More on Obama’s “Toughest” 18 Months

Peter Wehner, in “Politics Daily,” jumped on the same Obama quote—“this has been the toughest year and a half since any year and a half since the 1930s”—that I hopped on earlier. Both of us credited Daniel Halper, the man who found the Obama quote.

Wehner went over a similar list of “What about?” events that topped Obama’s bad 18 months, including the start of World War II, 9.11, Watergate, Vietnam, Carter and Reagan “stagflation,” the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Truman’s first few months including dropping A-bombs, and Truman’s Korean War.

Wehner stressed how bad things really were in 1946, at the beginning of the Cold War, using a quotation from Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation. Acheson, a top State Department official at the time and later Secretary of State:

wrote about the immensity of the task the Truman administration faced after war ended in 1945, which "only slowly revealed itself. As it did so, it began to appear as just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis. That was to create a world out of chaos; ours, to create half a world, a free half, out of the same material without blowing the whole to pieces in the process."