Today America goes to the polls to elect a new president--and the media continues to report a tight race.

If history tells us anything, America's commander and chiefs of the past have all performed very differently once in office. Some have been total heroes, having saved the nation from total disaster. While others, well, have been a disaster themselves. 

So on this day as the nation decides who will lead the free world, we have decided to take a look back at some of America's presidents. For example, who would be considered the best of the best or the worst of the worst?

For your reading pleasure, we have combined here in one post a compilation of articles from TNI political editor Robert Merry. Below, he gives us his picks, written over the last several years, for the best, the worst, the most mediocre and 5 most underrated of all the presidents. Let the debate begin...

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The Greatest President: Lincoln

Whenever academics and scholars tickle their fancy by putting forth yet another poll of historians on presidential rankings, there is little doubt about which president will top the list—Abraham Lincoln. In the numerous such polls executed since Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the genre in 1948 for Life magazine, Lincoln has come out as number one in nearly all of them. Of the seven surveys I pulled together for my 2012 book on the subject, Where They Stand, the Illinois rail-splitter was judged the nation’s greatest president in six of them. In the seventh (a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll), George Washington came out on top, with Lincoln in second place. (Franklin Roosevelt almost always occupies the number three slot.)

As the nation prepares to observe Memorial Day, it might be a fitting time to ponder just what constituted Lincoln’s greatness. One could begin with his personal qualities and note the encomium of the political historian Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford. Lincoln, he wrote in 1966, was “undeniably a great man…in spirit, in humility, in humanity, in magnanimity, in patience, in Christlike charity, in capacity for growth, in political instincts, in holding together a discordant political following, in interpreting and leading public opinion and in seizing with bulldog grip the essential idea of preserving the Union.” What Bailey seems to be saying is that Lincoln was a political genius who also happened to be saintly.

That is an easy case to make. But presidential greatness ultimately is a matter of presidential performance. Greatness is as greatness does. And it might be worth speculating on what likely would have happened to Lincoln’s standing in history if he had lost his 1864 reelection bid.  

He almost did. In fact, that's precisely what he expected just ten weeks before the election. He wrote a note to himself, sealed it in an envelope, and stashed it away for reference only after the ballot results were known. He wrote: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to cooperate with the president-elect so as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his selection on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”  These are words of near desperation.

The central reason for Lincoln’s beleaguered state was the war—four long years of the worst carnage the country had ever seen (or likely would ever see again), with little apparent prospect for victory.

Then things turned around with stunning force. On September 3, official Washington got word that General Ulysses Grant had taken Atlanta—the first significant Union victory of the campaign year. A month later General Philip Sheridan took complete control of the Shenandoah Valley, the Confederacy’s leading supply source. Then the South’s last ramming vessel was sunk, securing the economic strangulation imposed by the North’s naval blockade.

Immediately, Lincoln’s political standing soared. “It is now certain that Mr. Lincoln will be reelected,” declared Salmon P. Chase, a leader of the Republican Radicals who had nearly given up on Lincoln as he headed into the campaign home stretch. In their 1990 book, The 13 Keys to the Presidency, Allan J. Lichtman and Ken DeCell argue that the 1864 election hinged utterly on those Union military victories. Without them, Lincoln likely would have been defeated and the Union would have been dissolved, at least for a time; with them, he scored a 55 percent electoral triumph, the Union was preserved, and slavery was eradicated.

Thus it could be argued that an element of Lincoln’s greatness was the tenacity he brought to bear in attempting to get the nation through its crisis. Yet that doesn’t capture significance of the Lincoln vision that emerged in the late 1850s as the slavery issue engulfed the nation. Democrats had sought to calm the passions of the slavery issue through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but it had precisely the opposite effect. Lincoln not only saw this, but crafted a rhetorical concept of both the crisis and a pathway for getting through it. “Under the operation of that [Kansas-Nebraska] policy,” he declared, “that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.” Then, drawing from Scripture, he spoke one of his most famous lines: “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’” He explained: “I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

This was breathtaking candor in the midst of conflicting sentiments so powerful and emotional that a clear-headed vision of the situation was rendered nearly impossible. It reflected a crucial element of his civic genius—his understanding of the power of political rhetoric that stings and disarms with its stark realism. His depiction of the situation facing America as crisis descended upon it, coupled with the moral sensibility he brought to the slavery issue, positioned him to squeeze out his 1860 presidential victory with less than 40 percent of the popular vote against three other candidates.

