Rating Updating
NOVAK, ROBERT D.
Rating Updating Some of our greatest presidents were not so great. BY ROBERT D. NOVAK S hould Andrew Jackson, founding icon of the Democratic party, be ranked 27th out of 39 rated...
...Felzenberg drops George Washington one point each for “vision” and “economic policy,” giving him 28 points for second place...
...Felzenberg attempts to remedy this by inventing a numerical rating system, one through fi ve, in each of six categories: “character,” “vision,” “competence,” “economic policy,” “preserving and extending liberty,” and “defense, national security, and foreign policy...
...The 1962 survey has Dwight D. Eisenhower ranked 22nd or “Average,” defi ned by Schlesinger Sr...
...Grant is a “Failure” and Coolidge “Below Average...
...The Felzenberg rating system also gives 23 points to the maligned Grant, contending that he was trashed by reformers who neglect to praise his reversal of Andrew Johnson’s racist policies...
...in his Pulitzer Prizewinning The Age of Jackson...
...FDR’s performance on human rights for American blacks, Japanese Americans, and Hitler’s Jewish refugees was abysmal, his high-tax economic policy unnecessarily extended the Great Depression, his handling of intelligence about Japan led to the Pearl Harbor disaster, he betrayed Poland at Yalta, and this book deplores “the inattention and lack of concern Roosevelt paid to warnings that Stalin ordered agents to infi ltrate the highest reaches of the American government...
...BY ROBERT D. NOVAK S hould Andrew Jackson, founding icon of the Democratic party, be ranked 27th out of 39 rated presidents—below both the discredited philanderer Warren G. Harding and forgotten spoilsman Chester Arthur...
...Felzenberg lifts Coolidge to 12th from 29th in the historians, but I would make him a top ten president by raising the very low marks in “defense, national security and foreign policy...
...I would drop each into the middle range of presidents at best...
...He asked 55 colleagues to evaluate and rank presidents, and published the results in Life magazine...
...Grant was the last president to send federal troops south to enforce the law for African Americans until Eisenhower did so in 1957...
...who was rated eighth and “Near Great” in the Schlesinger surveys, is 20th on Felzenberg’s list...
...While he is given a fi ve out of fi ve in “competence,” he gets only a one in “character” and a two in “preserving and extending liberty” because of his massive expansion of American territory through the Mexican War...
...Republican Felzenberg tried to rate the presidents objectively, which is more than can be said of the Democratic historians, whom he accuses of “bias...
...The Schlesinger surveys ranked presidents in numerical order (omitting, as does Felzenberg, William Henry Harrison and James Garfi eld, who each served less than a year) and slipped them into categories of “Great,” “Near Great,” “High Average,” “Below Average,” and “Failure...
...Alvin S. Felzenberg is not just some guy seated at the end of the bar, mouthing off about what he thinks he has learned from the History Channel and C-SPAN3...
...Felzenberg does not mention that, or Truman’s deplorable performance as commander in chief during the last two years of the Korean War...
...Similarly, Truman sloughed off communications intelligence about Soviet espionage...
...Should two military heroes typically downgraded in presidential ratings— Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant—be tied for seventh with the much-praised Harry Truman and fondly remembered John F. Kennedy, one notch below universally celebrated Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Jackson and Wilson, top-ten “Near Great” presidents in the historians’ view, are rated 27th and 14th respectively, illustrating that this fi ve-point rating system is really just as subjective as the Schlesinger method and cannot be a political version of RBIs or batting averages...
...From the start, conservatives complained that the Schlesingers were dealing from a stacked deck of liberal historians recruited as presidential judges...
...Jackson was a racist, an unapologetic champion of slavery and brutal persecutor of Indians who always expressed pride in his forced relocation of Native Americans beyond the Mississippi River...
...But I will, using the rating system of The Leaders We Deserved: Three for “character,” two for “vision,” one for “competence,” four for “economic policy,” one for “preserving and extending liberty,” and two for “defense, national security and foreign policy...
...He gives Theodore Roosevelt and Reagan 25 points each, to tie them for third place...
...Nearly all Americans who claim even a passing interest in their nation’s history would answer with a resounding denial...
...as “mediocre...
...24 ranking, making him “Average,” along with George H.W...
...If he had not died in his second year as president, Felzenberg writes, “Taylor might have been able to draw upon his personal standing to bring to the fore suffi cient numbers of Southern moderates to hold the ‘fi re-eaters’ at bay...
...TR considered Jefferson one of the worst presidents, and the insult surely would have been returned by Jefferson if he had known TR...
...That made him “Above Average,” alongside the fl awed presidencies of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson...
...The historians did rank TR as “Near Great,” but Felzenberg lifted Reagan from mediocre status in the last Schlesinger poll...
...Felzenberg undervalues Jefferson’s bold purchase of the Louisiana Territory, his opposition to the noxious Alien and Sedition Acts (approved and enforced by John Adams), and his suspicion of an overreaching federal government...
