The Presidents

A Note to Readers on Style

Each of the following chapters is based on a single transcribed C-SPAN interview with a nationally recognized presidential historian or biographer. To achieve continuity for readers, questions were removed from the transcript, as were nonsalient portions, and the sequence of material has been frequently reordered. Double spacing between paragraphs indicates when text has been moved from another section of the interview.

Bracketed text generally indicates information that was conveyed during the questions posed during the interview and its inclusion was deemed important to telling the story. We also frequently added full names of historical figures and dates in brackets to enhance historical accuracy.

In the Complete List of Featured Books, we list the publication information for each of our highlighted authors. A website has been created to accompany this book, where you will find every chapter’s interview in its entirety, so you can listen to each historian for yourself. You will also find many additional resources about each president, allowing you to continue your informational journey. The web address is www.c-span.org/thepresidents.

About the Rankings

Chapters in this book have been organized by each president’s 2017 rating in C-SPAN’s widely recognized Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. In 2017, ninety-one presidential historians and professional observers of the presidency rated our leaders on ten qualities of presidential leadership established in 2000 by a team of presidential historians—Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Dr. Edna Greene Medford, Richard Norton Smith, and Purdue University political scientist and Executive Director of the C-SPAN Archives Dr. Robert X. Browning. Prior surveys using these same criteria were conducted with historians in 2000 and 2009. Contemporary presidents are not included in the survey until they leave office; President Obama received his first rating in 2017 and President Trump is not yet ranked. The president’s overall ranking leads the chapter along with a summary of his results.

The historians who have participated in our surveys and the authors featured in this book overlap in only a few cases, making for interesting comparisons between the historians’ rankings and the observations of the individual biographers.

The ten qualities of presidential leadership identified by our consulting historians are:

The topline results for all three surveys are included in Appendix I of this book. Complete results and additional contextual information are available at www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2017.

Our Special Contributors

These three nationally recognized presidential historians have long contributed their scholarship to C-SPAN projects. For this book, their contributions include an essay, a featured chapter on a president, and participation in a podcast that formed the basis for our chapter on President Donald J. Trump. All three also served as advisers for C-SPAN’s three Historians Surveys of Presidential Leadership.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, a best-selling author of numerous books, CNN’s Presidential Historian, contributing editor to Vanity Fair, 2017 Grammy Award winner for his work with jazz at Lincoln Center for “Presidential Suite” (for Best Large Jazz Ensemble), and is the first-ever New York Historical Society’s Presidential Scholar-in-Residence. Dr. Brinkley has a BA in American history from The Ohio State University, an MA in American history, and a PhD in military and diplomatic history from Georgetown University. Since 1993, Dr. Brinkley has been involved in numerous C-SPAN history projects, including its American Presidents and American Writers biography series.

EDNA GREENE MEDFORD is Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of history at Howard University, where she has taught for over thirty years. Dr. Medford received her undergraduate degree in secondary education with a history emphasis from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), an MA in US history from the University of Illinois, and a PhD in history from the University of Maryland. She has authored, coauthored, or edited four books and numerous scholarly articles on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. She serves on several national advisory boards and is a frequent contributor to historical documentaries and programs. Since 1994, Dr. Medford has been involved with several C-SPAN history projects, including its Lincoln-Douglas Debates and American Presidents series.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH is a historian and author specializing in US presidents and other political figures. He holds a degree in government from Harvard University. Between 1987 and 2001, Mr. Smith has served as the Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and the Gerald Ford Museum and Library. In October 2003, he was appointed Founding Director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. He has written biographies on Herbert Hoover, George Washington, and Nelson Rockefeller and is currently working on a comprehensive biography of Gerald Ford. Since 1993, Mr. Smith has been involved with many C-SPAN history projects, and from 2006 to 2014, he served as C-SPAN’s in-house historian, with a major role in series such as The Contenders and First Ladies.

The Magnificent Lion

It’s Not Your Grandfather’s Presidency

Richard Norton Smith

As the then-director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, I once received a letter from my counterpart at the James Buchanan Foundation chastising me for some none-too-generous comments I had made about his namesake on a C-SPAN broadcast. I should be careful, he suggested, to whom I applied the label of presidential failure. I sympathized with his position, if not his argument. As it happens, he has some distinguished company. The late, great Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald liked to tell of his 1962 visit to the Kennedy White House, in the course of which JFK voiced unhappiness over the glib methodology employed by some historians in rating his predecessors as “Below Average” or even “Failure.”

“No one has a right to grade a president,” said Kennedy, “—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.”

Whoever defined history as argument without end might have had in mind that great academic parlor game called “Ranking the Presidents.” The reputations of some chief executives are literally carved in stone, as evidenced by the C-SPAN Historians Surveys that appear elsewhere in these pages. Most, however, are subject to endless second guessing, less because of new facts coming to light than to fresh ways of interpreting facts long established. Case in point—in recent years, no one in the presidential fraternity has fallen more steeply in popular and scholarly esteem than Andrew Jackson. Traditionally numbered among the “near-greats,” not far below the holy trinity of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, Jackson is the only president to have an age bear his name. Enshrined in public memory as the original populist, Old Hickory was seen as a fiery enemy of entrenched privilege as represented by the monopolistic Bank of the United States, and an indomitable nationalist whose defiance of South Carolina nullifiers set the precedent for Lincoln’s breathtaking assertion of presidential powers a generation later.

