Where They Stand

Is debating the relative rankings of past American presidents a harmless pastime – a topic no weightier than a discussion of the merits or demerits of the best quarterbacks? Or is it instead a dangerous practice that encourages voters to take a romanticized view of the presidency?

Journalist Robert Merry, in Where They Stand, his well-informed new book, acknowledges that presidential rankings are an obsession for many politicos. But the result is not all bad, he argues: These debates generate interest in American history, and inspire us to become more knowledgeable about the past.  

In any case, president-rating is not going away anytime soon. In 1948, Life magazine published the first academic survey in the White House Rating Game, canvassing 55 political scientists, historians, and journalists on their rankings. The top three picks, in order, were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Sixty-four years and many similar surveys later, those three presidents still top virtually every presidential score card. (Sometimes they swap position. Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt have both knocked George Washington to fourth place at least once.) Overall, however, such consistency over so many decades suggests that something more than random adoration is at work. 

Merry, editor of The National Interest, a foreign-policy journal, takes academic surveys seriously, but he proposes a novel and more populist approach: that we need to also consider how well-liked each leader was in his own time. More often than not, Merry argues, voter approval and later historical esteem end up coinciding. He notes that James Polk is the only single-term president to ever appear on the “10 best president” lists of historians. “Presidents who were successful with the voters have tended to be rated by historians as our greatest executives, while those who were rejected by the voters generally don’t get smiles of approval from the scholars,” Merry writes.

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