...So let the game begin,” Felzenberg tells readers as he begins rating presidents, indicating he does not take his new rating as seriously as academic historians regard their Olympian pronouncements...
...He has been a state and federal government offi cial (most recently spokesman for the 9/11 Commission), congressional staffer, Republican political activist, biographer, essayist, and commentator, with a doctorate in politics from Princeton...
...The historians forgave the failings of Democratic household gods Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman to rank each in the top 10 as “Near Great” presidents...
...What Felzenberg calls “the presidential ratings game” was started in 1948 by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., professor of history at Harvard for 30 years...
...We’ll have to wait for the paperback edition to see what Al Felzenberg thinks...
...I disagree with Felzenberg keeping both Franklin Roosevelt and Truman in the historians’ top-ten stratosphere...
...Unfortunately, he defers a verdict on the unfi nished tenure of George W. Bush...
...Thus, his point system, with a one-two fi nish for Abe and George, duplicates the historians’ judgment...
...On his way to the ratings, Felzenberg delivers a rollicking 377-page survey of American history, replete with surprises...
...Felzenberg drops FDR to sixth place, contending he “fares less well when his character, experimentation, and human rights practices are considered...
...That’s 15 points, which would tie him for 22nd place with William Howard Taft and Clinton in this book’s tally—not very good, but predictably better than Schlesinger’s historians would give him...
...But he is not a historian, and The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t) is, in essence, a rebuttal to academic historians who, until now, have dominated the ratings racket, under the direction of the Arthur M. Schlesingers, p?re and fi ls...
...Bush and Bill Clinton...
...That triggered more than a dozen similar surveys, including another by Schlesinger (“Our Presidents: A Rating by 75 Historians”) in the New York Times Magazine of July 29, 1962...
...It all depends on what the rater thinks is important...
...Should the widely memorialized Thomas Jefferson (one of four presidents carved out of Mount Rushmore) be in 14th place—tied with his unpopular old rival John Adams and the even less popular son, John Quincy Adams, and actually below much abused-conservative Republicans William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge...
...He implies nobody needs a Ph.D...
...He contends that Taylor “might well have killed secessionist agitation in the cradle...
...Race is the overriding reason James K. Polk, Jackson’s prot?g...
...He gives each president from one to fi ve points in each category...
...Yet these are carefully reached conclusions, defended in detail by this book, and derived from Al Felzenberg’s new rating system that is intended to replace unsubstantiated declarations from the halls of ivy...
...The panel selected by Schlesinger Jr., himself a JFK White House aide, included just one conservative (Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama), numerous former aides to Democratic offi ceholders, and two Democratic politicians who were historians only because they wrote about history (Mario Cuomo of New York and Paul Simon of Illinois...
...Felzenberg sees Polk’s policies as crafted to benefi t slaveholders: “Polk’s vision for his country proved harmful over time, igniting the fuse that would set off the Civil War...
...I would reverse the rating system’s evaluation of Jefferson (tied for 14th) and Theodore Roosevelt (tied for third with Reagan), opposites who are forever joined on Mount Rushmore...
...Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist in Washington and the author, most recently, of The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington...
...Roosevelt’s legacy includes gunboat diplomacy, the fi rst federal police force, interference with markets, and advocacy of big government...
...The historians rated Franklin Roosevelt as “Great,” along with Lincoln and Washington, third in 1962 and tied with Washington for second in 1996...
...Not surprisingly, the Schlesinger polls downgrade Republicans, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt...
...They also largely agree about who should rank lowest: Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon...
...Roosevelt’s fall, however, is modest compared with what Felzenberg does to other Democratic icons...
...It is as if arguments about the all-time ranking of baseball players were not guided by statistics (batting average, number of homers and runs batted in, slugging percentage, etc...
...Felzenberg’s racial focus also explains his unexpectedly high ratings— especially 23 points for Zachary Taylor, considered mediocre by the historians, to tie him for seventh place...
...in history (or in politics) to play this game, and I—with just a bachelor’s degree in English—will give it a try...
...Wilson, at heart, was a southern segregationist who fought black rights advocates and sowed the seeds of World War II when he “used his infl uence at the Paris Peace Conference to block a Japaneseinitiated amendment on racial equality...
...Paradoxically, conservative Republican Felzenberg evaluates through the lens of race as a defi ning issue for the country, but one the liberal academic historians ignore...
...That included the infamous Trail of Tears, where “about a quarter of the Cherokee nation perished enroute”—ignored by Schlesinger Jr...
...Only Lincoln is six-for-six with a perfect fi ve for 30 points...
...But Ronald Reagan took Eisenhower’s place in the lower reaches with a No...
...No objective standard can be divined in the historians’ rankings except, perhaps, which past president would be booed and which one would be cheered at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner of the Democratic party...
...But their agreement does not extend much farther...
...The subsequent 34 years, when his presidential papers were opened, were good for Ike on the left, because he climbed to ninth place in 1996...
...His more famous son, fellow historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., followed on December 15, 1996, in the Times Magazine with his own survey of 32 historians...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 42
