Rating and Ranking Our Presidents
In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote for Life magazine a controversial article on a subject that has been the cause of spirited and acrimonious debate ever since. He listed the consensus of our academic elite as to which American presidents had been Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failures.
Leading the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and FDR. Below, but also among the Greats, were Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Near Greats were Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk.
In 1962, Schlesinger followed with a New York Times piece, also based on the responses of historians, political scientists and journalists. This list had the same top seven. But Jackson had fallen to Near Great and Polk, who took the Southwest and California away from Mexico, had risen from 10th to eighth.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others have since produced their own rankings. The latest in the field is Robert Merry, a lifelong journalist and now editor at The National Interest. In Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians, Merry adds a new criterion. Did this president win a second term, and was he succeeded by a man of his own party?
For this would mean his contemporaries, the American people of that era, had judged him to be a good, successful or even great president.
In the 20th century, McKinley, twice elected, but assassinated in 1901, left his office to Theodore Roosevelt, who won in his own right in 1904 and was succeeded by his friend and ally William Howard Taft.
FDR won four terms, and on his death in 1945 was succeeded by Vice President Harry Truman, who won in his own right in 1948.
Ronald Reagan won two landslides, pulled us out of the economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter presidency, won the Cold War and was succeeded by his vice president, George H.W. Bush, who swept 40 states in 1988.
Yet some historians have rated Carter, repudiated after one term, higher than Reagan, which tells us more about who has been doing the ranking than it does about Ronald Reagan.
Consider Warren G. Harding. After his 1920 landslide, he died in office in 1923. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, was elected in a landslide in 1924, and in 1928 Herbert Hoover won another Republican landslide.
Yet historians rank Coolidge as mediocre and Harding among our worst presidents. Liberal ideology has never lacked for a warm dwelling place in the history departments of America's universities.
Wilson's second term was an historic failure. After winning in 1916 on the slogan, "He kept us out of war!" he plunged us into a European bloodbath that produced 116,000 U.S. dead and a Versailles treaty that rewarded our imperial allies with new African, Middle East and Asian colonies, giving the lie to Wilson's promise that this was a war to "make the world safe for democracy."
Wilson—not Harding, Coolidge or Hoover, all of whom tried to ease the vindictive terms imposed on a defeated but democratic Germany—set the table for Nazism. Adolf Hitler was born at Versailles.
In 1918, Wilson lost both houses of Congress, and his party was crushed in 1920. Americans concluded that his second term had been a failure. Yet historians mark him as Great or Near Great.
Harding brought us out of the Wilson depression of 1919-1920 without any Obama-like intervention in the economy, cut the income tax rate by two-thirds, gave us the Washington Naval Agreement, the greatest arms reduction treaty in history, and worked to alleviate the most onerous aspects of the Versailles treaty that Wilson had imposed on Germany.
Harding and Coolidge gave America the greatest prosperity it had ever known, the Roaring Twenties, and the people rewarded them accordingly.
Yes, some of Harding's cronies were crooks—but so, too, were some of Harry Truman's, whose second term was marked by scandal, political nastiness and a winless war, after which he was repudiated by a nation that gave Dwight Eisenhower a landslide.
"Communism, corruption and Korea" was the slogan attached to Truman's legacy by the GOP in 1952. America agreed.
Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War in six months and presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, is now rising in the rankings of historians, some of whom now put him as high as 11th.
Though a plurality of Americans list John F. Kennedy in polls as the best president of their lifetime, fewer historians still share that view.
Other presidents are difficult to rank.
Richard Nixon's second term resulted in his resignation.
Yet his first term—ending the Vietnam War and the draft, creating the Cancer Institute and Environmental Protection Agency, creating a new majority that gave the GOP five victories in six presidential elections—was judged by the American people such a smashing success they rewarded him with a 49-state landslide.
In Where They Stand, Bob Merry offers his own assessments. Buy his book, take it to the beach, and bring the subject up with the after-dinner drinks. A long and loud discussion should ensue.
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Entries(RSS)
I've always hated Presidential rankings, particularly if they do all of the Presidents, so there is a '30th greatest President', etc. It should perhaps be a top 10 and a bottom 5. This is without mentioning, as Buchanan does, how the rankings are slanted toward more recent events and how much of a Great Leap Forward said President made in liberalism.
In 1974, five years after returning from Viet Nam, I removed myself to a foreign country for five years, in no small part out of disgust with Nixon, whose actions I felt brought dishonor and yet more public scorn on my service. I see this now as a rather naive reaction to relatively minor political foul-play; nothing remotely in the same league as, say, Wilson's betrayal of his promise to keep the country out of WWI, or Kennedy's theft of the presidency in the 1960 election.
But Nixon's abolition of the draft I think will go down as a great mistake. In a stroke it severed the link between the people and the military, and made wars immeasurably easier to start and harder to be held accountable for.
Mr. Jacobi.
About your disapproval of the end of the draft and the severing of the link between the military and the people....
As much as I am disinclined to move against your erudite opinion, surely you may agree that the premium placed on the life of the modern, undrafted, professional American soldier has meant fewer casualties in recent wars.
The Vietnam War saw 47,000 US deaths in combat. All post-Vietnam conflicts of US put together comprise 5,500 US deaths in combat. A single pre-draft war took 9 times as many American lives as all post-draft wars. Moreover, the Korean War involved 45 deaths per day and the deaths of 0.02% of the US population. OTOH, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars comprised 2 deaths per day and the deaths of 0.002% of the US population. In other words, the Korean War had 22 times the intensity of Bush's wars and the deaths of 10 times as many Americans with respect to the size of the population.
The data seems to show that the end of the draft meant that the US government had to take much greater care to prevent the deaths of soldiers fighting on front lines, and give them the maximum possible assistance and backup. Surely the abolition of the draft led to a more humanitarian outcome in American wars.
Mr. Sanjay, I'm not sure I agree that "the abolition of the draft led to a more humanitarian outcome in American wars." Since World War II the U.S. has fought progressively less deadly conflicts (for the U.S., at least) as techniques have become increasingly sophisticated and traditional total warfare in terms of "advancing fronts" has become largely obsolete, and I would wager it is this and not any sort of humanitarian interest that has led to a reduction in deaths.
Notwithstanding, prevailing attitudes around the U.S. these days - often informed by the socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels of most new enlistées - do not suggest that rank-and-file infantrymen are not seen, at least as much as they were in the past, as cannon fodder.
Regarding the draft, it is simply a fact that in the past leaders of a country were expected to be military heroes or at least descended from military heroes and certainly to have undergone combat training. For various reasons, that is no longer the case, and the results have not been pretty. Universal service would be one way of fixing the problem. In addition, it should be an expectation that in the event of a conflict the Commander-in-Chief will join active combat for at least part of the time: this will both reduce the use of the military for non-emergencies and prevent a descent into cowardly bureaucratic engineering of the sort we've seen since Kennedy and Johnson (and possibly earlier).
Misters Sanjay and Moses,
The worst aspect of the abolition of conscription is neither any change in the attitude toward the troops nor in the way wars are conducted. Americans, in easy, feel-good ways, support the troops better today than at any time since the Second World War. Politicians vie for the opportunity to invade a mess hall and spoil some poor trooper's chow in order to be photographed eating with the troops – I don't envy the private who has to try to eat in the presence of a Gingrich or a Pelosi.
But outside of military families, few care any longer to come to grips with them as real human beings, with all the strengths and weaknesses of everyone else, and even less as creatures made in God's image, with immortal souls at risk in the adventures we send them on. This was bound to happen with the shrinkage of the population base from which a volunteer force is drawn. With the draft, even those without serving family members were likely to know or know of someone in uniform, and therefore feel more keenly what was at stake in a war.