What renders this all the more remarkable is that Lincoln possessed few other attributes likely to propel him into the White House. He had served merely a single term in Congress nearly 15 years before his 1860 presidential run. He had never operated upon the national stage of politics in any significant way. (His fiery antiwar speeches during the Mexican War are often cited by biographers as a serious foray into the national consciousness, but this overstates the case and ignores the fact that his irreverent assault on a sitting president contributed to his becoming a one-term congressman.) Though a deft lawyer with a solid regional reputation, he had never gained national notice through his legal endeavors. He was not particularly prepossessing in appearance. He simply captured the essence of the country’s enveloping crisis with greater clarity and vision than any of his opponents.

Then, through a crisis-filled first term, he persisted in his pursuit of his vision in the face of what seemed like devastating odds—in the process revealing a remarkable political adroitness and capacity for deft maneuvering of events and people. He exercised his war powers with such force as to become almost a dictator—but without ever taking on a dictatorial mien or seeking to embed those powers institutionally in the American polity following the war crisis.

More than any other president, Lincoln left behind a nation transformed. All the great presidents set the country upon a new course at a time when the old direction no longer inspired confidence among citizens and voters. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt—all fulfilled this necessity of presidential greatness; all defined the country anew by fashioning fresh political idioms that pulled together new political coalitions, thus allowing the country to move forward into new eras. But the Lincoln transformation was the most profound and most long-lasting. Thus does he get that top slot in nearly every poll of academics with the temerity to rate the presidents. Thus also does he continue to occupy a special locus in the hearts and minds of his countrymen down to our day.

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The Worst: Woodrow Wilson 

If you wanted to identify, with confidence, the very worst president in American history, how would you go about it? One approach would be to consult the various academic polls on presidential rankings that have been conducted from time to time since Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered this particular survey scholarship in 1948. Bad idea.

Most of those surveys identify Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the worst ever. This is ridiculous. Harding presided over very robust economic times. Not only that, but he inherited a devastating economic recession when he was elected in 1920 and quickly turned bad times into good times, including a 14 percent GDP growth rate in 1922. Labor and racial unrest declined markedly during his watch. He led the country into no troublesome wars.

There was, of course, the Teapot Dome scandal that implicated major figures in his administration, but there was never any evidence that the president himself participated in any venality. As Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, put it, “Harding wasn’t a bad man. He was just a slob.”

The academic surveys also consistently place near the bottom James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania. Now here’s a man who truly lacked character and watched helplessly as his country descended into the worst crisis of its history. He stepped into the presidency with a blatant lie to the American people. In his inaugural address, he promised he would accept whatever judgment the Supreme Court rendered in the looming Dred Scott case. What he didn’t tell the American people was that he already knew what that judgment was going to be (gleaned through highly inappropriate conversations with justices). This is political cynicism of the rankest sort.

But Buchanan’s failed presidency points to what may be a pertinent distinction in assessing presidential failure. Buchanan was crushed by events that proved too powerful for his own weak leadership. And so the country moved inexorably into one of the worst crises in its history. But Buchanan didn’t create the crisis; he merely was too wispy and vacillating to get control of it and thus lead the nation to some kind of resolution. It took his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to do that.

That illustrates the difference between failure of omission and failure of commission—the difference between presidents who couldn’t handle gathering crises and presidents who actually created the crises.

In the realm of commission failure, three presidents come to mind—Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Bear in mind here that nearly all failed presidents have their defenders, who argue, sometimes with elaborate rationales, that the perceived failure wasn’t really failure or that it wasn’t really the fault of this particular president. We see this in stark reality in our own time, with the ongoing debates about the presidency of the second Bush, reflected in the reaction to senator Rand Paul’s recent suggestion that GOP hawks, with their incessant calls for U.S. intrusion into the lands of Islam, contributed to the rise of the violent radicalism of the Islamic State.

