Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Bush (again), Roosevelt, Truman. What do all these guys have in common? Gee, all of them loved to start aggressive wars against little countries they could conveniently bully but without getting their own hands bloody. Ever.

Funny how those guys-whether Democrat or Republican--liked to talk a good game, about American virtues but, once in power, browbeat an equally cowardly Congress into giving them war power against some tiny Third World country that had neither attacked American nor threatened us.

Take Truman for example. He was once a Captain in the US Army. But once in power, in 1945, he permitted two nuke strikes against Japanese civilian cities. And the Japs were ready to surrender before he nuked them!

FDR, his predecessor, never served in the military but was rewarded, "appointed," Assistant Secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson. Twenty years later (such was his loyalty to US sailors), that FDR allowed the US Navy to get bombed at Pearl Harbor!

One of the first actions undertaken by LBJ, suddenly shot into office, was to rescind little-known National Security Action Memo 263, which John F. Kennedy signed (an action that sealed his death). That memo called for withdrawing 1,000 troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963. Curiously, NSAM 273, overturning Kennedy's earlier memo, was already secretly written one day before JFK was killed!

Like most other, recent, US presidents, LBJ never served anywhere close to combat but didn't mind sending half a million American men to fight and die in a foreign war against a tiny country that never attacked us.

Are we beginning to see a pattern here? Almost all American presidents (With the exception of Washington, Eisenhower, Kennedy) dodged actual fighting but rushed soldiers into some bloody foreign war where they fought and died for God-only-knows what concocted lies.

Nixon was a prime example. Here was a guy raised as a Quaker who sat out the War in the Pacific playing poker. Rising quickly to power after the war, Nixon became president in 1968. Promising gullible American voters he would end the war in Vietnam, he instead escalated!

Jimmy Carter, now considered a near saint, hardly uttered a peep of protest about the massacres occurring in Central America during his presidency in the late Seventies. The brutal killers, specializing in torture, rape and dismemberment, were mostly trained in America by US Special Forces. These foreign soldiers then massacred their impoverished fellow citizens for the sake of some rich thug propped up by US taxpayers. (Uncle Sam: The crucifixion of El Salvador) Predictably, Carter never spoke out in protest or threatened economic sanctions, at least never very forcefully. Today Saint Jimmy spends his time building houses for poor folks under Habitat for Humanity; perhaps to absolve massive guilt for aiding and abetting war crimes against millions of other poor folks.

Ronald Reagan---"The Great Communicater"-- loved to regal people with his war stories. Only problem was they all occurred in Hollywood, where he served for the duration of World War II. Like his immediate predecessor, Reagan loved to prop up the right-wing dictators in banana republics, when he and Carter weren't castigating the Soviets for doing the same!

Another avowed Christian (like Carter) who avoided US military service, Reagan had no qualms about supporting foreign death squads, even ones that murdered nuns and archbishops. Revered to this day, by hundreds of historians, for somehow "destroying communism," (maybe he talked it to death) Reagan shared the same traits as many presidents who both preceded and followed him.

A genial scoundrel and war criminal, Bill Clinton darted across the pond to England to avoid military service during the Vietnam War. Some speculate William Jefferson "Bubba" Clinton is related to the unscrupulous royals there. His flight to Oxford would then make perfect sense. Like his fellow cowards, Clinton loved to sanction small countries and send US bombers over others, but found no reason to serve in the war zone himself.

Likewise the Bush "bookend" presidents, father and son. They hoodwinked Americans into voting for them with lofty speeches about long-lost American ideals (that mostly never existed) but found ample reasons to waste American men, money and materials in foreign wars. Especially wars against tiny countries they could easily defeat. Bullies themselves, the Bushes commanded the American military in the same style.

And so we come to the conclusion: American presidents, with few exceptions, are bullies and cowards. Not only did most of them shirk any military service but they proved quick to dispatch the US military on bully missions around the globe. Cowards all, they deserve little admiration and entire encyclopedias of condemnation.

USAF veteran and amateur historian, Douglas Herman wrote the recent novel, The Guns of Dallas, far closer to the truth about the JFK assassination than the fairy tale Warren Report