Pete The Elder

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July 13, 2005

Ranking Presidents

I finished reading Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the Whitehouse which was edited by James Taranto over the weekend and it was an interesting read. It pursuaded me that Harding and Grant were not as bad as I had been told and made me like them more, but others like Jackson and Ford I like less now. My opinions did not change much on the presidents I knew a lot about already. How some of these presidents like Jackson and JOhn Adams did not make the recent list of greatest Americans is mind boggling. Most of the essays were insightful and the only one I did not really like was the one on Nixon by Ken Starr because it only focused on Watergate and Nixon’s defense of separation of powers, while the other essays tried to cover the whole presidencies. I found the one on Clinton to be very good (did you know Clinton can eat a whole baked potato in two bites? I didn't, but it did not surprise me to read thathe could do that) as were the ones on Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. Reading this book combined with listening to the biography of John Adams made it interesting to see how George Washington was treated as almost a godlike figure by many of his contemporaries and how it really was a big deal that he retired after only two terms as president. Had he wanted to become dictator for life he probably could have done it.

The other tough thing about rating leaders is do you rate them on what you think they should have done in that situation, how well they achieved their goals, or some combination of the two. With someone like Coolidge this throws people off since he did not do much as president, which was his plan all along and what he thought the president should do. For me the best example of this is FDR who was very successful at getting his goals accomplished, but domestically I do not think he did a very good job and that his policies made the depression worse. Jackson is another good example of this since he was very good at abolishing the Second National Bank, but I do not think that this was a good thing. Another good thing is that in the past seventy years we have had a long string of some decent to pretty good presidents. From FDR to W these presidents have been at least decent except for the terrible trio of Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

Here are my personal rankings (with the books rankings in parentheses, along with category rankings if different from books):

Posted by Pete at July 13, 2005 10:21 AM

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Posted by: Mark Daniels at July 18, 2005 08:26 AM