The prevailing view of Bush is that his invasion of Iraq, the greatest example in American history of what is known as “preventive war,” proved to be one of the most colossal foreign policy blunders in all of American history, if not actually the greatest. According to this view, Bush destabilized the Middle East, essentially lit it on fire and fostered the resultant rise of the Islamic State and the deepening sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the region. Where this all leads, nobody can tell, but clearly it is going to play out, with devastating consequences, for a long time to come.

But of course there are those who deny that Bush created all this chaos. No, they say, Bush actually had Iraq under control and it was his hapless successor, Barack Obama, who let it all fall apart again by not maintaining a U.S. military force in the country. This is the minority view, embraced tenaciously by many people with a need to gloss over their own complicity in the mess.

There is little doubt that history eventually will fix upon the majority view—that Bush unleashed the surge of chaos, bloodshed and misery that now has the region in its grip. As Princeton’s Sean Wilentz wrote in 2006, when Bush still sat in the Oval Office, “Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.” And bear in mind that Bush also presided over the emergence of one of the most devastating financial crises in the country’s history.

Then there’s Nixon, whose Watergate transgressions thrust the nation into one of its most harrowing constitutional crises. There are some who argue that Nixon’s transgressions weren’t actually as egregious as many believe, particularly when viewed carefully in the context of the maneuverings and manipulations of many of his people, some of them conducted behind the president’s back. There may be some truth in this. But in the end it doesn’t matter. He was president and must take responsibility for the culture and atmosphere he created in the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building. If his people were running around and breaking the law, he must bear responsibility, whatever his knowledge or complicity. And we know definitively that Nixon himself set the tone in his inner circle—a tone so dark, defensive and menacing that wrongdoing was almost the inevitable result. Also, there can be no dispute that the president himself stepped over the line on numerous occasions.

Which brings us to Woodrow Wilson, whose failures of commission probably had the most dire consequences of any U.S. president. His great flaw was his sanctimonious nature, more stark and distilled than that of any other president, even John Quincy Adams (who was no piker in the sanctimony department). He thought he always knew best, because he thought he knew more than anybody else. Combine that with a powerful humanitarian sensibility, and you get a president who wants to change the world for the betterment of mankind. Watch out for such leaders.

Even during his first term, with war raging in Europe, he sought to get the United States involved as a neutral mediator, fostering a peace agreement to break the tragic stalemate that had the nations of Europe in its grip. When that effort was rebuffed, he ran for reelection by hailing himself as the man who kept the United States out of the war.

But, immediately upon entering his second term, he sought to get his country into the war by manipulating neutrality policy. While proclaiming U.S. neutrality, he favored Britain by observing the British blockade of Germany (imposed, said a young Winston Churchill, to starve Germans, including German infants, into submission) and by allowing armed British merchant ships entry to U.S. ports, which in turn fostered a flow of U.S. munitions to the Allied powers. At the same time, Wilson declared that Germany would be held to a “strict accountability” for any American loss of life or property from Germany’s submarine attacks. This policy applied, said Wilson, even if affected Americans traveling or working on British or French ships. He declined to curtail what he considered Americans’ “right” to travel on vessels tied to France or Britain (but not Germany).

Wilson was warned, most notably by his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, that these lopsided policies inevitably would pull America into the war. When he ignored those warnings, Bryan resigned from the Wilson cabinet on a stand of principle.

As Bryan predicted, America did get pulled into the conflict, and it certainly appears that that was Wilson’s intention all along. Then three things happened.

First, Wilson conducted the war in ways that devastated the home front. Prices shot up into double digits, and then came a potent economic recession that lasted three years. He accepted the suppression of civil liberties by his notorious attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. His government nationalized many private industries, including the telegraph, telephone and railroad industries, along with the distribution of coal. Race riots erupted in numerous cities that claimed nearly 150 lives in two years.

