War and presidential greatness.

• Author: Henderson, David R.
• Position: Report

War, he observed, made it easier for a president to achieve greatness. --Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., commenting on a conversation he had had with President John F. Kennedy (1)

If there is not war, you don't get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now. --Theodore Roosevelt, complaining in 1910 after leaving office (2)

What makes U.S. presidents great? Although ways of judging presidential greatness vary from person to person, one thing that is likely to affect many people's judgments of presidents, especially presidents who died decades or even more than a century ago, is historians' views. So let us narrow the question: How do historians rank presidents? Although the criteria differ among historians, we investigate here the patterns in their rankings, seeking to provide a plausible explanation for them. We investigate specifically the connection between presidents' greatness rankings and the intensity of the wars those presidents carried on. Using multiple-regression analysis, we compare the effect of war intensity with other explanations that previous researchers in the field have advanced. One measure of a war's intensity that is specific to the United States is the number of Americans killed in the war. We examine in this article the relationship between historians' rankings of U.S. presidents and the proportion of Americans killed in wars in which the U.S. government engaged during the various presidents' times in office. We find a strong positive correlation between the number of Americans killed during a president's time in office and the president's greatness rating.

The Literature on Presidential Greatness

In 1948, historian Arthur M. Schlesingcr asked fifty-five historians to rate U.S. presidents as Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, or Failure. The standard given to the raters was each president's performance as president, not his performance or achievements before or after being president. Since then, many other surveys of historians on presidential greatness have been conducted. (3) Discussing the surveys taken before 1997, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. writes: "Of national crises, war is the most fateful, and all the top ten save Jefferson were involved in war either before or during their presidencies. As Robert Higgs has noted, five (Polk, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman) were commanders-in-chief when the republic was at war, and four more (Washington, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eisenhower) made pre-presidential reputations on the battlefield" (1997, 187). Higgs, whose work Schlesinger cites, states bluntly: "The lesson seems obvious. Any president who craves a high place in the annals of history should hasten to thrust the American people into an orgy of death and destruction" (2004, 56).

These statements suggest a promising approach to estimating the variables that affect president ratings: ascertain whether these ratings are correlated with war. We certainly have grounds for hypothesizing that not only correlation but also causation exists. Historians and other scholars who study presidents tend to pay more attention to presidents who have been involved in wars, and the more important the war, the more attention these scholars pay, all other things being equal,. Of course, paying attention is not the same as paying positive attention, but historians do tend to regard a president as greater if, all other things being equal, he has made "tough" decisions. Such decisions often involve getting the United States into costly wars or, if other countries' governments have initiated wars, failing to avoid them.

Consider, for example, the following statement by John O. McGinnis: "To be sure, Coolidge was not a truly great president, like Washington or Lincoln. While he successfully handled small foreign policy crises in China, Mexico, and Nicaragua without saddling the United States with permanent and expensive commitments, he was never tested by a substantial foreign war" (2004, 149). McGinnis is a law professor, not a historian, but the tone of these remarks is similar to that of many historians. He judges Coolidge negatively because he was never "tested" by substantial foreign wars rather than positively for having kept the United States out of major wars. McGinnis and many historians commit the mistake highlighted by nineteenth-century economic journalist Fredric Bastiat (i 848) of not paying attention to "what is not seen." In this case, the unseen is the wars that various presidents might have injected the United States into but did not. Or, to employ an analogy, when a president avoids war, this avoidance is like the clue in the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze": the clue is that the dog did not bark. It takes a clever man such as Holmes to realize that the dog's not barking is the important thing. It takes an historian different from the usual ones to realize that a president's decisions that helped to prevent a war also evince leadership and greatness.

Zachary Karabell, Chester Alan Arthur's biographer, writes: "Presidents who govern during a time of calm and prosperity often suffer the barbs of history. They are remembered as bland" (2004, 142, qtd. in Eland 2009, 7). To the extent this claim is true, it implies that one way to avoid "suffer[ing] the barbs of history" is to inject the United States into war or not to avoid war when other countries' governments take hostile actions.

Much of the literature on presidents' greatness is psychological in nature. In this literature, researchers tend to focus on presidents' personal characteristics. The leading research psychologist in this area is Dean Keith Simonton (1991). His model has...