Happy President's Day

On the day we honor perhaps the most overrated elected office in America, I offer my assessment on (some of) the 45 men who have held the job.

When I was a little boy I was obsessed with the presidency. My parents bought me this giant, oversized hardcover book on all the US presidents when I was about 10 or 11 and I used to page through it constantly, intently reading and re-reading the entries. With that in mind, President’s Day should be one of my favorite days of the year. It’s not! But it does provide me with the annual opportunity to play amateur presidential historian, which I still love to do.

I’m not going to rank all the presidents, because truth be told, I’m not knowledgable enough on most pre-twentieth century presidents. I wouldn’t be comfortable ranking Andrew Jackson or Grover Cleveland against Harry Truman or Bill Clinton. Moreover, the American presidency has dramatically evolved. It’s almost a category failure to compare presidents in the 19th century, when the presidency was a weak office, to modern times and the era of what Arthur Schlesinger called the “imperial presidency,” which is pretty much everyone from FDR to the present. Back then the president had small staffs, managed a relatively tiny bureaucracy, and played second fiddle to Congress. World War II and the reforms that came out of the New Deal changed all that.

So with that in mind, here’s a few semi-coherent thoughts.

The Greatest

This is a pretty simple: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Many historians place George Washington in the top three, which is fine. But it seems to me that the president who won the Civil War and ended slavery and the president who brought the country out of an economic depression, won World War II, and established the United States as a great world power should be in the top two. Don’t ask me to pick who is number one. My heart says FDR, but my head says Lincoln.

The Worst

This is also pretty easy - Andrew Johnson, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and James Buchanan. Previously I would have said the president who royally screwed up reconstruction (Johnson) should rank at the bottom. But I need to give the nod to the president who did nothing as 400,000 Americans died from a pandemic, shredded basic democratic norms AND launched an insurrection against a co-equal branch of government. Trump is the worst. There’s not one good thing you can say about his time in office.

It’s odd to me that W gets rated better by historians than Warren Harding or Franklin Pierce. Those two were bad presidents, but, again, they held office when the presidency was relatively weak. Bush was one of the more powerful US presidents and he was a complete disaster. The Iraq War, sitting by idly as the global economy self-destructed, doing nothing on climate change, having one of the worst job creation records in modern presidential history, undermining civil liberties, bringing back torture … I could go on. Bush was a terrible president and I have him just ahead of Trump and Johnson in my rankings.

The Pretty Good

After the power trio of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR there’s a relative consensus among presidential scholars that the next ranking of presidents includes Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Thomas Jefferson. I’ll submit that TR helped create the modern presidency, particularly on foreign policy, and that Jefferson gets high marks for expanding the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase so I’ll give these two a pass.

Eisenhower is, in my view, a top five US president. On domestic policy his accomplishments were significant. He built the national highway system and increased federal support for higher education as well as technology research and development. On foreign policy he ended the Korean War, his policy of ratcheting up the nuclear arms race had the ironic and intended effect of making war between the US and Soviet Union less likely, and kept the military budget from spiraling out of control. He also crushed the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, helped usher in the end of McCarthyism and departisanized US foreign policy (at least for a short time). Ike wasn’t perfect. His civil rights record was uneven, his domestic accomplishments were undercut by a lack of ambition (or so his critics said), and a lot of Iranians, Indonesians and, Guatemalans would disagree with me about his foreign policy record.

On Truman, I’m much less bullish. As I wrote a few years ago about him:

“He deserves enormous credit for protecting and stabilizing Western Europe with the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. These are signal achievements but as historians from Robert Dallek and Walter Lafeber to Fredrik Logevall have suggested there is a pretty significant downside to Truman's presidency as well.

“First there was Korea. An impulsive response to a cross-border attack that re-shaped American foreign policy. It was the final nail in the coffin of the more modest containment strategy proposed by George Kennan and by default enshrined the notion that the US had a responsibility to contain Communism wherever it showed its fangs.  But while the decision to go to war can be considered a debatable one; the failure in rein in Douglas MacArthur's push to the Yalu River, which triggered a Chinese intervention is a disaster that can't be washed away (even by Truman's later decision to fire the general).

“… The Truman Doctrine and its declaration that it was the "policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures" laid the groundwork for the limitless definition of US national interests that unfolded over the next 60 years … Then there was Truman's use of anti-Communist rhetoric for political advantage that turned what might have been a balance of power, geo-political clash into an ideological one. This, of course, also helped to politicize the Cold War in the United States and heightened the issue of anti-Communism. Indeed, few Presidents more flagrantly used foreign policy as a political punching bag as frequently as Truman.”

He was better on domestic policy but he so screwed up the Korean War that he was unable to run for a second term and ended the Democrat’s two decade control of the White House. Don’t get me wrong, he was a good president but he’s not as good as he’s often portrayed.