Second, America’s entry into the war broke the stalemate, allowing the Allied powers to impose upon Germany devastating armistice terms. Third, when Wilson went to the Versailles peace conference bent on bringing to bear his humanitarian outlook and making the world safe for democracy, he promptly got outmaneuvered by the canny nationalist leaders of Britain and France, whose agenda had nothing to do with Wilson’s dreamy notions about a harmonious world born of his humanitarian vision.

The result was a humiliation of Germany that rendered another war nearly inevitable and created in that country a sump of civic resentment and venom that would poison its politics for a generation. We can’t say with certainty that Adolf Hitler wouldn’t have emerged in Germany if the stalemate of World War I had been settled through negotiations rather than diktat. But we can say that the world spawned by Wilson’s naïve war policies certainly created a political climate in Germany that paved the way for Hitler.

That’s a big load for Wilson to carry through history, though the academic polls consistently rank him quite favorably. That’s probably because most academics are progressives who like Wilson for his own progressive sentiments. But the two Roosevelts also were progressives and left the country better off when they left office. Such a case can’t be made for Wilson, who left the country in shambles. The 1920 Republican victories in the presidential and congressional elections constituted of the greatest political repudiations in U.S. history. Thus, Wilson’s failures of commission render him, arguably, the worst president in American history.

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The Most Mediocre: Grover Cleveland 

We have discussed in these spaces the greatest presidents of the U.S. heritage. We’ve discussed the worst. We’ve discussed the greatest and most hapless war presidents. And we have sought to identify—recognizing this is entirely a matter of opinion—the president who left in his wake the greatest mess of civic havoc (Woodrow Wilson).

Is it fair, though, for us to ignore the most mediocre president in U.S. history, the man who belongs precisely at the very midpoint of the presidential rankings? After all, this intermittent concentration on presidential greatness and presidential incompetence leaves out any consideration for those middling gentlemen who were neither great nor bad, just mediocre. After all, as the late senator Roman Hruska once said in defending a Supreme Court nominee who was utterly unqualified for the job, “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?...We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozas.”

Too true, Senator. And we can’t have all Washingtons, Lincolns and Roosevelts, either. The world doesn’t work that way, and, anyway, not every era demands such presidential greatness. And so now, in the spirit of Roman Hruska, I venture forth with my candidate for the country’s most solidly mediocre president—Grover Cleveland.

Most Americans don’t know much about Grover Cleveland. Not their fault, really. He isn’t a man who gets much attention in school these days. Generally, there are just two things that most people know about the man from Buffalo—first, that he was the only president who served two non-consecutive terms; and, second, that he fathered a child out of wedlock.

Leaving aside his personal life—as did the voters in 1884, when he was first elected—we can say that Cleveland deserves some credit for being twice elected to the presidency. That’s no mean feat. Of the forty-four presidents, only ten managed to get elected twice (four times for FDR). (Two others, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, succeeded to the presidency upon the deaths of their predecessors and then were elected in their own right).

But, while this twice-elected record represents a significant political accomplishment, it must be noted that Cleveland’s Democratic Party lost the White House after each of his two terms. The first time, he was on the ballot for reelection and was upended by Benjamin Harrison. Then, after he defeated Harrison and reclaimed the White House four years later, his party felt that his second-term record didn’t justify retaining him on the Democratic ticket.

Hence, Cleveland is the only president in U.S. history who was a one-term president on two separate occasions—the only two-time one-term president.

The first defeat, in 1888, was a near thing. He actually outpolled Harrison in the popular vote but lost the presidency in the Electoral College. During Cleveland’s first administration, the economy expanded nicely. He signed the Interstate Commerce Act, designed to rein in abusive railroad trusts, although he had done little to promote the law and didn’t identify himself with it. He also curtailed abuses in the expansive Civil War pension and disability program.

But, on the other side of the ledger, his administration lacked energy. It brought forth no major domestic initiatives and no foreign policy actions of note. Cleveland’s effort to reduce tariff rates, a hallmark Democratic position, faltered in Congress. Worse, his tenure was beset by extensive labor protests that led to a significant loss of life and extensive property damage. In 1886 some 600,000 workers participated in more than a thousand strikes and lockouts, double the number from the previous year. In May 1886, during a series of nationwide strikes and rallies, Chicago police fired on protesting workers, killing several. The next day a retaliatory bomb killed eight police officers and injured 67. A police counteroffensive led to several deaths among protesters. As labor unrest continued through Cleveland’s tenure, with intermittent deaths, many Americans felt the country was coming unhinged, and some feared a dark radical conspiracy.

