Rating the presidents: purpose, criteria, consequences

Note: The following commentary is taken from a roundtable discussion at the Hofstra symposium about the purpose and consequences of presidential ratings, and the criteria used in those evaluations.

James MacGregor Burns:

The fact that so many of us are meeting here today attests to the attention that presidential evaluation receives, not only from the academy but from journalists and even many of the reading public. Ratings of presidents by presidential scholars have become a small industry. This makes it all the more important that we stand back and look critically at what we're doing. I'm not about to criticize comparative presidential ranking so much as to suggest four anomalies that raise serious questions about the endeavor.

The first is the sheer maleness of the rating game. It consists of mainly male scholars evaluating invariably male presidents. As a presidential scholar, a woman, said to me, "It's all so nineteenth century," to which I replied, "It's all so twentieth century." Women, she believes, have been socialized to be less hierarchical and more collaborative than men. Of course, we must not stereotype women politicians. The "Iron Lady," Margaret Thatcher, was one of Britain's strongest leaders since Churchill. But in America, note the criticism, for example, of both Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton that they are too forthright and perhaps a bit assertive, while this is expected of male politicians. Our presidents, in short, are tested by so-called male qualities. Well, of course, we can't solve this problem until we elect a woman president, and I can hardly wait.

A second anomaly involves the presidency as an institution. To rate leaders, we must see them in their institutional settings, as we would leaders in the judiciary, or corporations, or universities. But we're not much agreed on what the presidency is as an institution. Presidential scholars and other analysts see the White House through highly dissimilar lenses. Unlike the blind men who touched different parts of the elephant, these analysts see the whole beast, but they're different beasts. This is reflected in the various titles, or emphases, in scholars' writings about the presidency, books called The Rhetorical Presidency, The Imperial Presidency, The Unfinished Presidency, etc. Naturally, since we disagree on how we see the presidency, we disagree on the key questions that should be asked of this institution. Is a presidency too strong or too weak? Should it fit comfortably into our fragmented checks-and-balances system, or be more independent, more autonomous? Should the presidency be a place of inspiring vision, a center of moral leadership, or should it be a seat of pragmatism, moving cautiously, incrementally, step by step, dealing in practical ways with problems as they come along?

This problem escalates when we evaluate individual presidents as leaders, my third anomaly. The presidential rating game, of course, does not evaluate presidents separately; it's a ranking. They're evaluated comparatively. And here, again, analysts disagree hugely on the qualities they want in a president.

Collectively, we want everything: a strong leader, a consensus builder, a good manager, a policy expert, a great communicator, an ethical model, a visionary, a negotiator. Fred Greenstein, in his excellent recent book, The Presidential Difference, has added two arresting qualities: cognitive style and emotional intelligence. Typically, though, we don't rank these qualities on the basis of priorities, in terms of what do we really want most in a presidency. And, of course, we disagree on those qualities and probably on the rankings. Hence, we rate different presidents by different standards. Then what happens to comparability, which lies at the heart of ranking?

One solution to this problem might be to judge presidents not by their behavior--how they act--but by their values--what they believe. The problem here is that this opens up another can of worms: What values do we test presidents by? Liberty, equality, justice, community, happiness? And how should we rank order such values? And how even to define values? There's a vast confusion here.

Some scholars, such as William Bennett, see values as virtues, like piety, or, for example, sobriety, chastity, frugality, and other such qualities. Others define values as ethical standards: honesty, accountability, responsibility, especially in dealing with one another in the business of politics. Still others see values as the kind of principles that define a great nation, such as Franklin Roosevelt's four freedoms.

But here, again, can we expect presidents to live up to all three of these definitions of values? If not, which are the most important? Thus, FDR violated values as virtues--he was unfaithful to his wife--and he sometimes violated values as ethics in his deceptive and even Machiavellian dealings with friend and foe. But for some of us, he was magnificent in articulating and carrying out his lofty moral values, like the four freedoms. So, as we study Roosevelt, we would play down the failings and play up the great achievements, which are the ones we feel would last in history. But others disagree with that, and that's the whole point.

So how do we compare presidents when our values are fuzzy and lack priorities, and when we mix up virtue, ethics, and values? My fourth anomaly poses the toughest problem of all. It stems from the old enigma or paradox in history in the social sciences, and particularly in leadership analysis--namely, the interaction of agency and situation, the interaction of would-be leaders and the situational opportunities and obstacles that confront them.

