Ten Worst Presidents: Introduction
Bush's own view of how history will treat him comes across in his frequent allusions to Harry Truman, another famously unpopular sitting president whose reputation rose sharply as scholarsand the public began to appreciate his role in laying the foundations for America's success in the Cold War.As Bose points out, however, it is Bush's perceived failure to build similarly effective foundations for the long-term war on terror that has made so many scholars so uncharacteristically quick to judge. And if Iraq turns out to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East 10 years from now, there will be a lot of scholars eating crow.
Attempts to rate the Bush presidency are at best premature, but they do raise valuable questions about presidential ratings in general and failed presidencies in particular. Is there, to begin with, a scholarly consensus on who America's worst chief executives are? If there were a negative Mount Rushmore, which presidents would have their faces carved into it? What qualities seem to distinguish poor presidencies? And finally, and is there any failing that seems to weigh more heavily than others? And last but not least do rankings really help us understand presidential leadership and individual presidencies, or do they, in the words of Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein, "divert attention from the full range of presidential experience"?
Are they simply parlor games that say more about the biases, partisan or otherwise, of the people who do the rating?
As it turns out, those questions have been asked ever since scholars got into the business of ranking presidents. Fred Greenstein, chairman of the Program in Leadership Studies at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, charges that ratings "divert attention from the full range of presidential experience."The ambiguities and mixed performances of our past chief executives are far more instructive, he argues, than what you get when you reduce a president to a place on a ladder. Having written an outstanding book on the Dwight D. Eisenhower (The Hidden-Hand Presidency), which provided a significant upward revision of that president's ability and accomplishments, Greenstein has good reason to question the mutability of judgements, even those of scholars. Yet as critical asis of presidential rankings, his own study of the qualities that constitute presidential leadership (The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton) has been picked up and used by designers of many of the major polls. Perhaps not altogether innocently, Greenstein has contributed to the game.
Credit, or blame, for the first scholarly ranking of the presidents usually goes to Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who conducted a poll for Life magazine in 1948. He asked 55 specialists in American history to rate the presidents as great, near great, average, below average, or failure. Abraham Lincoln topped the list, followed by George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Claiming the cellar of that list were Warren G. Harding and, in ascending order, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Calvin Coolidge, John Tyler, Benjamin Harrison, and Herbert Hoover.
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