The result was that Cleveland lost his native New York, a state that had given him his margin of victory four years earlier. Now it sealed his fate as a one-termer.

After staying in the game and getting elected again in 1892, largely because of Harrison’s failings, Cleveland faltered seriously in his second term. Indeed, while his first term could be called a mild success, his second term was a clear failure, characterized by a persistent economic downturn that unleashed extensive bank failures, corporate bankruptcies, and devastation in the farm sector. Cleveland seemed inert in the face of the crisis and proved incapable of acting effectively when domestic tranquility was shattered with further massive labor strikes and governmental efforts to quell street protests.

There are two indices for assessing presidential performance—the judgment of the voters; and the judgment of historians and other academics in the various surveys conducted over the years aimed at ranking the presidents. Both offer interesting assessments of this solid but undistinguished man.

The voters had it about right. In almost retaining him in office in 1888 (and giving him a popular-vote win), the electorate gave him a pretty good performance review—though just insufficient for rehire. But, in assessing his second term, even his party concluded he had to go. He had no standing with the American people.

The academic surveys suggest that Cleveland’s standing in history has declined over the years. In the first poll, conducted by Harvard’s Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. in 1948, Cleveland actually was ranked eighth. Perhaps he was riding high because the noted historian Allan Nevins had just produced a hagiographic biography of the man, entitled Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. It garnered a Pulitzer Prize for Nevins.

In subsequent surveys, Cleveland’s standing declined, fluctuating generally between eleventh and seventeenth.

Of course, I would put him at 22nd—halfway between the top and the bottom. In other words, mediocre in the spirit of that sage of mediocrity, Mr. Hruska. But it might be instructive—or at least interesting—to note just which presidents ended up at the precise midpoint in the various academic surveys. In the seven I used for my 2012 study on the presidency, Where They Stand, the midpoint presidents are: Martin Van Buren (twice), William McKinley (twice), John Quincy Adams, Bill Clinton, and William Howard Taft.

I disagree. My vote for the champion of mediocrity goes to Grover Cleveland.    

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The 5 Most Underrated: 

Poor Warren G. Harding. The country’s twenty-ninth president just doesn’t seem to get any respect from historians or citizens. He’s viewed as a kind of political laughing stock. People roll their eyes at the spectacle of this man carrying on a fifteen-year affair with his best friend’s wife. They snicker at the even more ludicrous spectacle of his White House liaison with a starry-eyed young woman named Nan Britton, thirty-one years his junior. They pursued their sexual trysts in a White House coat closet.

He is excoriated for the famous Teapot Dome scandal involving his attorney general, interior secretary and postmaster general, venal characters who brought into the government a collection of freebooters and scoundrels bent on grabbing whatever booty they could. Their exploits, once exposed shortly after Harding died in office, cast a pall over the nation and placed a blot upon the reputation of the inattentive executive under whose nose they operated. It doesn’t seem to matter that he was never involved in any scandalous behavior himself.

The result is that poor Harding is generally considered the absolutely worst president in American history. In the seven academic polls on presidential rankings that were cited in my book on this subject, Where They Stand, he was listed dead last in six of them. In the seventh, he was second from the bottom.

And yet, leaving aside Teapot Dome, nothing bad happened to the country during his stewardship. He didn’t get the nation into any intractable wars. He quickly pulled the country out of the steep recession he inherited from his predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. He then presided over a robust economy—including real Gross Domestic Product growth in 1922 of nearly 14 percent, one of the best years of economic expansion in the country’s history. Civic unrest, substantial during Wilson’s time, declined significantly during Harding’s tenure.       

Aside from the scandals, then, it seems the worst that can be said about him is that the American people elected him to nullify Wilsonism, and he dutifully complied with that mandate.      