Wars have been getting both less and more lethal. The capabilities for slaughter are much greater today, but the days of using men as canon fodder, at least on the American side and on a massive scale, were ending as WWII drew to a close. Axis commanders, for example, complained that they were being beaten by American artillery and air power rather than being out-fought. The ratio of support troops to trigger-pullers has risen to the point where today, the jobs of very few service members require actually finding, fixing, closing with and destroying the enemy. But the force is so small, the wars so continuous, the enemy's tactics so asymmetrical, that troops are being exposed to the dangers of a war zone more often than in the past. So, though current military doctrine is to expose troops to fire reluctantly, the dynamics of today’s wars work to keep risk high.
If there is a situation where troops are still treated, in effect, as cannon fodder, it comes up when the wild card of civilian casualties is played. This subject is such a political hot potato, and our leaders are so ignorant regarding combat, that war policy becomes subject to hysterical gyrations. The oscillation of over-reactions has had many disastrous effects. Among them, first making too loose and then too restrictive the rules of engagement. When they are too loose, Justin Raimondo and Paul Craig Roberts shriek (and in my more pessimistic moments I have thought) that the soldiers are murderous beasts. When they are too restrictive, the cry arises from outraged NRA-ers and NASCAR fans (and from me in some cases) that we don’t allow our troops to defend themselves. Both sides have a point, but this is not treating troops as expendable (or putting a "premium" on soldiers' lives - should we put a discount on them?) but rather the result of our rulers failure to understand and take war seriously.
It's the greater license to start wars that's the worst problem. Today, the tiny number and narrow socioeconomic spectrum of voters to answer to means virtually no political capital is at risk in the decision to deploy troops.
The draft fed America’s sons from every corner of the country into its wars, not just from a few pockets here and there, producing a far more representative sample of the American population than is to be found in today’s military. It wasn’t entirely fair, and by hook or by crook many young men themselves or through their affluent, well educated parents got deferments, or got the hell out of the country.
But it was harder to evade the draft than former draft dodgers like to brag, and the difficulties involved and the pressure of the looming “greetings” letter from the government induced many to enlist in the service of their choice, rather than wait to be placed somewhere worse.
There were also significant numbers of those who, though they would not have chosen to serve, had family traditions of military service to uphold, and those who, out of nobility of spirit, simply could not stand aside and let the less privileged be taken while they remained in safety. They undoubtedly improved the quality of the military, and made a potent political force when they turned against the war. There is no equivalent of them today and there won’t be until the draft is reinstated. Though I still disagree with how Viet Nam was ended, at least it was as a result of the political action of the American people, not some afterthought of the executive branch.
Most important of all, when the war had done what wars do, the draft ensured that no place remained untouched. It was only the draft that fed back America’s cold dead children to every corner, and made the price of war too widely known to ignore.
Thanks for an excellent, enlightening post, Mr. Jacobi.
The plight of the front line soldier today is something to consider, given that he is a part of a smaller force, is drawn from a smaller pool of population with less political capital, and is exposed to far greater possibilities of slaughter, as you say. And that his actions are condemned in the media, whether he is allowed to be too loose or is too restricted in what he does, is also a very tragic situation
This discussion does remind of a loathesome article written by a contract mercenary from Iraq who said that the typical soldier can't be trusted with fighting, and that most of the soldiers who die are what he calls "FNGs" (or f-ing new guys). It made me wonder if the more callous, trigger-happy maniacs among defense contractors are the way of future wars, since policymakers can both disavow their heinous actions while also keeping people who are more willing to kill and defend themselves, as opposed to the ordinary soldier.
I second Mr. Sanjay's thanks to Mr. Jacobi for articulating and confirming what I, never having served, had but a dim perception of.
With regard to the issue of draft-dodging and fairness, a more direct solution would not be drafting but compulsory service, as is still the case in Norway and Switzerland and was the case in France until 20 years ago.
I'm all for compulsory service, as long as there arise no opportunities to swap service in a combat arm with, say, landscaping, teaching in an inner city, serving meals to patients, etc. As was touched upon in the sugestion that the commander-in-chief be required to endure a spell of combat, the key factor is putting the leadership and the affluent, and their families, at risk in any proposed war.