Another handicap for Eisenhower’s public perception is that neither party has much interest in boosting his legacy. Dems don’t because he was a Republican. Republicans don’t because they consider him a RINO.
Yeah, but you only get a little credit for impetus - having the idea and talking it up is much easier than actually carrying it out, and I don’t know if JFK could have ever succeeded in doing so.
JFK’s mystique and image was greatly enhanced by his assassination. Without that, he might have just half the reputation he does today.
Reagan - sure he had accomplishments, but flaws were often papered-over.
Lincoln might be someone whose flaws don’t get enough criticism that they deserve.
FDR - same, economic meddling, SCOTUS packing attempt, and the Japanese-American internment.
Reagan by a mile. He did NOT end the Cold War.
Truth be told, the Cold War is not over. The Russians are now waging it on a different front- using the internet and social media to throw chaos into the west.
The booming recovery that people give Reagan credit for was quite overdue and would have happened under a second term of Carter. Reagan instilled the hatred of government that persists to this day and has metastasized into the racism (passed off as nationalism) today.
Yeppers to this. Anyone can be an ‘idea man.’ Figuring out how to make it happen, getting people to buy into it - that’s the heavy lifting. (I’ve been on both sides of this one, sometimes on the same project. :))
Agreed. But Kennedy did make an important and perhaps critical step-he (somewhat unwillingly) set the stage for significant progress. LBJ did the heavy lifting in congress, but Kennedy got the northern liberals energized enough to join the people who actually created and manned the civil rights movement-the African Americans themselves. Without the blacks making their voices heard, nothing would have happened. LBJ pushed it through the congress-that would not have happened without him, but he would not have had anything to push if the civil rights movement hadn’t gotten Kennedy on board and given the movement an establishment face.
But I think Kennedy’s level of support would have peaked at him being in favor of black civil rights. I don’t believe he would have ever gone past the line where conservative Southern Democrats threatened a mutiny. Kennedy would have stuck with the status quo and argued he was working for incremental change.
Johnson was different. He wanted significant change to happen during his Presidency. Johnson didn’t want to merely hold office; he always defined success as getting things done - especially when it involved overcoming opposition. And Johnson, surprisingly, felt a much more personal connection to civil rights than Kennedy did. Johnson always saw himself as the underdog that had been held down by others. So he was capable of identifying with black people in a way that Kennedy didn’t.
Plus Johnson had the image of being a Southern conservative; other Southern conservatives weren’t as suspicious of him as they would have been of Kennedy. They gave Johnson leeway Kennedy never would have gotten because they mistakenly believed in the end that Johnson would side with them.
It’s worth noting that at the time, early in Clinton’s second term, I told anyone who would listen that I believed Clinton was saving his “political capital,” intentionally not “spending” it on advancing any agenda of change, for the express purpose of positioning his wife Hillary for a future run. Presidents sometimes tend to be risk-averse and careful not to demand too much from the electorate during their first term; Clinton remained like that through his entire time in office. “What is he saving it for?” I thought, and my conclusion was that the Clintons collectively were still planning to run again.
I think Lincoln is vastly overrated. Many cite him as the greatest President of all time, but I don’t know how one can actually read about his Presidency and think he was doing anything more than fumbling, politicking during a war, and outright jailing his political enemies. He was better at his job than Jefferson Davis, and given that his entire Presidency was about one big issue, that’s all he needed to succeed. Now don’t get me wrong, Lincoln deserves LOVE for what he did, but greatness should be more than just being the guy who messed up less than his opponent and should hopefully involve doing more than one thing, although his Presidency being cut short was not his fault.
Andrew Jackson was very overrated, but we seem to have moved on from that guy in my lifetime.
As for some of the other guys mentioned here:
-
Coolidge- not GREAT, but a very good President who did exactly what the public wanted at the time. A lot of Coolidge’s drop in the rankings is due to an ideological war against the 1920s by progressives, and so every President from that period must be portrayed as not seeing how things should be. Fine. Harding and Hoover were terrible. Leave Calvin alone.
-
Clinton- a truly great President, probably the most talented man we’ve ever elected. He didn’t have the opportunity to do anything great, but like Coolidge he’s a textbook case of a President doing exactly what he was elected to do and doing it better than anyone expected. But historians like wars and major ideological accomplishments. Clinton and Coolidge are sorry to disappoint you with their prosperous, happy Presidencies.
