqua salesman who moves in, seduces everybody, and then starts to compromise his position based on the pressures that he gets politically and otherwise.”
—GERALD FORD
“I’ll tell you one thing: he didn’t miss one good-looking skirt at any of the social occasions. He’s got a wandering eye, I’ll tell you that. Betty had the same impression; he isn’t very subtle about his interest.… He’s got his eyes wandering all the time.”
—GERALD FORD
“The truth is, he’s a very talented guy, but he has no convictions—none whatsoever.”
—GERALD FORD
“He is a man of honesty and integrity.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.”
—GEORGE H. W. BUSH, referring to Clinton and running mate Al Gore
“[H]is campaign’s fascinating to a student of politics. It’s disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues.”
—BARACK OBAMA
GEORGE W. BUSH
“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“President Bush has not been honest with the American people, and certainly has failed in almost everything he professes to be doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, unfortunately.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“It’s not true that people dislike W. all over the world. In Russia, they probably like him more than they like me.”
—BILL CLINTON
BARACK OBAMA
“This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”
—BILL CLINTON, on Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign
“I’ll tell you, they just want to cream in their jeans over this guy.”
—BILL CLINTON, on press reaction to Obama
“Truly a pathetic excuse of a president, can’t get any worse.”
—DONALD TRUMP
DONALD TRUMP
“He’s a disaster.”
—JIMMY CARTER
“I don’t like him. I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard.”
—GEORGE H.W. BUSH
“Sorta makes me look pretty good, doesn’t it?”
—GEORGE W. BUSH
“How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.”
—BARACK OBAMA, on Donald Trump’s response to a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville