Presidential Reputations

Alex Massie polls his readership, asking everyone to pick the most overrated and underrated U.S. Presidents, and I thought I'd offer my ballot in the form of a blog post. In the overrated camp, I'd place Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy (both obvious choices, I think) and then throw in Harry Truman as well, whose reputation deserved to be rehabilitated from the nadir it reached during his second term, but whose current position as the bipartisan saint of American politics grossly overstates his virtues. In the latter camp, I'd place Eisenhower (whose reputation has risen, true, but not high enough for my taste), George H.W. Bush and Warren G. Harding - the latter for the reasons outlined by Ilya Somin here. (I certainly wouldn't haul Harding up into the near-greats or greats, but he deserves better than to be placed in the bottom five, just as his predecessor deserves far worse than his regular top-ten showings.)

All of my picks are twentieth-century figures, you'll note. If pressed on the pre-1900 chief executives, I suppose I would say that Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland are slightly underrated (though only by virtue of being forgotten), and James Madison and Andrew Jackson slightly overrated. But with the exception of Lincoln and Washington, and perhaps famous debacles like James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, I'm not sure how profitable it is to argue the overrated/underrated question where nineteenth-century Presidents are concerned, since the majority don't have sufficiently-defined reputations these days to really be counted either way.

Comments

Fun fact: Dwight Eisenhower today would be considered to the left of Al Gore, Hilary Clinton, John Kerry....

Posted by Freddie | April 28, 2008 3:57 PM

Aw, man, I was gonna say "Eisenhower," too.

As to Freddie's point, Ike insisted on balancing the budget, and took offense at people who wanted to decrease taxes or increase defense spending (he insisted that it be cut). He had some huge flaws-- indifference to the plight of the disadvantaged here at home, and a tendency to see everything through the prism of Communism abroad-- but he was a successful, principled president.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | April 28, 2008 4:10 PM

Ike closed out his presidency with his ominous warning about the MIC: Military-Industrial Complex.

He was a brilliant general, and he saw what was coming. Can we say the same about Hillary, or Bush, or McCain? Rattle the sabers, beat the drum: more will die, so we don't have to say we surrendered. Gosh, what a horrible thing, to admit we screwed up royally. Better to continue the killing rather than lose face.

Wait a minute, when did we become Asian in our thinking? Or is it just stupid, ignorant and misplaced national pride (and submerged guilt) that prevents people and their governments from admitting when they've made horrendous mistakes?

Posted by James Lawrence | April 28, 2008 4:26 PM

What are you saying, Freddie? That Ike supported gay marriage; he wouldn't have been content with civil unions? That Ike supported abortion without restriction during the first two trimesters? That Ike supported racial preferences, backed by quotas to give them teeth, in college admissions and government contracting? I mean, those positions would be (slightly) to left of Clinton et al., but I doubt Ike held any of them.

Posted by y81 | April 28, 2008 4:28 PM

Ike is one of my favorite presidents. He really understood the idea of soft power, and he kept us out of, what, like four or five different wars (China, Vietnam, Suez, and Korea, right)? Even his civil rights record wasn't that bad, considering, and I'd argue that his legacy on civil rights was superior to Kennedy's--perhaps not that impressive a statement since Kennedy didn't accomplish jack shit on civil rights, aside from appointing scores of racist judges. Certainly Ike comes out better when it comes to judges.

I don't really understand the conservative urge to resurrect the reputations of Harding, Coolidge, etc. Harding wasn't an outright crook, and he did a few good things, like speaking out for civil rights and reinstituting civil liberties, but he was still a bumbler who presided over one of the biggest corruption scandals in American history, and who himself admitted he was unfit for the presidency. Maybe he deserves a tad more respect than he gets, but he was pretty awful, and didn't have any mitigating accomplishments to excuse the awfulness.

My pick for the most overrated president in history: Grant. Pretty overrated general, too, since his strategy can be aptly summarized as: throw all of our troops straight at the enemy and hope for attrition, which will be worse for the South. Meade, Sheridan, or (especially) Hancock would have brought the war to an end far sooner, and with far fewer deaths, I think. And I'll outsource my commentary on Grant's presidency to H. L. Mencken:

"His belief in rogues was cogenital, touching and unlimited. He filled Washington with them, and defended them against honest men, even in the face of plain proofs of their villainy."

Posted by Lev | April 28, 2008 4:42 PM

y81 -- I don't think Mao or Lenin held any of those positions either. Come to think of it, Castro put homosexuals in prison, so does that mean he's to the Right of Trent Lott? Stay tuned for my new bestseller Conservative Communism: From the Russian Revolution to Rush Limbaugh.

Or maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider the possibility that Freddie was talking about economic policy.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | April 28, 2008 5:16 PM

Adams and especially Jefferson - overrated. Great, great men. But their presidencies did not go so well and do not warrant the high ratings they tend to garner.

Adams never really understood the US Constitution or the emerging party-based nature of US politics. He either blew his stack or retreated to Braintree when it all became too much for him, which was often. And then there was the Sedition Act.

Jefferson's Embargo Act not only failed to have the intended influence on French and English but also devastated the US economy. It, along with Jefferson's efforts to dismantle the army and navy, the US bank, and a good part of the federal government, left the country weak and divided when war came in 1812.

Posted by cwilliams | April 28, 2008 5:29 PM

Is it just a coincidence that all the Presidents that you consider to be overrated are liberal Democrats and all the underrated Presidents are conservative Republicans?

Posted by Thrasymachus | April 28, 2008 5:44 PM

Polk should go down as underrated, at least according to the metric that most people seem to rate presidents by. He doubled the size of the country through war and diplomacy and reestablished the independant treasury.

Overrated is Clearly Reagan.

Posted by mad6798j | April 28, 2008 5:49 PM

Ol' Dutch is underrated. Not only did he single-handedly disarm the Evil Empire, rendering it completely harmless, but he got The National Airport named after him, plus lots of cool buildings and streets 'n' stuff.

Clinton is underrated. Sure, he presided over unprecedented peace and prosperity, but not only did he have sex outside of his marriage (and outside of a bedroom!), but he subsequently lied about it. For shame.

Posted by ed | April 28, 2008 5:56 PM

Because social norms are so fluid and tend to change rapidly, I find it difficult to have a meaningful discussion about how "right" or "left" politicians of previous eras were. It's more productive to talk about economic policy, and Ike was not a small-government conservative or laissez-faire capitalist by any means. What's more, his opposition to the expanding military-industrial complex would be absolutely anathema to the conservatives of today.

Posted by Freddie | April 28, 2008 6:06 PM

Fun fact: Dwight Eisenhower today would be considered to the left of Al Gore, Hilary Clinton, John Kerry....

And if every other developing economy had recently been devastated by war, his economic policies might make sense today. Unfortunately the global economic environment is a teensy bit different today than in 1952.

Posted by right | April 28, 2008 6:07 PM

Or maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider the possibility that Freddie was talking about economic policy.

'Freddie' did not make that clear; the most salient vector for people's classification according to the conventional binary are the social and cultural questions; and Eisenhower manifested no particular affection for economic planning, mercantilistic state intervention, or income redistribution above and beyond what was extant public policy at the time he took office.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 6:13 PM

It's more productive to talk about economic policy, and Ike was not a small-government conservative or laissez-faire capitalist by any means.

I can't remember, did Ike's healthcare plan have an individual mandate in it or not?

His opposition to the expanding military-industrial complex would be absolutely anathema to the conservatives of today.

Indeed. To the liberals as well.

Posted by right | April 28, 2008 6:24 PM

What's more, his opposition to the expanding military-industrial complex would be absolutely anathema to the conservatives of today.

Not unless it be your contention that the 'conservatives of today' would be pleased to have the military function as an organized appetite in the manner of the farm lobby.

The ratio of military expenditure to domestic product at the time Gen. Eisenhower left office has never been equalled during the administrations of any of his successors - bar for a brief period during Lyndon Johnson's tenure in office.

Please note that the ratio of military expenditure to domestic product has seen a good deal of flux in response to external circumstances over the last ninety years (dropping by roughly half in the period running from 1984 to 2000). The ratio of domestic expenditure to domestic product has underwent a radical augmentation between 1929 and 1955 subsequent to which it has seen only the most modest flux (roughly .27 +/- .04). The munitions and aerospace industry ain't got nuttin' on higher education, the Farm Bureau Federation, or the American Association of Retired Persons.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 6:29 PM

Art Deco,

I would think that the most important vector at least for most of the last century were economic questions (or more specifically, ideological questions over societies ought to arrange their economic affairs). The Cold War wasn't solely about different visions about economic justice, but that was its basic essence. Even today- the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran and Bolivia are all anti-abortion but I don't see that they've gotten too much credit for that from the pro-lifers in the Republican Party. That seems like proof that when it comes down to it economics still counts much more than culture.

As for Eisenhower, let's not pretend that he was a progressive. He _was_ responsible after all for the sordid U.S. intervention in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America.

Posted by Hector | April 28, 2008 6:30 PM

I disagree with your assessments of Wilson and Truman. My main point is that Wilson's strategic vision was a hundred percent true. He knew Europe was destroying itself and that a new world order would emerge from the wreckage no matter how it ended. He knew that the US would not have a say in designing it unless we fought the war. He imposed his vision on the Versailles Peace Conference, which meant that our ideas were for the first time given international legitimacy. I'm the first to admit the failures in theory and practice of Versailles and of Wilson as a politician, but his strategic vision was second to none and in the end his vision is what guides most of the the world today, in the focus on human rights, democracy and capitalism. I find it a work of genius as a statesman to expand our sphere of influence by having our ideas take precedence. Wilson knew that if the rest of the world played by our rules, we're bound to come out on top. We'd be playing for the house. Wilson got us there.

Truman's achievement in national security was also lasting and true. Proof is that the national security system that he set up in 1947-48 lasted throughout the Cold War and throughout the presidencies of both parties. This system was part of the reason that we won the war. So, credit where credit's due. Proof that setting up a national security system is not chopped liver is that the Bush system is so inept that it's impossible to imagine the next president maintaining it, not matter which party he comes from, not to mention 50 years from now when it'll be an embarrassing footnote.

I have to second Polk's nomination. Aside from his obvious accomplishments, cited by mad6798j, he innovated by starting a war of aggression on the high moral ground ("American blood has been shed on American soil").

Posted by Roque Nuevo | April 28, 2008 6:45 PM

The difficulties with an exercise like this are that one has to differentiate between events derived from circumstances and those from what a particular office-holder brought to the table, one has to ascertain reliably how a president has been rated and by whom, and one has to have a clear (and consensual sense) of what constitutes a good outcome. Michael Kinsley once remarked that he thought Ronald Reagan had performed fabulously at 'handling his job' (as the pollster's trope had it); he (Kinsley) just happened to disagree with everything Mr. Reagan had attempted to do.

That having been said, I seriously doubt that Gen. Eisenhower has in the last twenty-eight years been unfairly disparaged by anyone not on Victor Navasky's payroll.

Kennedy was arguably over-rated by the cargo-cult in the Democratic Party and it is a matter of record that he lived his life repulsively, but he made the right calls in October of 1962, and for that we can be grateful.

Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, and the Federal Reserve Board followed in 1929-33 the most disastrous monetary policies imaginable. Mr. Hoover was a remarkably able man who did much good in his life, but it is hard to think of a discrete set of contingent decisions with worse consequences. I think if you look at these inane historians' polls over the years, he is usually spared in favor of ill-rating of his immediate precessors. You could say that he has thus been over-rated.

Franklin Roosevelt has also been over-rated by much of the general public who remember him, journalists like Studs Terkel, and historians like Arthur Schlesinger. His economic policies were quite mixed in their effects on output and employment and his prosecution of the war was disfigured by the turn toward aeriel bombardment of population centers.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 6:53 PM

I would think that the most important vector at least for most of the last century were economic questions (or more specifically, ideological questions over societies ought to arrange their economic affairs).

That depends on time and place. In this country, that has not been the case since around 1964.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 6:56 PM

He _was_ responsible after all for the sordid U.S. intervention in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America.

Which elsewhere?

Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, and Mexico had in 1954 some decades under their belt of internal politics characterized by legal order (if not necessarily democracy). Even so, they suffered many interruptions of same not characteristic of most of Europe or North America or the Antipodes. As for the rest of Latin America, fuggedahboutit. That was not a problem Gen. Eisenhower, or Mr. John Foster Dulles, or the United Fruit Company created.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 7:10 PM

Regarding left and right (which is actually tangential to the original post): on economic matters no less than on social matters, mainstream beliefs shift so rapidly that it is difficult to make comparisons between figures of different eras. On the one hand, neither Clinton nor Obama is proposing to raise federal income tax rates on ordinary income to 70% (which I think was the rate when Ike left office). On the other hand, Ike didn't propose a national health care plan or a subprime mortgage bailout. So go figure.

Posted by y81 | April 28, 2008 7:18 PM

Eisenhower's administration supported a variety of nasty Latin American leaders including Somoza, Batista, and even the genocidal Trujillo. His worst moment was of course the intervention in Guatemala. It was also Eisenhower of course who first initiated the embargo on Cuba and endorsed plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Posted by Hector | April 28, 2008 7:33 PM

his prosecution of the war was disfigured by the turn toward aeriel bombardment of population centers.

I'm no FDR fan, but blasting the crap out of cities was the accepted strategic bombing doctrine before the war. If you must blame someone for that, it should be Giulio Douhet.

Posted by guineapigfury | April 28, 2008 7:40 PM

Didn't Ross just blast this exact type of poll among historians as an exercise in "nitwittery?"

Posted by BillB | April 28, 2008 7:48 PM

Eisenhower's health insurance proposal was killed off by opposition from the AMA. He proposed a government fund to encourage expanded insurance, but did not propose a mandate. While "rejecting the socialization of medicine," he argued that "the means for achieving good health should be accessible to all. A person's location, occupation, age, race, creed, or financial status should not bar him from enjoying this access." It is arguable that this assertion was mere happy talk, though. I suppose that, no one, or at least no politician, would argue that a person's financial status should condemn him to subpar health coverage.

Hector-- Ike drew the lesson from Castro that we shouldn't support transparently atrocious dictators like Bautista-- or Trujillo. The guys who assassinated Trujillo had received weapons from the US, on account of Ike's turn against him.

I don't think that Polk is underrated or that Grant is overrated; I think they are generally very highly and poorly regarded, respectively.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | April 28, 2008 7:49 PM

Anastasio Somoza Garcia ruled Nicaragua from 1936 until his assassination in 1956; Fulgencio Batista was the most consequential political figure in Cuba from 1934 through his resignation and flight at the beginning of 1959 and its President from 1940-44 and 1952-59; Rafael Trujillo was the autocrat of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to his assassination in 1961; the characteristics of the Trujillo regime were such that Anastasio Somoza (among others) regarded it as offensive and beyond the pale, but it was not 'genocidal' and Trujillo had a fairly liberal policy as regards Jewish immigration.

All of these characters were well established in their positions at the time Gen. Eisenhower took office. Is it your contention that Gen. Eisenhower should have assigned the CIA the task of ejecting them?

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 7:49 PM

The Cold War wasn't solely about different visions about economic justice, but that was its basic essence.

I'm not sure that's true. I think the different visions of political freedom had a lot to do with it, too. The Cold War would not have been what it was had the Soviets been collectivist and economically redistributionist with no gulag and no KGB. Of course, I question whether you can get the scale of economic redistribution "desired" without ending up there, but...

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | April 28, 2008 8:01 PM

While we're recounting Eisnhower's foreign policy sins lets not forget that we helped overthrow a government and put the Shah in power during his admin.

Posted by Eric k | April 28, 2008 8:05 PM

Elvis,

Authoritarian government was the default in Latin America in 1953, the region was (and has remained) poor in comparison to the United States and Western Europe, and the economic and social order in countries other than Uruguay and Costa Rica was deeply problematic.

Cuba under Fulgencio Batista's superintendency was quite politically pluralistic and maintained competitive electoral institutions up until 1952 (Contrast Batista's treatment of his mortal enemy Fidel Castro with Castro's treatment of Huber Matos, an ally with whom he had policy disagreements); and in its level of affluence it ranked above all but six other sovereign states in the hemisphere. Are you aware of any income distribution data which would suggest Cuba was abnormal for the hemisphere? The history of the last three decades suggest that Latin America has in it the capacity to do better, but Batista hardly merits the designation 'atrocious', all things considered.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 8:06 PM

While we're recounting Eisnhower's foreign policy sins lets not forget that we helped overthrow a government and put the Shah in power during his admin.

No, the CIA in 1953 intervened in a power struggle between the Shah, who had been on the throne since 1941, and Premier Mohammed Mossadeq, the outcome of which was that Mossadeq ended up out of office and under house-arrest. Presumably there is an English translation of the Iranian Constitution of 1906 we could examine. I think it is fairly unusual in parliamentary systems for the head of state to lack the formal legal authority to discharge the ministry (though such power is seldom present de facto in well established parliamentary regimes).

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 8:14 PM

My main point is that Wilson's strategic vision was a hundred percent true.

Hans Morganthau has a fairly concise critique of the notion of 'collective security' which I believe appears in each edition of Politics among Nations. When I used to study this stuff, critics of the 'realist' conception of international political relations (e.g. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye) were not making the attempt to defend Woodrow Wilson's schemes.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 8:29 PM

Mr. Deco,

My basis for calling General Trujillo genocidal was the events of 1937 in which he order the mass murder of Haitian migrant workers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley_Massacre
"In October of 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina ordered the execution of the Haitian population living within the borderlands with Haiti. The violence resulted in the killing of 17,000 to 35,000 Haitian civilians over a span of approximately five days."

Yes, true, he wasn't specifically _genocidal_ during the Eisenhower era although he did engage in a lot of torture and extrajudicial murder. as for Batista, Cuba under his regime is generally considered to have been extremely unequal with a wealthy oligarchy ruling over an impoverished peasantry. Torture and extrajudicial murder were also common. Of course he wasn't as bad as Somoza or Trujillo, but stil plenty bad enough.

Marquis,

The United States was friendly with some very brutal in countries like Indonesia and some of the Central American countries, and they were bitterly hostile even to elected socialist governments in places like Nicaragua and Chile. So no, I don't think that concerns for human rights were at the essence of it. Probably they were in the 1930s and 1950s, but by the late 1960s I have a hard time believing that the American ruling elites were more concerned about human rights than about preserving capitalism pure and simple.

Posted by Hector | April 28, 2008 8:34 PM

Rating presidents is higly subjective without some specific criteria, and the "success" of a president is often driven by events outside his control. However, one factor to consider is how the president handled a significant world crisis. On that score, I offer the following:

Kennedy - Kennedy was the beneficiary of great myth building and there is little to praise him, except for one huge issue. He was president when the world was on the brink of nuclear war and somehow he had the judgment to reject the advice of his generals and achieve a resolution without war.

George Bush (the first one) - He had his significant moment when Hussein conquered Kuwait and he almost perfectly met the moment. If he had accepted Hussein's conquering, there likely would have been terrible consequences for the world. He certainly should rise in the estimation of persons who judge presidents.

Posted by kansas city brian | April 28, 2008 8:53 PM

Polk should go down as underrated, at least according to the metric that most people seem to rate presidents by. He doubled the size of the country through war and diplomacy and reestablished the independant treasury.

And having done all this, he sought no second term.

Posted by Just Dropping By | April 28, 2008 9:26 PM

The degree to which Art Deco is willing to tow the party line in his role as a conservative troll is pretty impressive. There are not today even many conservative scholars who will argue against the fact that the CIA deposed the democratically-elected Mossadegh, that the United States enthusiastically supported his incredibly brutal and corrupt regime, and that doing so created the conditions that made the Iranian religious revolution possible.

Posted by Freddie | April 28, 2008 9:57 PM

The Shah was a modernizing monarchical despot and not abnormally severe by the benchmarks of the region. The Ba'athist regime in Iraq and the Islamic Republic in Iran at its point of maximal severity (1981-89) were the ones who might strain one's credulity.

I would suggest some counter-factual speculation as regards the course of Iranian politics after 1953. Here you have a multi-ethnic state where the modal nationality comprehends perhaps 60% of the population, where the minority nationalities are concentrated in frontier zones where they have a demographic plurality, where the country's natural resource bonanza is to be found primarily in the territory of the minorities and with regard to which there is a potential irridentist claim to boot. Less than a tenth of the population is minimally literate. The evolution of the country's social strata is bound to be distorted due to the concentration of the country's wealth in extractive industries operated by foreign concessions or by the state. To add to that, among the salient actors in the country's political elite, you did not have a consensus that each of the competitors retained some baseline of immunity or inviolability.

Never say never, but none of the foregoing looks terribly promising for the survival of parliamentary institutions. Also, you can find examples over the period since 1917 of monarchical disestablishment leading to an improvement in the quantum of civil liberty and political participation, but nearly all of them would be in Europe during the period running from 1917 to 1945 and most of the successor regimes (e.g. the Spanish Republic) proved to be unstable equilibria. One might also note that by 1963, only about a quarter of the states in the Near East and North Africa had any kind of competitive electoral politics.

Posted by Art Deco | April 28, 2008 11:33 PM

Most underated: LBJ war on poverty, civil rights,Medicare and would have done a lot more if it wasn't for the filibuster. Stupid on Vietnam, but did a lot of good on domestic policy.

Overated: Regan followed by JFK

Posted by rtaycher1987 | April 29, 2008 12:32 AM

And having done all this, [Polk] sought no second term.

Polk was extremely ill by the end of his Presidency, dying less than four months after he left office.

Posted by Mike | April 29, 2008 1:24 AM

Overrated:
JFK
Reagan
Jackson (the most of all)

Underrated:
Grant
Eisenhower

Posted by dtah | April 29, 2008 1:26 AM

Overrated: Jackson, Jackson, Jackson!

I suppose you can say a lot of things about a President that engages in blatantly illegal ethnic cleansing against a clear ruling by the Supreme Court, but I'm certainly holding it against him.

Posted by Zeke | April 29, 2008 5:14 AM

Too much of the ratings are dependent on placing "scandal" as being of immense importance and the President being "fortunate" enough to be around for a major successful war or crisis.

Harding, Nixon, and Grant were rated low from the scandals of their associates doings - while overseas we call certain foreign leaders "great" who were up to their eyeballs in scandalous associates or affairs.
Nixon also suffers from liberal historians once whimpering on his "senseless persecution of noble people he accused of communism" - until that was revealed as "Oops! They were Soviet tools!" but still on his "intolerable law-breaking". Which the liberal historians have not yet reconciled with the far worse law-breaking of some of their favorite Presidents - Jackson, FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ - other than on "Well, that may be true, but the heroes of the media caught Nixon" rationale. But Nixon's domestic policy accomplishments (except affirmative action and wage and price controls) were lasting, successful and visionary, 3rd in impact to FDR and LBJs domestic policy - and in foreign policy, he might have been the best American we possibly could have had in office, for his era.

Ratings should be on how successful they were as executive decision-makers, how well they led and averted major problems and made tough decisions that had lasting, positive impact on the country. Besides dropping the "scandal test" to downgrade popular, successful Presidents like Harding and avoid the War Hero inflation factor, historians should also avoid imposing modern values on the culture a decision-maker in the Oval Office 50, 100, 200 years ago operated in.

If we look at the Presidents of the last 100 or so years who were absolutely competent executives who had a lasting legacy of consequential, tough or visionary decisions where the positives of their efforts greatly outweighed the negative and had lasting impact, your top 6 would be:

FDR, Nixon, Eisenhower, LBJ, TDR, and Reagan - in that order.

Bottom 5 would be:

Carter, Dubya, Wilson, Hoover, and Harding - in that order.

Posted by chris ford | April 29, 2008 5:56 AM

Re: And if every other developing economy had recently been devastated by war, his economic policies might make sense today.

Huh? Ike was president in the 50s. WWII was well over with, and European economies had fully recovered.

Re: While "rejecting the socialization of medicine," he argued that "the means for achieving good health should be accessible to all. A person's location, occupation, age, race, creed, or financial status should not bar him from enjoying this access."

That just feel-good rhetoric. I don't think Bush or McCain would be embarrassed to say the same-- while doing nothing to further the goal.

Posted by JonF | April 29, 2008 6:33 AM

Yes, Nixon really gets a bad rap from those liberal historians. It's only crazy liberals who think that detente was a form of appeasement and that many of his social and economic policies -- affirmative action and price controls, to name a few -- were mistakes.

And let's not overestimate Watergate. It only fouled politics and dampened the country's spirit for a few years after all. That's like letting Ahab's little thing with the white whale distract you from how good a captain he was. Those decks were spotless ...

Posted by Ralph | April 29, 2008 10:05 AM

Harding is definitely among the most underrated Presidents of all time. Americans of the 1920s would have howled at the notion that the dreadful Woodrow Wilson was a better President than the popular, effective, and thoroughly decent Harding.

Eisenhower deserves much more credit than he gets for his foreign policy. On domestic policy, he wasn't particularly successful. Yes, he balanced the Federal budget, but at the cost of presiding over one of the deepest recessions (1957-58) in post-World War II American history. A recession, by the way, that led directly to the collapse of Republican Party at the congressional level in the 1958 mid-term elections, a nadir from which the GOP didn't really recover until the 1980s.

Posted by Simon | April 29, 2008 12:09 PM

Most underated: LBJ war on poverty, civil rights,Medicare and would have done a lot more if it wasn't for the filibuster. Stupid on Vietnam, but did a lot of good on domestic policy.

"Stupid on Vietnam," yes. Also stupid on domestic spending. And there's the little problem that American society came near to total collapse during his presidency while LBJ stood by and watched haplessly. But why pick nits?

Posted by Simon | April 29, 2008 12:16 PM

Most underrated: I think history will be kinder to Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford than their contemporaries. In its run of Cold War Presidents, the US had fewer lemons than ever in its history - no Fillmores, Pierces, Buchanans or Andrew Johnsons. George H.W. Bush could be added. It is unfair to label one-term presidencies as automatic failures. The elder Bush is the James K. Polk of the 20th century.

Grant was surely underrated. I would rate him as maybe the unluckiest President as he had to take over from the incompetent Andrew Johnson, who had already blown most of the chances of peaceful & sucessful Reconstruction.

Most overrated. I suspect Wilson - his foreign policy idealism should be contextualized by the revitalization of racism and xenophobia at home.

I think Ronald Reagan will suffer at the hands of historians - in strange counterpoint to Ford's & Carter's reputations. Like Wilson, Reagan has foreign policy success - but more dubious for future generations will be his pandering to big business, especially oil interests, and his increase in the US's military involvement in the Middle East. Under him, the US became increasing dependent on fossil fuels when he could have swung momentum in an alternative direction.

Posted by toby | April 29, 2008 12:40 PM

One problem with all of the Polk love is that his expansionist efforts appeased and strengthened slaveholders by expanding the territory of slavery. Grant thought that the Civil War was an outgrowth of and punishment for the Mexican-American war.

I am curious about Toby's reasons for thinking Carter underrated. I remember his administration as time during which there was a steady drumbeat of bad news, disappointments, and embarrassments on every front -- stagflation, high unemployment, gas shortages, Soviet aggression, the Iranian hostage situation. Carter seemed content to preside over, and to a certain extent even help bring about, America's decline. What will historians point to as the redeeming or overlooked aspects of his administration?

Posted by tutor | April 29, 2008 1:44 PM

I think George Bush II is the most over-rated President this country has ever suffered through.

Posted by MNPundit | April 30, 2008 9:37 PM

Re: And there's the little problem that American society came near to total collapse during his presidency while LBJ stood by and watched haplessly.

Care to explain the above? There was a lot of upheaval and commotion when LBJ was president (note: I'm too young to remeber those years) but the US came no where to collapse. The economy was strong, the country was in no danger from foreign foes and all the campus protests and the like were basically a lot of histrionic teapot tempests. Change the "9" in "1960s" to an "8" and you'll have the decade when the US almost did go under.

Posted by JonF | May 4, 2008 7:34 AM

I would like to join the chorus and say that Jackson is far and away the most overrated president we have. On top of ethnic cleasning that risked destroying the seperation of powers, he brought corruption to an entirely new level and brought on a century of bank failures.

Posted by Kyle | May 4, 2008 2:14 PM

I've always thought Polk the most underrated - even allowing for Ross's difficulty of dealing with forgotten 19th century presidents. Polk is underrated precisely because he ought not be forgotten.

Here's a president who set himself four major policy goals and achieved all four in one term - and didn't bother running again. And won a major war and added more territory to the US than any other president as bonuses.

Some of his achievements were pregnant with the divisions that would lead to the Civil War. But those trends were already in place.

Wilson was a complete debacle by almost every measure.

Posted by Richard | May 4, 2008 2:18 PM

I think the Polk question is an interesting one, too. It may be a no brainer that given his obscurity, he's underrated. But an overall assessment of his accomplishments is trickier once you place them in light of the simmering crises that ultimately led to civil war and that his policies may have exacerbated.

One last thing on Polk. Many have expressed the opinion that Jackson is seriously overrated and many of his policies were failures. That Polk was Jackson's protegee, and carried out many of his polices, bears remembering.

Posted by tyt | May 4, 2008 6:33 PM