It's Been a Long Half Century Since We Went to the Moon...But We May Finally Be Going Back

Exactly fifty years ago at this time, American astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were on the surface of the Moon while fellow astronaut Ronald Evans orbited the Moon in the command module. Cernan and Schmitt were the eleventh and twelfth people to walk on the Moon, while Evans was one of another twelve to fly to the Moon without landing on it. Cernan and Schmitt spent over three days on the Moon, and nearly a day of that was spent outside actually walking or driving out on the surface, with both their total time and time outside exceeding the records set in previous missions. But on late on December 14, 1972 (Coordinated Universal Time; in Asia and much of Europe and Africa it was early December 15), Cernan and Schmitt lifted off in the lunar module to rendezvous with Evans a few hours later. Late on December 16, the three left lunar orbit for the return journey to Earth. 

Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan with the Lunar Rover (NASA)

Since that time half a century ago, humans have not been back to the Moon. Of the twelve people who walked on the Moon, only four are still alive: Schmitt, Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 15's Dave Scott, and Apollo 16's Charlie Duke. Of the twelve others who flew to the Moon without landing, six are still alive: Frank Borman (Apollo 8), Jim Lovell (Apollos 8 and 13), Bill Anders (Apollo 8), Tom Stafford (Apollo 10), Fred Haise (Apollo 13) and Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16). The three youngest are Mattingly (86), Duke (87) and Schmitt (87); most of the others are over 90. For that matter, everyone who can actually remember watching or hearing about the Moon landings at the time they were happening is well over fifty now; those of us who recently hit that milestone were too young at the time to have any memory of it, and anyone younger was of course not even born yet. Human exploration of the Moon is not yet gone from living memory, but it is becoming more and more distant in the past. 

This is very unfortunate. Not so much because being in the distant past will make it easier for some to claim it never happened; people who claim such things are idiots and fools — after all, only a tiny handful of people alive today are old enough to have even a vague memory of World War I, but only complete idiots would claim that World War I never happened. However, humans landing on the Moon was, at least in terms of physical exploration of our surroundings, our peak achievement as a species, and it is something of a tragedy that in half a century since we have not even managed to replicate it, much less surpass it. 

But that may finally be about to change. As those who still manage to keep abreast of a wide range of headlines — or those whose information bubbles include news relating to science and technology — may have heard, the US space agency NASA, responsible for the Apollo missions half a century ago, recently launched the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, this time with major contributions from the European Space Agency. While this mission was uncrewed, the Orion spacecraft that flew to and orbited the Moon over the past few weeks, returning to Earth exactly 50 years to the day and almost to the hour after Cernan and Schmitt landed on the Moon (December 11 UTC), is designed to eventually carry humans, and if all goes well, the next Artemis mission will take humans back to the Moon again. We will have to wait until at least 2024 for this to happen, and that first mission back, like Apollo missions 8 and 10 (and 13, though for less fortunate reasons), won't involve landing on the Moon, just flying there and coming back. But that's far more than we've done in half a century, and the mission after that, perhaps in 2025 or 2026, should see humans landing on the Moon once more, and this time those going will include women and people of color, unlike the Apollo missions, which were exclusively crewed by white men. 

I fervently hope that most of the remaining Apollo astronauts will still be around to see humans return to the Moon. But just as importantly, I hope that once we as a species do get back to the Moon, we will continue to explore it regularly, and even go beyond it, to Mars or the asteroids. Of course if we want to maintain a regular presence in space beyond low Earth orbit (there have already been in low Earth orbit continuously for the entire 21st century) for decades or even centuries, we will have to solve the many problems we have created for ourselves down on Earth, including the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and many more. But despite what some people might say, and indeed have been saying since the Apollo era, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be going to the Moon. Going to the Moon and solving problems on Earth are not mutually exclusive goals; in fact, our exploration of space, including figuring out how to sustain human life far from Earth, can be directly useful in finding ways to deal with Earth-bound problems (and it can also just provide inspiration — the famous Blue Marble photo of Earth, which helped inspire the environmental movement, was taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts).

