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Home – American Heritage News – Victor Davis Hanson: Kennedy Treated LBJ Worse Than Biden Treated Harris

Victor Davis Hanson: Kennedy Treated LBJ Worse Than Biden Treated Harris

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Well, Victor, I was thinking about Zachary Taylor, and then off the top of my head I was going, I know the name for some reason, and I did have to look him up. It was the campaign down into Mexico. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, he was brilliant. Brilliant.  

Winfield Scott was a brilliant strategist, but the best tactician on the battlefield was Zachary Taylor. He won an incredible battle at Monterrey and Palo Alto in Mexico. He was from a Virginia planter family that moved to Kentucky, I think.  

He was only president for 16 months, from 1849 to 1850. It was a very tumultuous time that he came in. There was a gold rush in California that all of a sudden made this obscure place have more capital than most states because of the amount of gold and silver they were mining.  

In addition to that, there was the height of the Mormon uprising, or so-called Mormon tensions, in 1850.  

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In addition to that, there were the vestigial remnants of the Missouri Compromise and the question of how you bring states into the Union. He was a Southerner who owned slaves and was originally from Virginia. 

His 16 months were characterized by unity. I don’t know how he was nominated because he was up against Henry Clay in the Whig Party and Winfield Scott, his superior in the Mexican War, but he was very popular. He was known for humane conduct. He treated Mexican prisoners very well. That was all in the headlines.  

He was 65 years old. He had problems with his stomach his whole life, and he died. 

This was a period, if you look at it, Martin Van Buren, [James] Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan. These five or six presidents were considered, with the exception of Polk, who was only there for one term, mediocre or a low point. People argue over who was the worst president in United States history, Millard Fillmore or James Buchanan. 

But of those people, he was the most famous because he had single-handedly outfought the Mexicans and had won that war, and he was on everybody’s list of famous people. He was kind of just a caretaker.  

Nobody knows much about him because he was there for, I think, the third-shortest presidency up to that time, and he died.  

So you can’t think of anything he did other than try to calm tempers down about the admission of states. As a Southerner, the North supported him because he did not demand that for every California or New Mexico admitted, there be a similar slave state. He kind of squashed the idea that they were going to let in Cuba. They wanted to let in Cuba as a slave state. 

John F. Kennedy, who was president from 1961 to Nov. 22, 1963, the thousand days that the Left called Camelot, had three cycles of public attitudes toward him.  

He was a senator for one........

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