Rating the Presidents

NO sooner had Bill Clinton won re-election than he reportedly began to fret about his “place in history,” thereby inspiring a Doonesbury series in which a clutch of historians is invited to the White House for an Arkansas sales pitch. Lyndon Johnson was more methodical. While doing research at the LBJ Library (itself a monument to ego of pharaonic proportions), I discovered that Johnson had commanded all federal agencies to compile voluminous accounts of the great deeds done during his tenure, the better to elevate his standing in history. That was enough to suggest to me that perhaps the best first cut to make is between those of our Presidents who cared about their place in history and those who did not.

Retrospective rating of American Presidents is wonderful sport for historians, if only because reputations are the only things over which we exercise power. So it was that when the Intercollegiate Studies Institute asked me to serve on a panel ranking the Presidents I promptly said yes. I have always envied the baseball writers who get to vote each year on which players deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, and then write columns explaining their ballots. How much more fun to pass judgment on all 41 Chief Executives in American history! The Institute’s purpose was undoubtedly to obtain results at variance with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s periodic polls, which invariably lionize such Presidents as FDR, Truman, and Kennedy, and discount the achievements of such Presidents as Eisenhower and Reagan. But being a gentleman as well as a scholar I endeavored to muzzle my own politics and rank the Presidents by objective standards. First, was the President a political success insofar as most Americans at the time applauded his performance? Second, did the President address the pressing issues and challenges faced by the nation in his day and win approval for his solutions? And third, did those solutions, in retrospect, promote the security, prosperity, and liberty of the American people? The last, of course, is a matter of interpretation, but the first two criteria tend to balance any bias introduced in the third.

WM

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Walter A. McDougall

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Harry S. Truman

John F. Kennedy

Dwight D. Eisenhower

NO sooner had Bill Clinton won re-election than he reportedly began to fret about his “place in history,” thereby inspiring a Doonesbury series in which a clutch of historians is invited to the White House for an Arkansas sales pitch. Lyndon Johnson was more methodical. While doing research at the LBJ Library (itself a monument to ego of pharaonic proportions), I discovered that Johnson had commanded all federal agencies to compile voluminous accounts of the great deeds done during his tenure, the better to elevate his standing in history. That was enough to suggest to me that perhaps the best first cut to make is between those of our Presidents who cared about their place in history and those who did not.

Retrospective rating of American Presidents is wonderful sport for historians, if only because reputations are the only things over which we exercise power. So it was that when the Intercollegiate Studies Institute asked me to serve on a panel ranking the Presidents I promptly said yes. I have always envied the baseball writers who get to vote each year on which players deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, and then write columns explaining their ballots. How much more fun to pass judgment on all 41 Chief Executives in American history! The Institute’s purpose was undoubtedly to obtain results at variance with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s periodic polls, which invariably lionize such Presidents as FDR, Truman, and Kennedy, and discount the achievements of such Presidents as Eisenhower and Reagan. But being a gentleman as well as a scholar I endeavored to muzzle my own politics and rank the Presidents by objective standards. First, was the President a political success insofar as most Americans at the time applauded his performance? Second, did the President address the pressing issues and challenges faced by the nation in his day and win approval for his solutions? And third, did those solutions, in retrospect, promote the security, prosperity, and liberty of the American people? The last, of course, is a matter of interpretation, but the first two criteria tend to balance any bias introduced in the third.