So let's celebrate the anniversary of Apollo 17 with the hope that in the next two or three years, humans will finally follow in the footsteps of Cernan, Schmitt, and their fellow Apollo astronauts, and we will get to see people walking on the Moon, not as distant history but as part of our present.

The Worst US Presidents in History

A few weeks ago, the Siena College Research Institute's Presidential Expert Poll of 2022 was published. This poll has been conducted regularly since 1982 in the second year of the first term of every president beginning with Reagan. I always find these surveys of historians fascinating, as it is always instructive to learn the current views of the experts regarding past presidents. There are a lot of interesting things to note about this latest survey, such as that Franklin D. Roosevelt won out in the usual contest between him, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington for the top spot. Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan rightfully dropped a few places (though they arguably are still too highly ranked) and Lyndon B. Johnson and Barack Obama moved up several spots. Obama ranked the highest of all presidents since LBJ (who was the last of a string of five presidents who all came in the top 10 overall), followed by Bill Clinton, Reagan, Joe Biden and George H. W. Bush (the latter three all coming in the lower part of the second quartile). Jimmy Carter was still ranked in the third quartile, but he was at the very top of it (just below Jackson, who was in the exact middle of all 45 presidents ranked), so he was only half a dozen spots below his successor Reagan, and several places ahead of his predecessors Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. George W. Bush landed at the top of the fourth quartile, well below all other recent presidents except one, but ten spots above the bottom. However, it's those presidents who came in at the very bottom in both this and past surveys of historians that I want to focus on. 

As can be seen from the chart on Wikipedia summarizing historical rankings of US presidents by scholars, until recently, three presidents have traditionally "competed" for last place: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren G. Harding, with Franklin Pierce and William H. Harrison (when he's included) also coming in near the bottom, but never in last place.* Of course now there is a new contender for the bottom spot, namely the person who left office at the beginning of 2021, who we'll call DJT. DJT had already placed last in one of the previous three surveys in which he was included, and he was third and tied for third from the bottom in the other two. He came in third from the bottom in this latest Siena survey as well. While Johnson came in last in this latest survey, with Buchanan coming in at second to last, the president who has most frequently come in last in more recent surveys is Buchanan (Harding consistently came in last in surveys prior to 2000, but since then it has usually been Buchanan, except for a few times when it has been Johnson and once when it was DJT), and there are some interesting parallels between him and DJT. 

The Wikipedia article "Presidency of James Buchanan" states that: "Buchanan and his allies awarded no-bid contracts to political supporters, used government money to wage political campaigns and bribe judges, and sold government property for less than its worth to cronies. According to historian Michael F. Holt, the Buchanan administration was 'undoubtedly the most corrupt [administration] before the Civil War and one of the most corrupt in American history.'" This should sound familiar to all of us who observed the actions of the DJT administration. But an even bigger and more deadly parallel is seen in the way they left office. Buchanan is most noted for his failure to prevent the Civil War, which erupted just after he left office. While publicly opposed to secession, he did little to stop the Southern states from seceding, and blamed abolitionists and the North for the crisis. Seven Southern states had seceded by the time Buchanan left office, and the best that can be said for him is that he didn't surrender the federal forts in South Carolina, though even that may have been in part due to pressure from Northern members of his cabinet. While some historians argue that he was merely incompetent, indecisive or caught between conflicting loyalties, historian Jean Baker gave a much harsher verdict in her biography James Buchanan: "Americans have conveniently misled themselves about the presidency of James Buchanan, preferring to classify him as indecisive and inactive.... In fact Buchanan's failing during the crisis over the Union was not inactivity, but rather his partiality for the South, a favoritism that bordered on disloyalty in an officer pledged to defend all the United States.... In his betrayal of the national trust, Buchanan came closer to committing treason than any other president in American history." But as bad as Buchanan's performance was, it seems obvious that after January 6, 2021 and the events leading up to it, that last sentence is no longer true of him, since DJT's attempt to launch a coup to overturn the election results and stay in office were an even more blatant case of treason than Buchanan's actions in 1860 and 1861. 

