Ten Worst Presidents: Introduction
Surprising, perhaps, is how closely later scholarly polls would track with Schlesinger's list of the worst, including Schlesinger's own 1962 reprise of the exercise and his son Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, 1996 pollThe hardy perennials among the worst are the pre-Civil War crew of Pierce, Buchanan, Taylor, Fillmore, and Tyler. (William Harrison could have been included, but Schlesinger omitted him, along with the much later Garfield, because of a precipitously short term of office, a courtesy that few other subsequent polls granted those short-timers.) More volatile are the rankings of Grant and a president who did not even earn a place on the first 10-worst list: Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second-term vice-president and successor, would earn a place of unenviable distinction on most subsequent lists. As time rolled on, of course, there would be new contenders for the bottom spots, including Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter.
What broad lesson could be drawn from this first scholarly poll of the presidents? Interpreting the results, Schlesinger concluded that what weighed most heavily in determining the best presidents was whether they "took the side of progressivism and reform, as understood in their day." Though Schlesinger did not say so, the quality that characterized most of the failed presidencies, reflected in the choice of so many ineffectual pre-Civil War presidents and Hoover, was passivity or inaction in the face of great historical challenges (or, in the cases of Grant and Harding, in the face of corruptionand ineptitude inside their own administrations). The high value placed on executive energy could be said to reflect a liberal bias, but it also reveals the influence of a less strictly partisan ideal of the presidency as a strong, activist branch of government. That ideal goes back to the arguments of Alexander Hamilton in his contributions to the Federalist, and it has has been embodied in presidencies as different as those of Andew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, though in none more vigorously than FDR's. "If there is a common denominator in presidential assessments," argues Princeton's Greenstein, "it is a bias toward activism, unless the activism is viewed as misplaced, as in the instances of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam and Nixon and Watergate."
To test whether that or any other generalizations about presidential performances, particularly failed performances, hold up, U.S. News averaged the results of five major and relatively recent presidential polls to make its own gallery of the BOX OUTSpecifically, this survey of surveys ranks the 10 worst presidents based on the average of the choices for the 1 0 worst in those five polls. We awarded 10 points for the lowest position on any poll and one point less for each successively higher spot on a poll, up through the tenth worst.)We did not include the current occupant of the White House, and in any case he does not make the 10-worst list on any of the surveys in which he was included. Furthermore, because large polls—and averages of the findings of such polls—tend to cancel out quirky and idiosyncratic judgements that often reveal more about the ambiguities and mixed achievements of a presidency, we have also surveyed a much smaller pool of specialists to learn how and why their choices differ from the usual suspects.
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