Most Overrated Person Of All Time

[Bill Murphy]

Muhammad Ali.

Note, I did NOT say "most overrated boxer/athlete".

Read the Hauser biography *carefully*, then Ghosts Of Manila by Mark Kram for details, but I'll elaborate further, later.

However, ever notice how Ali's zen-like statements of wisdom started appearing around the beginning of his current marriage, and none have ever been captured on tape or film, nor witnessed by an outside reporter?

BTW, I believe that Ali is clearly the best haevyweight of all time, and, a la Bill James, think that there exists a strong argument that he is in fact the best pound-for-pound boxer ever.

Also, imagine if Tiger Woods had been barred from every golf tournament from the '99 PGA thru the '02 US Open. The overlap with Ali's banishment vis their respective ages is eerily close.

[Chris Alger]

One needs a Christopher Hitchens to ably contrast the worphip of TR with his monstrous legacy, but Chomsky's description captures him well: "racist lunatic."

[Bill Murphy]

...LBJ is generally considered a good/very good president. >*SHUDDER*<

Talk about your monstrous legacies...

JFK is wildly overrated in every dept., save maybe for shagging.

And as for Ali, my point is that while he is quite arguably the most gifted & charismatic athlete the world has ever known, and he also made an extremely courage decision during an extraordinary time, all the rest is a combo of baby boomers feeling their age and white sportswriter racial guilt fantasizing/gullibility/ignorance of what actually went on.

[Chris Alger]

JFK is a good candidate but few people get nostalgiac about Johnson. His defenders argue that his accomplishments were overshadowed by a universal perception of failure, hardly the mark of "overrated."

[Bill Murphy]

Johnson is actually UNDERRATED, in the sense that his evil has never been truly recognized & appreciated. Makes Hitler look like a kid throwing stink bombs. Only the Catholic Church surpasses him as a purveyor of misery. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Vietnam was only a fingernail clipping of his crimes, barely worth mentioning, except that it provides some useful illustrations. [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

[Dynasty]

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JFK is wildly overrated in every dept.

[/ QUOTE ]

About ten years ago, I came across a book which attempted to rank the 500 most important people in world history. I can't remember the title or author of the book but it seemed well thought out. #1 on the list was Jesus Christ. #2 was Mohammed.

Among the 500, there were three U.S. Presidents- Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy. Presidents Washington and Lincoln made it for some fairly obvious reasons.

President Kennedy was a unique situation. The author dismissed all of Kennedy's accomplishments as nothing special from a long term historical perspective with the exception of one. The author even commented on how Kennedy's popularity after death has inflated his legacy.

The one exception was Kennedy's use of his political power to drive forward the U.S.'s space program and goal of landing a man on the moon. The author thought, quite correctly I think, that when looking back at the 20th century from the year 3000 or so that even the World Wars will not be seen as any more important than we see the Crusades or some other long-over war today. But, landing a man on the moon is forever going to be seen as the first giant leap towards mankind moving into outer space permanently.

The author concluded that President Kennedy was the indespensible man in the moon race. Neil Armstong? He was just the astronaut who got the lucky seat. The scientists were plentiful but nobody was absolutely necessary. The same goes for everybody else involved in the moon race except Kennedy. Kennedy was the man who set the goal and greased the political and economic wheels necessary to get the massive job done. And, he was the only man who could do it.

When trying to look at the 20th century from the perspective of somebody in the year 3000, I think the arguement is interesting.

Washington and Lincoln were ranked fairly high. I think they were both in the top 100. Kennedy was at least in the bottom half.

[Cyrus]

JFK made his mark in the Cuban crisis. If there's anything underrated about the JFK presidency is how close we came to annihilation. We were much closer than even the wildest-eyed account of the era describe -- put all the unstable parameters in context (even strictly technically we were not as safe as we thought we were!)and the whole extremely volatile environment where events took place, and it could very, very easily have gone the other way.

JFK provided an extremely competent leadership at a period of continuous and continuously changing crisis, however brief that crisis was, relatively speaking. (One can read the transcripts of the White House taped conversations and meetings, along with the released CIA documents about the crisis, for evidence of excellent, examplary crisis management.)

Forget the philandering, the political trickery, the nepotism, the cronyism and the unsufferable patrician attitude. Man saved our ass, period.

[Dynasty]

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Man saved our ass, period.

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What about Khruschev? Does he share the credit since he was the one who accepted a perceived public defeat? Khruschev was supposed to have had substantial difficulty controling what was happening in Cuba but he still got a deal done and ordered the ships back and missles removed. It was Kruschev who made the final call. That decision basically cost him his positon of power a few years later. He became the only Soviet leader not to die in power until Gorbachev.

I'm sure most people are used to looking at the Cuban Missle Crisis from the American perspective. But, wasn't the critical decision eventually made by the Soviet leader?

[adios]

"JFK made his mark in the Cuban crisis. If there's anything underrated about the JFK presidency is how close we came to annihilation."

You too huh? I didn't think you were that old. I'll just point out that a lot of people thought that the Bay of Pigs brought on the Cuban Missle Crises. Many were really pissed, including CIA honchos, that he abandoned the invaders. Their arguement is that if he would have followed through and gave more support to the invasion and removed Castro, the Cuban Missle Crises would have never happened.

[BruceZ]

The author dismissed all of Kennedy's accomplishments as nothing special from a long term historical perspective with the exception of one.

His handling of the Cuban missle crisis may very easily have thwarted nuclear holocaust.


The author concluded that President Kennedy was the indespensible man in the moon race. Neil Armstong? He was just the astronaut who got the lucky seat. The scientists were plentiful but nobody was absolutely necessary.

The space race was a direct result of the arms race and competition with the Soviets. An indispensible part of the success was the invention of the Kalman filter by Rudolf Kalman. This was based on mathematics which was largely ignored in the U.S. but well known in the Soviet Union, and Kalman was forced to publish his first paper on it in a Soviet journal. One of these branches of mathematics for which the Soviets had a big lead was probability theory.

Thomas Edison is highly overrated. Despite his huge number of patents, he was mostly a hard working hack, and his intellect and theoretical knowledge were dwarfed by that of his rival Tesla who never got nearly the credit he deserved. For example, Edison randomly tried hundreds of different filaments for his lightbulb before it finally occurred to him to put a bulb over it and pump out the air so it wouldn't burn up right away. On the other hand, his idea of recording sound was truly original. Someone said it is the only patented idea which has no known predecessor.