Also, to be fair to Buchanan, he did at least support the Union once the Civil War began, unlike former president John Tyler, who was actually elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, though he died before taking office, and who was the only US president whose death was not officially recognized in Washington, DC, and whose coffin was not draped with the US flag but with the Confederate one. Still, Tyler's renunciation of his allegiance to the US came long after he was out of office. Given his behavior in office, there's no reason to doubt that DJT, despite his occasional public fondling of US flags, would betray the country in an equally blatant manner if it suited him -- in fact, his actions after he lost the 2020 election were as conspicuous a betrayal as Tyler's and, as I already noted, worse than Buchanan's.   

Harding was probably the worst president of the 20th century, and he resembled DJT in that he was both incompetent and presided over a corrupt administration. But from what I can recall, there is little evidence that he himself was personally corrupt, and it seems that he at least had the self-awareness to know that he wasn't qualified for the office he held. Neither of these things is true of DJT, and of course Harding didn't attack the most basic tenets of democracy by refusing to accept electoral defeat (to be sure, since he died in office, he never faced reelection, but there's no reason to believe he would have tried to overturn the results had he lost reelection). So while Harding was a lousy president, it is still clear that the experts are right to rank him above DJT. 

As for Andrew Johnson, he has a few things in common with DJT as well. The most obvious is that they were both impeached, with Bill Clinton being the only other president to actually be impeached (Nixon, of course, resigned before the House could vote on impeachment). The impeachment of Clinton was frivolous partisanship, but the impeachments of Johnson and DJT were on more solid grounds. While DJT was impeached twice and is the only impeached president who had members of his own party vote to convict him in the Senate, Johnson came closest to being convicted by the Senate, being acquitted by only one vote, as at the time the Republicans had 45 of 54 seats (ten Republicans voted to acquit Johnson).

It might be argued that in Johnson's case the grounds for impeachment (violation of the Tenure of Office Act for trying to fire the Secretary of War, who had been appointed by Abraham Lincoln and opposed Johnson's handling of Reconstruction) were somewhat flimsy, if more solid than those for Clinton's impeachment. But even so, it is largely because of his poor handling of Reconstruction and his obstinate refusal to compromise with the Republicans that he now has such a bad reputation. He hindered Republican efforts to ensure voting rights for freed slaves (even vetoing the Freedman's Bureau bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866), and when his more lenient treatment of the Southern states resulted in the latter passing the infamous Black Codes and allowed many former Confederate leaders, including the Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, to win election to Congress, Johnson acquiesced, while the Republicans were outraged and refused to seat the Southern legislators. Johnson not only refused to work with the more moderate Republicans, but made a speech in which he attacked the leaders of the Radical Republicans and accused them of plotting to assassinate him. It was soon after this that he vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a veto that destroyed any hope of compromise with the moderates (who then joined the Radicals in overriding Johnson's veto), and cementing his disastrous legacy as the President who fought the efforts of Congress to ensure full rights for African Americans.

While Johnson, despite having racist views himself, did not actually agree with the more harsh efforts to suppress blacks in the South in the wake of the Civil War, his willingness to acquiesce in these racist actions is reminiscent of Mitch McConnell and his wing of the Republican party; they might criticize the more extreme actions of DJT, but they wouldn't do anything at all to stop him. But in other ways Johnson was reminiscent of DJT himself. In the same hour-long speech in which he made wild accusations against Radical Republican leaders, Johnson referred to himself over 200 times, even though the speech was supposed to be in honor of George Washington, whose birthday it was. This sounds very like DJT, who talked about himself on every occasion. Johnson also made speeches in which he compared himself to Jesus Christ. One recent historian referred to Johnson's "enormous sense of self-importance". Likewise, what the same historian calls "his complete mishandling of Reconstruction policy" might be compared to DJT's complete mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it's hard to imagine that even Johnson was as utterly narcissistic as DJT, and though his racism and his callous attitude toward African-Americans were as bad as DJT's and due to the historical circumstances even more harmful, Johnson didn't engage same sort of blatant corruption that DJT did, and he is generally credited with having some degree of intellectual ability (though poorly applied), something which can't be said of DJT. Finally, though his leniency towards former insurrectionists against the United States was inexcusable, at least he himself was not one, unlike DJT. 