-
Reagan- Reagan’s in a bit of a different category. Totally unqualified to be President, although none of us knew the true extent of his limitations at the time, and yet he was the perfect man for the time. He made America great again, restored our confidence, and saw opportunities in the changes of the Soviet Union that his hardline Cold Warrior advisors did not. Only Nixon could go to China, and I think only Reagan could have cozied up to Gorby the way he did. Mondale or Hart would have been crucified and too scared of their own shadows to sit down with Gorby, or they would have given away the store and thrown a lifeline to the Communists.
-
Wilson-Wilson was a great idea man, but also a pretty awful man and not very good at his job. Wilson was pretty much what you’d expect electing an academic, something which European countries love to do and get similar results. But historians love big ideas, so Wilson gets a lot of love. Plus he won a war, which always is good for a 10-20 point boost in the rankings.
Historian rankings in general are about as reliable as Baseball or better yet, Rock n Roll Hall of Fame votes. The JFK rankings prove that. They have stars in their eyes for some guys and an ideological interest in tearing down others.
Clinton reluctantly did welfare reform and nothing else. He had the luck to be elected right before and upturn in the business cycle and when the internet bubble temporarily goosed tax revenue, but had no real accomplishments.
Clinton’s “a textbook case of a President doing exactly what he was elected to do and doing it better than anyone expected”?
One of the big things he was elected to do was to pass some form of universal health care. He failed spectacularly, and his party lost control of Congress in the fallout.
Which was much worse than anyone would have expected when he was elected.
The stock market crashed just seven months after Coolidge left office.
Maybe there was no connection between Coolidge’s loose hand on the tiller, and the crash. But even with just a sketchy knowledge about America in the 1920s, it’s not the way I’d bet.
UHC was part of his platform, but he was elected with a campaign focused like a laser beam on the economy.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans at the time understood why the stock market needed to be regulated, or how to do so.
However, Coolidge probably would have managed the Depression better than Hoover did.
OK, but all that tells me is that even though the iceberg was approaching, nobody could see the iceberg, and wouldn’t have known how to steer away from it anyway.
That doesn’t mean that the person at the helm was a great captain. It means nobody in that situation could be a great captain.
Why, what would he have done differently? What reason is there to believe he’d have handled it differently?
It was a pretty big part of his platform. Advocacy for universal health care was a big part of Harris Wofford’s special election win in November 1991, and Clinton picked up on that in a big way.
Not that that was separate from “it’s the economy, stupid.” Health care costs were a big deal for a lot of people even then.
The run FDR --> HST --> DDE --> JFK --> LBJ is an amazing run of five consecutive great or near-great Presidents; can we all agree on that? I’ll happily stipulate that JFK is the least worthy of the five, as long as y’all concede that JFK was clearly “above average” :— with his inspirational Moon program(*it has come to my attention that some of you did not click links provided), Peace Corps, New Frontier, RFK, etc.
The only comparable run of great Presidents AFAIK is the very first run, GeoWash --> JAda --> TJef --> JMad --> JMon --> JQA --> AJac
Then I’ll fall back to my other argument, that Presidents being judged for legislative accomplishments is vastly overrated. Congress should be judged on that. Presidents manage the executive branch and conduct foreign policy.
LBJ was the least worthy. Horrible President whose legislative accomplishments were either inevitable(Medicare) or ill considered(War on Poverty). His war management is the worst of any President ever, including George W. Bush. Even Donald freakin’ Trump knows enough to not micromanage wars.
What I do think you can say about both sets of Presidents is that they understood the stakes of the time they lived in and managed things very well, although I do think there are exceptions. I’d rate John Adams as poor. We’ve never come closer to losing our democracy than during Adams’ Presidency. We also nearly got into a very ill considered war with the French. But I’d rate all but Adams highly in that group. The latter group understood the threat of totalitarianism and America’s role in a changing world. I’d actually say all the Cold War Presidents had a good understanding of that generational challenge, but the ones who managed it in the first half deserve more credit since a lot less was known. Those early Presidents in the Cold War years were in charge at a time when there was actually a question in elite circles about whether democracy was superior to Communism or fascism. Even among those who were fully in the democracy camp, there was fear that maybe the Communists would out compete us in those early decades. It would have been easy for a Henry Wallace type to get elected looking to appease rather than confront.
Adams was a great founding father. I would put him ahead of Jefferson and on par with Washington only behind Ben Franklin. But yes he was a poor President indeed.
I think Truman mismanaged Stalin very greatly and this nearly balances out the Marshall plan which was 100% brilliant. Truman a good president but not a great one. Ike was great or at least least very good but JFK & Johnson were not.