Who is the worst American president of all

time? (25 January 2021)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/25/who-is-worst-american-president-all-
time/

Bruce J. Schulman

With the inauguration of Joe Biden as the nation’s 46th president, pundits and scholars have
begun rating Donald Trump’s standing among the nation’s chief executives, and he is joining
the very worst on the list. Contemporary historians give presidents low grades for the very
things that dominated the Trump administration: graft and cronyism (Warren G. Harding),
abusing official powers for personal political purposes (Richard Nixon), comforting white
supremacists (Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Johnson), conspiring with foreign adversaries
(Nixon again) and not meeting a national emergency (James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover).
Given his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his two impeachments, Trump will fall
to the bottom in rankings by specialists; among the general public, his reputation will remain
more mixed. Trump gets solid grades in a recent Fox News survey.

Still, standards and judgments can change significantly over time: Fifty years ago, scholars
normally placed Wilson among the greatest presidents despite his racist policies. Harry S.
Truman and Ulysses S. Grant, on the other hand, have climbed the charts despite charges of
corruption haunting their administrations, because of their leadership through periods of crisis
and their commitment — at least by the standards of their times — to civil rights.

Where do presidential rankings come from and what might they tell us? The presidency
maintains an outsize hold on popular imagination, and Americans rank presidents
obsessively: with polls while they occupy the Office, with surveys, memoirs, films and
monuments after they’re gone. But what, really, does this obsession with presidential
performance really tell us?

Thinking historically about presidential ratings — treating them, that is, not as data that helps
us understand and evaluate past presidencies, but rather as windows into the attitudes and
expectations of the people and the periods that produce these ratings — highlights both the
significantly changed impressions of some presidents over time and the changing nature of
the institution and the nation.

To some extent, of course, Americans began assessing their chief executives as early as 1792,
when George Washington won reelection. A more scientific way to analyze political
performance didn’t occur until George Gallup opened his American Institute of Public
Opinion in 1935. But presidential ratings, the familiar scorecards of greats, near greats,
mediocrities and failures, owe their origins to one scholar-activist who in 1948 asked 55
noted historians to sort the presidents into five categories: great, near great, average, below
average and failures.

The author of that pioneering survey was Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. An innovative scholar
who brought new subjects such as immigration and city growth into the study of the past,
Schlesinger was also the prominent organizer of the Massachusetts chapter of the lobbying
group Americans for Democratic Action. Still, he is probably most famous today as the father
of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., White House aide to President John F. Kennedy and an
important architect of the Kennedy Camelot legend.

Schlesinger’s survey — and the colleagues he chose to participate in it — reflected a

particular liberal model of White House leadership that both father and son valued and a
particular conception of presidential greatness.

The Schlesingers placed a premium on what they called “struggle”— presidents who engaged
in conflict rather than promote consensus. Schlesinger Sr. was, in his words, “more interested
in change and reform than status quo” and viewed the epic drama of American history as the
gradual triumph of democracy over the forces of privilege and reaction. The Schlesinger
survey also tended to favor “Big-D” Democrats, but more than anything else, it established a
model for measuring presidential achievement, one that privileged reformers and activist
leaders in times of crisis, a preference that exerted lasting effects on many subsequent
surveys.

The Schlesinger polls, for example, listed James K. Polk, the president who led the United
States into war with Mexico, as “Near Great,” and even though recent scholarship has been
more critical, Polk still scores in the top 15 in most recent scholarly rankings. One 1970 study
tried to compensate for the Schlesingers’ preference for activism and found that Polk fell in
the standings and that less dynamic presidents such as Hoover, James Monroe and Dwight D.
Eisenhower moved up.

But things have changed over the 73 years since Schlesinger first polled his colleagues,
revealing not only the effect of new information and new benchmarks as the roster of past
presidents to compare grows, but also changes in the qualities contemporary Americans
expect and value in the White House. Consider, for example, the shifting fortunes of Truman
and Eisenhower.

In the spring of 1952, Truman found his reputation at low ebb. His approval rating hit just 22
percent, and although it improved a little bit after he announced he would not seek reelection,
he was all but run out of Washington. Mired in an unpopular war on a distant continent, the
nation had experienced a heated period of strikes and labor conflict. Truman faced constant
attacks from Sen. Joseph McCarthy and others for harboring communist spies in his
government, and charges of corruption and cronyism dogged his administration. In 1952,
Eisenhower, the Republican presidential candidate, repeatedly declared, “There’s only one
issue in this campaign: the mess in Washington.”

And yet, after leaving office, Truman’s reputation rebounded. By the 1960s, he scored “Near
Great” and has since consistently remained among the top 10. To some extent, that change
represents the vindication that the passage of time can bring: McCarthyism was discredited
and the United States eventually won the Cold War that Truman started. But it also signals
changing standards: Truman’s combativeness, his plain-spoken, folksy style — traits that
seemed second-rate after the majestic Franklin D. Roosevelt — looked pretty good in
comparison to the machinations of Lyndon B. Johnson and the dishonesty of Nixon. And
Truman’s support for civil rights, an increasingly important metric in presidential rankings,
has moved him up while dropping Wilson and Andrew Johnson.
Eisenhower’s reputation has also changed significantly. The general received very good
approval ratings throughout his presidency but was not much appreciated by the historians
and intellectuals in scholars’ surveys. In the 1962 Schlesinger survey, for instance, he
finished at the bottom of the average presidents, No. 20, just above Andrew Johnson. He did
not fit the model of can-do leadership, of struggle and reform, that Schlesinger Jr. and the 75
scholars he polled in 1962 regarded as the standard of presidential leadership.

But Eisenhower now consistently makes the top 10. The 2018 Siena poll of 157 presidential
scholars has him sixth overall. The relative restraint of Eisenhower’s “Hidden-Hand
Presidency” — ending combat operations on the Korean Peninsula, keeping U.S. troops out
of Vietnam, criticizing the military-industrial complex — looks better to experts who have
watched Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon and Trump. This reassessment owes to the opening of
archives allowing scholars to learn details about Eisenhower’s governing style that
contemporaries could not see. But it also reflects shifting priorities: In an increasingly
polarized country, Eisenhower’s moderation, steadiness and courteous relationship with the
opposition seem more attractive.

And yet, some presidents have retained their reputations through eight decades of rankings.
Abraham Lincoln, Washington and Roosevelt make up the top three in every major survey of
scholars since Schlesinger first posed the question. Their staying power is a testament to the
enduring respect for their temperaments and their accomplishments, as well as their iconic
status as makers and re-makers of American democracy, guiding the nation through the most
fundamental breaks in its history, through successive new births of freedom.

How, then, will Trump fare? The 45th president frequently compared himself to Lincoln,
placing himself at the top of the heap alongside his illustrious Republican predecessor. The
stark differences between the two men — how they dealt with the national crises of their
presidencies and their diametrically opposed temperaments — suggest that Trump and
Honest Abe will long remain at opposite ends of the presidential rankings.