One evening quite a few years ago, this fellow attended a huge party at the home of a contemporary business colleague. The house was quite expansive, featuring a large entertainment room, along with a back yard vast enough to absorb any overflow.
It so happened that the hostess and the writer were cut from the same cloth politically-orientationwise, that is slightly to the left of John Kennedy and somewhat to the right of Fidel Castro. At that particular time, the Nixon-Kissinger duo was staging a senseless and futile war against the North Vietnamese, not unlike the Bush-Cheney Middle East shenanigans which followed decades thereafter.
For reasons we can’t specifically recall, a brief chit-chat with the sympathetically-minded hostess suddenly caused us to begin playing a sort of private game, which we agreed to dub “Great Americans”, but strictly in a derisive mode. For the next two or three hours, she and I, even though often a fair distance apart physically, kept taking turns shouting out names in our most insulting fashion. Every person so identified by either of us would be some right-wing conservative type for whom we both felt nothing but contempt. A number of the other guests listened in wonderment as to what we were up to. Nevertheless, we simply carried on with our loud pronouncements, not bothering to offer any explanations.
That personally memorable session so many years ago eventually inspired this writer to sit down and compile a list of 35 names viewed as representing our selection of history’s worst Americans. Correspondingly then, we decided that a contrasting roster of our chosen 35 greatest should be in order.
The end result of this exercise is presented below, by appropriate contributory classification. We feel that every entry stands on its own as being self-explanatory. Both listings have been subject to periodic revision as national and world conditions have dictated, and we reserve the right to update further, whenever so motivated. The numerical quantities will remain intact, however, in which case any added names must be by substitution only.
At the present date, our good guy and villain selections appear below alphabetically.
THE 35 GREATEST
Carl Bernstein, Muckraking
Art Buchwald, Philosophy
Cassius Marcellus Clay aka Muhammad Ali, Sports; Human Rights
Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain, Philosophy
Walt Disney, Entertainment
Thomas Alva Edison, Invention
Benjamin Franklin, Founding
Erle Stanley Gardner, Justice
Jim Garrison, Justice
George Gershwin, Music
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Justice
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Politics
Robert Francis Kennedy, Politics
Martin Luther King, Human Rights
Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Sports
Abraham Lincoln, Politics
Henry R. Luce, Communication
John Marshall, Justice
Bill Mauldin, Front Line Combat Reporting
Ralph Nader, Muckraking
Barack Obama, Politics
Ernest Taylor Pyle, Front Line Combat Reporting
Branch Rickey, Sports
Norman Rockwell, Art
Will Rogers, Philosophy
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Politics
Theodore Roosevelt, Environment
Jonas Salk, Medicine
Upton Sinclair, Muckraking
Oliver Stone, Entertainment
Robert Alfonso Taft, Politics
Ted Turner, Communication
Myron Wallace, Muckraking
Robert Woodward, Muckraking
Larry Zeigner aka Larry King, Communication
THE 35 WORST
Spiro Agnew, Politics
Jonathon Bilbo, Racism
George Bush, Politics
George W. Bush, Politics
William Calley, Military
Calvin Coolidge, Politics
Thomas E. Dewey, Politics
David Duke, Racism
Allen Dulles, Espionage
Henry Ford, Business
Daryle Gates, Law Enforcement
Barry Goldwater, Politics
David W. Griffith, Entertainment
Warren Gamaleil Harding, PoliticsWilliam Randolph Hearst, Journalism
Herbert Hoover, Politics
John Edgar Hoover, Law Enforcement
Robert Maynard Hutchins, Education
Henry Kissinger, Politics
Curtis Lemay, Military
Rush Limbaugh, Communications
Henry Cabot Lodge I, Politics
Joseph Raymond McCarthy, Politics
Colonel Robert McCormick, Journalism
Richard Milhaus Nixon, Politics
Ronald Wilson Reagan, Politics
John Davidson Rockefeller, Business
George Lincoln Rockwell, Racism
Donald Rumsfeld, Politics
Louis B. Seltzer, Journalism
Eugene Tallmadge, Racism
Herman Tallmadge, Racism
George Wallace, Racism
Robert E. Welsch, Reactionism
Sonny Werblin, Sports
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