Thus, an argument can be made that Harding is one of the country’s most underrated presidents. There is a large gap between his actual performance (middling, to be sure, but not disastrous) and his standing in history and within the national consciousness.

There are other such gaps involving other presidents whose survey rankings and standing in the minds of Americans seem inconsistent with what they actually accomplished. Herewith, then, a very subjective assessment of five presidents I consider the most underrated chief executives of our heritage. I emphasize the subjective nature of the assessment because any exercise in presidential assessment necessarily is about as far as we can get from an exact science. Still, it’s fun and perhaps even worthwhile as an exercise in historical analysis.

Consider, next, William McKinley, described by conservative commentator Fred Barnes as “America’s most underrated president.” A solid case can be made in behalf of Barnes’s assessment. In the surveys of historians, he has been ranked generally between fourteenth and eighteenth (with the exception of an eleventh ranking in one poll in 1982). But consider his accomplishments: He managed to get nearly all his priority legislation through Congress, including his signature high-tariff bill in the first months of his administration. He presided over robust economic growth throughout his nearly five years in the White House (before succumbing to an assassin’s bullet in September 1901). And he managed to end the agitation for the free coinage of silver, which had driven the country throughout his first presidential campaign.

Most important, consider this: When he was elected in 1896, America was not an empire, though it had pursued expansionist policies on the North American continent. Within two years of his tenure, America was an empire, with far-flung possessions that included Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and numerous other islands of strategic significance to the country’s burgeoning deep-water navy. Cuba became a U.S. protectorate. All this was a product of the Spanish-American War, in which the United States destroyed two Spanish naval fleets and kicked that declining country out of the Caribbean and Asia. During McKinley’s presidency, America also took a significant step toward the pursuit of global markets.

Clearly, the McKinley presidency was truly a consequential one, and it seems curious that this president hasn’t ranked higher in the surveys or that his name doesn’t resonate with more force in the country’s historical consciousness.

Then there is Ulysses S. Grant, the country’s eighteenth president. In the first six of the seven academic surveys noted above, he was ranked as follows: second from bottom; second from bottom; fifth from bottom; fifth from bottom; second from bottom; sixth from bottom; and finally twelfth from bottom (or twenty-ninth out of forty presidents). And yet Grant was elected twice and was revered by the voters in his lifetime. His first term was characterized by a powerful wave of economic growth born of massive railroad development and industrial expansion. It isn’t surprising that the American people would reelect him in 1872 with a whopping 55.6 percent of the popular vote and about four-fifths of the electoral ballots.

What’s more, in recent years his standing has improved due to his stance on Reconstruction following the Civil War. He accepted congressional dominance over that policy area and joined the so-called Radical Republicans in imposing harsh measures upon the South designed to protect freed blacks from brutal treatment from disgruntled whites. Until recently, Grant’s willingness to cede presidential authority was decried as a political lapse by academics who extolled strong presidential leadership. But now many academics argue that he was right on the merits and got the policies he desired. He also scored a major foreign policy success with the Treaty of Washington, designed to settle U.S. claims arising from British shipbuilders providing warships to the Confederacy during the war. The claims were referred to an arbitration board, which called for a British apology and payment of $15.5 million to the U.S. Treasury. Aside from the outcome, highly favorable to the United States, the settlement established a precedent for resolution of international disputes through arbitration and created a climate for a new level of friendship between the United States and Britain.

But Grant, like Harding, didn’t pay attention when his collector of internal revenue in St. Louis conspired with his own private secretary to evade taxes on distilleries. The result was that the U.S. treasury was defrauded out of millions of dollars. Not only did the episode reveal a dangerously inattentive management style, but the president’s efforts to protect his assistant during his legal travail also raised questions about his judgment. Beyond that, Grant’s second term was beset by a serious economic downturn.