Today, by contrast, the seventh president is widely stigmatized as a slave owner, an Indian killer, and an economic illiterate. Ninety years after his image first appeared on the twenty-dollar bill, many Americans want to replace Jackson’s stern military visage with the face of a very different kind of hero, Harriet Tubman. (The same fate nearly visited upon Alexander Hamilton and the sawbuck until the runaway success of a Broadway musical setting his story to hip-hop rhythm made Hamilton as fashionable as Jackson was passé.) What happened to bring about such a dramatic change of attitude? In a word, the 1960s, a transforming decade in whose aftermath historians discovered vast numbers of Americans—women, African Americans, Native Americans, among others—whose stories had gone missing from its history books. Their subsequent inclusion in the national narrative is not without irony. For the more truly representative American society becomes, the more imperfect Jacksonian democracy appears.

Revisionism does not end at the Hermitage. Consider Jackson’s Tennessee protégé James K. Polk. Dubbed “Young Hickory” by supporters, in his single term as president, Polk added more territory to the American nation—1.2 million square miles—than any chief executive before or since. While the threat of war and some skillful diplomacy were sufficient to obtain title to much of today’s Pacific Northwest, Mexico was less easily persuaded to part with modern-day Texas, California, and the Southwest. Polk’s conduct of the Mexican-American War, once celebrated as proof positive of America’s Manifest Destiny to occupy the continent, struck many in the Vietnam generation as a shameful example of imperial conquest.

Offsetting the decline of Jackson and Polk is the improbable ascent of other chief executives long relegated to the historical basement. Recent scholarship has dramatically raised Americans’ view of Ulysses S. Grant as the last American president for eighty years willing to deploy federal troops to protect black Americans in their most basic rights. A much smaller group of iconoclasts credits Warren Harding with pursuing naval disarmament and the first federal budget act. As for “poor James Buchanan,” his mishandling of Bloody Kansas, his suborning of the Supreme Court over the Dred Scott case, and his fatally limited construction of presidential authority at a moment when the nation’s existence hung in the balance—well, revisionism has its limits.

Theodore Roosevelt divided presidents into two categories: the Lincoln type and the Buchanan type. This was as prophetic as it was self-serving. The twentieth century would be dominated by TR and his heirs in both parties, activist chief executives who ushered the United States on to the world stage, entrusted a private economy to public planners, and belatedly committed Uncle Sam to the fight for democracy at home as well as abroad. What began with the first Roosevelt was reinforced by the second. First the Great War and the Great Depression, then World War II and the Cold War centralized power in Washington and personalized it as never before in the presidential office.

No one captured this trend better than Clinton Rossiter, the premier political scientist of his age. “The President is not a Gulliver immobilized by ten thousand tiny cords, nor even a Prometheus chained to a rock of frustration,” he declared in 1951. “He is, rather, a kind of magnificent lion who can roam widely and do great deeds so long as he does not try to break loose from his broad reservation.” Rossiter’s ode to the heroic presidency was composed under the spell of both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman—assertive leaders boldly testing the limits of an office enlarged to meet the twin crises of economic depression and global war.

Presidential government arguably peaked in the decades from 1960 to the 1980s, when television brought the people closer than ever to the man in the Oval Office, even as it magnified the reach of his bully pulpit advocacy from Birmingham and Selma to the jungles of Vietnam and the collapsible Berlin Wall. Yet the lifejacket of one generation can become the straitjacket of the next. Ronald Reagan was the last president who could command an audience of sixty or seventy million for an Oval Office address with minimal competition from cable networks, and none from the internet. Three decades after Reagan’s counterrevolution called into question the liberal consensus forged by his boyhood hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Reagan and his policies continue to evoke intense loyalty and no less fervent criticism. (Eighty years on, the same holds true for FDR and his New Deal.) Such controversy is the tribute posterity pays to the handful of presidential change agents who remake the political weather. Harry Truman said as much when he defined a statesman as a politician who has been dead for twenty years.

Everyone knows about the sign on Truman’s desk asserting, “The buck stops here.” Much less well known is the sign that Dwight Eisenhower kept on his desk… translated from Latin, it read, “Gently in manner, strongly in deed.” Academic critics, accustomed to swashbuckling Roosevelts and their only slightly less energetic imitators, dismissed the old soldier as a grandfatherly duffer smiling his way through a bland decade. The first scholarly poll conducted after he left the White House placed Ike at number 22, just below Chester A. Arthur. Then, in 1966, the first of his White House papers became available for researchers to ponder. Soon students of the presidency were competing in their praise of what Princeton’s Fred Greenstein calls Eisenhower’s “hidden hand” leadership. Half a century later, historians are still peeking behind his artfully conceived defenses. According to the latest C-SPAN survey, most like what they see. As of 2017, Ike was ranked in 5th place, sandwiched between TR and Harry Truman.