The great white house rating game.

• Author: Hamby, Alonzo L.
• Position: 'Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians' - Book review

Robert W. Merry, Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 320 pp., $28.00.

No one can accuse Robert Merry of thinking small. On top of a long and distinguished career in high-level Washington journalism (including the editorship of this magazine), he is the author of a fine biography of Joseph and Stewart Alsop, a cautionary tract on "missionary zeal" in American foreign policy, and a well-received volume on James K. Polk and the war with Mexico. Borrowing from the title of the latter book, one might describe him as a writer "of vast designs." His latest work is a relatively slender book about a big topic: the way in which we view and remember our presidents--or, as he calls it, "The Great White House Rating Game."

Serious attempts at comprehensive presidential rankings are relatively recent and have tended to reflect the views of noted scholars, prominent journalists and eminent biographers. The first such survey was published by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. in 1948; the second also was conducted by Schlesinger in 1962. Both had fifty-five respondents. Over the next half century, several others appeared. Merry showcases efforts by the historian David Porter in 1981, journalist Steve Neal for the Chicago Tribune in 1982, historians Robert Murray and Tim Blessing in 1982, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1996 and the Wall Street Journal in 2005. These were hardly the only such efforts. Neal did another in 1995 for the Chicago Sun-Times, and C-SVAN conducted notable surveys in 2000 and 2009. (I admit with neither pride nor chagrin to having participated in perhaps a half dozen of these exercises.) I wish Merry had included at least one of the C-SPAN polls in his reference list. These were based on ten relatively distinct, if occasionally vague, criteria. Nonetheless, his sample is sufficiently representative of the change and continuity that characterize the ratings game.

Just who gets asked? The answer seems to be mostly academics who have written on presidents or the office of the presidency. C-SPAN drew on scholars who had participated in the network's remarkable American Presidency series. They likely were about as liberal and Democratic as the academics in Merry's sample. Most of the professors asked to participate in the ratings game have been intellectual products of either the New Deal or the Great Society and members of a rather cozy liberal, academic establishment. A few contrarians aside, they tended to rank according to their political preferences. Two liberal Democratic politicos--Governor Mario Cuomo and Senator Paul Simon--participated in the Schlesinger Jr. effort.

The years 1981-1982 constitute a midpoint of sorts for the evaluations Merry selected; three were conducted during this brief period. At that point, thirty-eight men had preceded Ronald Reagan in the presidency. However, William Henry Harrison and James A. Garfield were not ranked because of the brevity of their tenures in office. Those who grade on a curve might assume bottom and top quartiles of eight presidents and a broad center of twenty. The 1982 Murray-Blessing poll, with its 846 participants, might be presumed to have more validity than the 1981 Porter endeavor (forty-one participants) or the 1982 Neal/Chicago Tribune survey (forty-nine participants), but the variations were inconsequential. In all three polls, one finds the same eight names at the top--Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson and Harry Truman--with only slight discrepancies in precise order. The bottom eight are also consistent-Millard Fillmore, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Pierce, Richard Nixon, James Buchanan and Warren Harding. This congruence seemed to reveal a wide consensus, or at least similarity of impressions, among students and observers of the presidency.

Thirty years later, little had changed. The 2009 C-SPAN poll takes Wilson and Jackson out of the top eight and replaces them with John E Kennedy (sixth) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (eighth). The top three--Lincoln, Washington and FDR--remain undisturbed, with Theodore Roosevelt not far behind them. The bottom eight display a bit more turnover. Hoover escapes only because C-SVAN ranked and gave a very low slot to William Henry Harrison. Grant, Coolidge and Nixon make it to a low-average rank.

If nothing else, the game proves that scholars and political junkies have opinions--or suppositions--about our various presidents and that these can change somewhat with time. But what are the evaluations based on?

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy declined an invitation to participate in the second Schlesinger Sr. survey. He expressed his reasoning to Schlesinger Jr., who was serving as one of his White House aides: "How the hell can you tell? Only the president himself can know what his real pressures and real alternatives are. If you don't know that, how can you judge performance?" Some "great" presidents, Kennedy believed, were acclaimed for decisions to which there was no realistic alternative. Others were beneficiaries of timing. Lincoln presided over victory in the Civil War, then was spared by death from having to manage the impossible problems of Reconstruction. Some were just plain overrated, Kennedy thought. Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy had been a botch from...