Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and Worst in the White House
The first formal ranking of presidents was done by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. for Life magazine back in 1948. He surveyed 55 historians who placed Washington, Lincoln, and FDR atop Mount Olympus and put Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding in the hell of presidential failure.
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At least eight subsequent surveys produced nearly identical results–a top three, a few “near greats,” a string of mediocrities, and Grant, Harding, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and one or two others in the cellar. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. repeated his father’s project in 1996, polling historians, who installed the usual trinity on top and Andrew Johnson, Buchanan, and Harding at the bottom. Different surveys might quibble over the relative merits of those in the middle, but by and large the groupings of great, near great, average, below average, and weak were remarkably constant.
So what is the purpose of this book? It claims to be a novel and ideologically balanced ranking. It isn’t novel, given that the Journal first published the survey results four years ago. And even if you accept the editors’ claims to ideological balance (no supporting data is provided), the question of why the ratings are so consistent, no matter which experts are assigned the job, goes unanswered, not to mention that of why we play this rating game in the first place.
The rest of the book is ideological filler. William J. Bennett’s foreword laments that the “politicization of American colleges and universities” has “corrupted our history, and the understanding of it–including our presidency.” There are also four essays on “Issues in Presidential Leadership” and an introduction by Calabresi on “The Presidency, Federalist No. 10, and the Constitution.”