There’s one more I would include in the pretty good category - Barack Obama. This might be an example of recency bias, but his domestic accomplishments were significant (particularly on health care but also in the support for green industries in the 2009 stimulus plan), the most progressive since LBJ, and helped bring the country out of one of its most significant historical economic downturns. On foreign policy he restored America’s role as a respected global power, signed an important nuclear arms agreement with Russia, and brought US troops out of Iraq. His flawed stewardship of the war in Afghanistan does, however, count mightily against him. Also, and this may be the most important thing, he was the country’s first Black president, which is no small thing in a nation founded on white supremacy. Aside from helping move public opinion on same sex marriage, when he publicly endorsed it, he expanded the national conversation on a host of civil rights issues. In addition, he is the only modern president to have no major scandals, which if you think about the scrutiny and biases of American political journalism is a simply stunning accomplishment.

The major mark against Obama is that he was followed by Donald Trump, which suggests that he failed to lay the foundation for a more enduring political transformation. For a guy who was a fantastic politician that’s a significant failing. Time will still tell on Obama’s presidency, but I give him high marks.

The Flawed

This is where things get tough, because ones partisan or ideological views definitely come into play with this group. For example, I don’t personally consider Ronald Reagan’s presidency to be a great period in American history. But was he consequential? Yes. Did he have a major impact on American politics? It’s still felt today. Did he do a few good things? He helped to end the Cold War by giving Mikhail Gorbachev the space to pursue reforms that ultimately caused the Soviet Union to collapse - a move that was opposed by almost all of his close aides. Still, I wouldn’t put him in the pretty good list, because his overall record on foreign policy was, how shall we say, uneven, and his domestic record of cutting taxes, increasing the defense budget, and weakening the regulatory state, though consequential, were largely negative. There’s also the Iran-Contra scandal.

On the other side of the ledger is Woodrow Wilson. He laid the foundations for the modern administrative and regulatory state. During his presidency, the Federal Reserve was created along with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wilson’s tenure saw major banking reforms, tariff reductions, antitrust legislation, the enactment of a federal income tax, support for labor rights, and increased federal domestic aid for education and agriculture. He was the first truly progressive president and he arguably turned the Democratic Party into a progressive political party. On the other hand, he was a horrible racist, clamped down on domestic opposition by signing into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and even though he deserves credit for helping end World War I, botched the peace by failing to get the Senate to bring the United States into the League of Nations. Wilson fought the war in order to hubristically make the “world safe for democracy” and remove America from its isolationist slumber. Instead he pushed the country to look more inward in the years after he left office and by going along with the European Allies thirst for vengeance at Versailles laid the groundwork for World War II.

What about LBJ? On the one hand he helped to expand the modern welfare state, with reforms like Medicare and Medicaid, and passed major civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act. From a legislative accomplishment standpoint only FDR is a more consequential president. But he also escalated the war in Vietnam, destroyed the liberal consensus, and sent the Democratic Party into a more than two-decade death spiral. And all that played a huge role in undermining his domestic accomplishments.

Then there is Richard Nixon. He went to China, established detente with the Soviets, and signed into law a host of progressive priorities including the creation of the EPA and OSHA. But he also aided and abetted genocide in Bangladesh, got the US out of Vietnam but unnecessarily killed a lot of people in the process, and, oh yeah, plotted a criminal conspiracy from the Oval Office and was forced to resign his office. There’s a reason he’s lodged near the bottom of presidential rankings.

This is why it’s so hard to rank presidents. Even the good ones have major marks against them (though some are more major than others!)

The Good, Not Bad, and Ok

This is the squishy area of presidential rankings. It is where one generally finds Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Madison, James Monroe, William McKinley, and Ulysses S. Grant who has been steadily moving up presidential lists. I don’t have a strong enough view to weigh in on most of these, except to say Jackson seems overrated.

Bill Clinton was a pretty solid president but he just didn’t have that many significant accomplishments. In general, his foreign policy efforts look better in retrospect and he did preside over a strong economy, but getting impeached for having an affair with an intern knocks you down a few rungs. George H.W. Bush deserves praise for his excellent handling of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the unification of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his leadership of the Gulf War, and even his stewardship of the Arab-Israeli peace process. On domestic policy, his record is less stellar. He did sign into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, but his accomplishments were meager. He was also a nasty campaigner who coarsened the political discourse (though in ways that will seem quaint today) and he only served one term, in part because of his mishandling of the economy. John F. Kennedy died too young, but any president who avoided nuclear holocaust is a good president in my book. I am convinced that Kennedy would have been a great president and his high ranking is a tribute to the millions of Americans who he inspired. His assassination remains an enduring tragedy.

The Rest

Here’s the dirty little secret of presidential history: the majority of presidents have been mediocre and inconsequential. From Van Buren to FDR, you’ve got a few notable ones (Lincoln, TR, Wilson, Polk, maybe Grant) but most were largely forgettable. In modern times there are fewer such presidents - Carter and Ford - but that’s because the role of the president had so dramatically changed. But even in the post-war era there are just a handful of true standouts because in a messy, complicated, more intensely partisan country where domestic accomplishments increasingly depend almost exclusively on control of Congress, it’s hard to be a great president. In many respects, the presidency is overrated. Presidents have a great deal of influence on foreign policy, which is why the imperial presidency has largely coincided with American becoming a great international power. On domestic policy, they are relatively weak. Congress calls the shots on that. For example, I think Clinton or Obama could both have been among the best, if they had working majorities in Congress. But they only did for a very short time. Being president is tough. Being a great president is next to impossible. Most have simply been adequate - a fact best captured by, not surprisingly, the Simpsons.