presidential greatness

[calimac]

A news item has been running around that historians have once again been asked to rank all US presidents in order of greatness, with the obvious one coming last and the relatives of James Buchanan thanking the scholars for getting him out of the bottom hole at last. However, it's hard to get at the actual list, and I had to fight my way past a series of "Danger Will Robinson" warning labels from my internet security provider to do it.

So as a public service, here's the list, enhanced by me with full names and terms of office. The authors forgot that there were two presidents named Harrison so they didn't distinguish them, so I just guessed which was which. Also, although Biden is called #46 there are only 45 names because there was a 19th-century president, Grover Cleveland, who served two separated terms and gets two numbers - a numbering practice not followed in any other case I know of office-holders more likely to experience repetitions.

1. Abraham Lincoln (1861-65)
   
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45)
   
3. George Washington (1789-97)
   
4. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09)
   
5. Thomas Jefferson (1801-09)
   
6. Harry S. Truman (1945-53)
   
7. Barack Obama (2009-17)
   
8. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
   
9. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
   
10. John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
    
11. James Madison (1809-17)
    
12. Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
    
13. John Adams (1797-1801)
    
14. Joe Biden (2021- )
    
15. Woodrow Wilson (1913-21)
    
16. Ronald Reagan (1981-89)
    
17. Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77)
    
18. James Monroe (1817-25)
    
19. George H.W. Bush (1989-93)
    
20. John Quincy Adams (1825-29)
    
21. Andrew Jackson (1829-37)
    
22. Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
    
23. William H. Taft (1909-13)
    
24. William McKinley (1897-1901)
    
25. James K. Polk (1845-49)
    
26. Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97)
    
27. Gerald R. Ford (1974-77)
    
28. Martin Van Buren (1837-41)
    
29. Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81)
    
30. James A. Garfield (1881)
    
31. Benjamin Harrison (1889-93)
    
32. Calvin Coolidge (1923-29)
    
33. Chester A. Arthur (1881-85)
    
34. George W. Bush (2001-09)
    
35. Richard Nixon (1969-74)
    
36. Herbert Hoover (1929-33)
    
37. John Tyler (1841-45)
    
38. Zachary Taylor (1849-50)
    
39. Millard Fillmore (1850-53)
    
40. Warren G. Harding (1921-23)
    
41. William H. Harrison (1841)
    
42. Franklin Pierce (1853-57)
    
43. Andrew Johnson (1865-69)
    
44. James Buchanan (1857-61)
    
45. Donald J. Trump (2017-21)

I would find it difficult to vote in a survey like this. How do you account for actual malignancy in presidents? I count five clear-cut cases, not all of which are ranked at the very bottom; plus about three more with malignant traits passing beyond foolish or erroneous policy, and no, I'm not counting "being a slave-owner in a slave-owning society" as evidence of malignancy. (Though it is notable that only 3 of our first 18 presidents were entirely free of either the taint of this practice or of fellow-traveling in its favor.)

Comments

[cmcmck]

Am I right in guessing that JFK has dropped down the batting order somewhat?

[calimac]

No, he's actually gone up quite a bit since lists compiled in the 2010s, which are the only ones for which my source gives comparison. I expect that period was the nadir of his reputation, and that he's been beginning to recover. Possibly the tapes of the Cuban Missile Crisis have provided evidence of the sagacity of his decision-making.

Raygun

[lsanderson]

I keep hoping the Reagan allure will fade away faster, but that does not seem to be the case.

[wild_patience]

I suppose they didn't give any weighting to presidents unable to do things due to the opposite party working to prevent them. Just as the GOP now refuses to pass the border bills they claim are so vital because they want to leave it as a campaign issue for Trump, they held up Jimmy Carter being able to resolve the hostage crisis to prevent his re-election. Scum they were and scum they are.

[kate_schaefer]

I'd put Tyler farther down because of his post-presidential career serving in the Confederate legislature, but it would be hard to rank all the badness of the bad presidents versus the ineffectuality of the ineffectual presidents.

[kate_schaefer]

I looked at Tyler in light of the 14th amendment argument about whether the president is an officer of the United States. He was the only ex-president before Trump to act as an insurrectionist, but he died before the end of the Civil War.

[calimac]

Don't forget Henry Kissinger persuading the North Vietnamese not to make peace so long as LBJ was in office.

[calimac]

A living postwar Tyler would in any case be covered because he had served in both houses of Congress. Unless he were pardoned, which many of them were.

[calimac]

I think this was about their presidencies, not their entire careers. But it's a good question. If this were prime ministers of the Third Republic, what would we do about Pierre Laval?

This reminds me that Tyler was one of two US Presidents to live under the jurisdiction of the Confederacy. Can you guess the other? (Hint: He had no involvement with politics at the time.)

[ndrosen]

Would that have been Woodrow Wilson?

[calimac]

Indeed. Having visited his birthplace in Virginia, where his family were served by slaves though his father owned none (he was a minister), and also his boyhood home in South Carolina, both of which are now historic sites, I learned a lot about how the South shaped Wilson.