All in all, it was a checkered eight-year performance. But there seems to have been enough accomplishment here to justify a ranking well above what he has received over the decades. As Princeton’s Sean Wilentz has written, “Though much of the public and even some historians haven’t heard the news, the vindication of Ulysses S. Grant is well under way. I expect that before too long Grant will be returned to the standing he deserves…”

We must not exclude from this list Calvin Coolidge, who presided over peace, prosperity and domestic tranquility for six years after inheriting the presidency at the death of Harding. He also effectively cleaned up the scandal bequeathed to him by Harding. It isn’t surprising that Coolidge was elected in his own right in 1924 and that his full-term record secured White House retention for Republicans when Herbert Hoover ran to succeed him in 1928. The voters were happy with his performance, notwithstanding his quiet but iron-willed devotion to limited government. That governmental passivity no doubt contributed to his lackluster rankings in the academic surveys on the presidency, since most academics tend to be liberal, particularly on the question of presidential activism. In the seven polls I have cited, he gets an average ranking of twenty-sixth.

But Ronald Reagan never slighted Coolidge in his own assessment of the presidents. Reagan liked him so much that he had a portrait of Coolidge placed on the wall of the White House Cabinet Room. For Reagan, the question wasn’t one of presidential style but rather of performance. And he viewed Coolidge as a president who performed.

Some have argued that Coolidge’s economic policies, by fostering massive corporate investment that ultimately outstripped consumers’ spending power and fueled an unsustainable stock market boom, created an imbalance in the national economy that led inevitably to the Great Depression. But the argument that Coolidge bears responsibility for that economic cataclysm is more theoretical than provable, and hence he seems to be an underrated president.

Underrated presidents don’t always remain underrated. When Dwight Eisenhower was first rated following his eight-year presidency, the academics placed him twenty-second on a roster of thirty-one presidents. This clearly was a product of academic prejudice against presidents who didn’t seek to govern with the heavy hand of a Franklin Roosevelt or a Woodrow Wilson. Typical was the comment of presidential historian Clinton Rossitor: “He will be remembered, I fear, as the unadventurous president who held on one term too long in the new age of adventure.” But in subsequent polls Ike’s ranking rose steadily, until he hovered between eighth and eleventh. This was accompanied by new studies of his leadership style revealing that his apparent passivity often masked a determination that served him well in turning his agenda into accomplishment.

The same seems to be happening with Reagan. In 1996, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. conducted a poll for The New York Times Magazine in which Reagan was ranked twenty-fifth among presidents. This placed Reagan just above Chester A. Arthur, a non-entity presidential caretaker, and below such mediocre presidents as George Herbert Walker Bush, Rutherford Hayes, Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, and Grover Cleveland. This was inexplicable (except as liberal bias) for a president who transformed the economic debate in America and presided over tremendous economic growth (once he led the country out of the recession induced to quell an inflationary spiral that threatened to flip the national economy out of control); who subdued the mysterious specter of “stagflation” and brought unemployment to the lowest level in fourteen years; and who set in motion policies and strategies that led ultimately to the West’s stirring triumph over Soviet communism. This liberal bias also was evident in an extensive survey conducted from 1988 to 1990 by the team of Robert K. Murray and Tim H. Blessing. The results placed Reagan in the Below Average category, between Zachary Taylor and John Tyler, two presidents whose accomplishments were modest at best. The liberal animus against Reagan was fairly dripping from the comments of these academics.

If these survey results had significantly influenced popular thinking about Reagan, then he would be languishing as one of the country’s most underrated presidents. But the popular view of Reagan is much more positive than the academic rendering, and the Gipper is seeing his standing improve even among academics. In the latest poll, conducted by The Wall Street Journal (which sought to balance its respondent pool so it contained equal numbers of liberals, conservatives and moderates), Reagan rose all the way to sixth. Polls of voters also place Reagan at a high station.

But Reagan’s standing in history and in the country’s popular consciousness has yet to find its natural level. When it does, we almost certainly will find him at a standing far above those first academic polls, which continue to exercise a drag on his standing. Like Eisenhower, who also rose from his initial station, he will reside with those presidents who aren’t among the greatest (generally, Lincoln, Washington and Franklin Roosevelt) but above the Above Average category. Thus, he likely will be seen in the Near Great clique. Until he gets there on a consistent basis, and with those early survey rankings weighing his down, we can include him among the underrated presidents.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/UpstateNYer.