In conclusion, while I will admit that I don't really have the thorough knowledge of US history that the experts who took part in these scholarly surveys have, based on the more superficial knowledge that I do have, it seems to me that DJT probably should be ranked even below presidents like Buchanan and Johnson. But of course it should be pointed out that the final rankings are an average of the scores given by the scholars in 20 individual categories. The scholars were also asked to rank the presidents according to their "present overall view" of that individual, and in that ranking, which in some sense is more reflective of the scholars' actual views**, DJT was second to last and Buchanan was last. Also, the survey consulted 141 scholars in all, so we can be pretty sure that many of them did put DJT in dead last. He did come in last overall in five of 20 individual categories, including "Integrity", "Intelligence", "Executive Appointments", "Foreign Policy Accomplishments" and "Background". The only categories he faired well in (coming in around the middle of the pack) were "Luck" and "Willing to take risks". The former, which unlike the other categories says nothing about the individual president's ability, may alone have been enough to keep him from the very bottom. Buchanan and Johnson both ranked very low on "Luck", and indeed Lincoln and Biden both ranked lower than DJT in this category. As for being "Willing to take risks", it is arguably true that DJT was a risk taker, though I might add that most of the risks he took were bad ones. Overall, it's generally pretty reassuring that most of the experts agree with what seems obvious to most of us - DJT was the worst president since the 19th century and one of the worst presidents ever. Now if only his supporters could get that uncomfortable truth into their heads....

*Millard Fillmore has likewise consistently been in the bottom quartile, but always a few spots above the bottom (he has always ranked slightly above his successors Pierce and Buchanan). John Tyler usually has been ranked similarly to Fillmore, though he made the third quartile twice. Zachary Taylor (who died just over a year after taking office) has tended to rank at the top of the fourth quartile or the bottom of the third. Ulysses Grant was consistently ranked in the bottom quartile in earlier surveys, sometimes below Pierce, Johnson, or Buchanan, but his reputation among historians has improved since and he has risen to the third quartile and even in a few surveys, including two of the last three, the second. Calvin Coolidge likewise was consistently ranked in the fourth quartile (though above Grant) in earlier surveys but has since always ended up in the third, largely reversing positions with his successor Herbert Hoover, who landed in the third quartile in early surveys but recently has usually been in the fourth. The only other early presidents to occasionally fall into the fourth quartile are Martin Van Buren, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield (who is sometimes excluded entirely due to his short time in office), Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison. As for more recent presidents, Richard Nixon has always been in either the third or fourth quartile (though he's tended to fare better in recent surveys), Jimmy Carter was ranked in the fourth quartile on three surveys but also made the second in three others; in all others he's been in the third. Gerald Ford has always been in the third, except for once when he was in the fourth. George W. Bush ranked in the middle in the two surveys conducted while he was still in office but was in the fourth in the surveys conducted in the two terms after he left office, in a few cases near the bottom. Probably not coincidentally, in the last three surveys (the first ones to include DJT), he's done somewhat better, landing in the lower third quartile, though in the latest Siena poll he fell back to the top of the fourth quartile. 

**Since the overall rankings are an average of the rankings in the individual categories, they incorporate areas such as "Luck", which as I note elsewhere, may have helped boost DJT's final ranking despite not having anything to do with his actual ability or performance. Also, in their "present overall view", scholars may also be weighting categories differently or taking into account aspects of a president's record that aren't covered by the individual categories. Though in most cases there is not much difference between where the scholars ranked the presidents according to their "present overall view" and the final, overall rank, one notable exception is Nixon, who came in a lot lower in the former category than in the latter. Presumably this is because the scholars felt the Watergate scandal and the flaws that it brought out outweighed his more positive achievements. It's interesting to note that Nixon's lowest ranking was for "Integrity", where he came in second to last -- dead last being occupied, of course, by DJT.