This problem often comes to presidential scholars as a question from a student or an audience. Can an American president be great without a huge crisis, such as war or depression, that he can exploit politically? Even if presidents' personal qualities, such as courage or character, were stable and similar from one administration to another, do not the ever-changing situations or circumstances make it most difficult to compare the leadership of presidents? Thus, FDR had both a depression and a war to propel him to greatness, while Theodore Roosevelt had neither. Oh, how he would have loved a little war during his presidency, just a little war, like the one in Cuba that built his reputation.

But sometimes agency, in the form of leadership, trumps situation. TR didn't have a crisis, but he was a kind of a walking crisis, in himself, because of his sheer drive, forcefulness, and, above all, his conviction. On this score alone perhaps he deserves a slightly higher rating than most scholars give him. But a far more common situation facing presidents, as scholars know so well, are intractable circumstances that perhaps no president could overcome. How do we compare the border-state problems facing Lincoln, the Republican Senate confronting Wilson, the Vietnam War confounding Lyndon Johnson? And as situations vary so much, and presidential responses to situations vary so much, how, again, do we compare presidents in terms of greatness?

So, in view of the above four problems, and others, why do we continue to play the game of ranking presidents? First, because everybody does it, especially the voters at election time. And at least scholars bring empirical knowledge, historical experience, and scholarly perspective and disinterest to this endeavor, as well as awareness of the kinds of shortcomings of the rating game that I've mentioned.

Secondly, we do it because it's fun. And to join the fun, I'm now going to reverse direction and offer my own ratings of the qualities necessary to presidential greatness. They are character, competence, courage, conviction, commitment, in rising order of importance. So at least I'm meeting my own demand for prioritizing, though I expect most of you would differ in that particular series of qualities.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.:

My father invented the game of rating the presidents, and his first ranking came in Life magazine in November 1948, based on responses from 55 historians. He repeated the experiment in the New York Times Magazine of July 1962, this on the basis of replies from 75 historians, political scientists, and occasional people who were neither professional historians nor political scientists but had occasion to understand the problems of the presidency.

The rating game caught on, I think, because it explored scholarly values in the measurement of presidential performance, tested various theories, various criteria, of presidential performance, and also because, as Jim Bums reminded us, it was great fun as a parlor game. My father proposed a simple method of dividing presidents into five categories: Great, Near-Great, Average, Below-Average, and Failure.

As to how presidential performance should be judged, my father, instead of proposing specific criteria, specific yardsticks, left it to scholars to offer their own overall judgments. Some subsequent scholars have regarded such overall judgments as unduly subjective and impressionistic. Also, as political scientists joined the game, with their faith in typologies and models, that too introduced an effort to try to formalize and make objective the judgment of presidential performance. Would not ranking polls be more objective, more scientific, if presidents were given numerical scores against stated criteria?

Scholars, therefore, tried to make the judgments more precise, more objective, by breaking them down to a group of categories, but as Jim Burns has reminded us, these categories are themselves subjective in the sense that they represent the view of the historian as to the hierarchy of values which presidents should be judged--such categories as success in the attaining of objectives, the relationship of those objectives to the general welfare, personal trustworthiness and integrity, impact on history, and so on.

Fred Greenstein, in his interesting new book, The Presidential Difference, proposes six criteria: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, emotional intelligence. Tom Bailey of Stanford, who semi jocularly regarded the Schlesinger polls as a Harvard, Eastern-elitist Democratic Party plot, came up with no less than 43 yardsticks. The University of Illinois in Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times recently developed a survey on the American presidency, asking respondents to rank each president in each category on a one-to-five scale. And the categories are political leadership, foreign policy, domestic policy, character, and impact on history.

I found I could not comfortably rate presidents in this manner. I am a holist rather than a mechanist when it comes to judgment of presidential performance. The notion that presidential greatness or presidential failure is a sum of designated categories seems to me misleading. The breakdown into a set of standards, a set of criteria, does not allow for the accommodation of presidents to the character of the problems that confronted them, nor for the values that the presidents embody.

This is related, of course, to one of Jim Burns' anomalies. And I think it's also related to an occupational difference between historians and political scientists. Historians tend to focus on the uniqueness of things; political scientists try to abstract from the welter of concrete circumstances certain generalizations of larger applicability. So I think the formalist approach is more congenial to political scientists; the more specific approach--and that is the overall judgment rather than a breakdown into categories--is more congenial to historians. And, for that matter, it should be added that the use of standards, the use of the mechanical rather than the holistic approach, does not make much difference in the end to the results. Even Tom Bailey's complex set of standards, with his 43 yardsticks, ended up with much the same ranking as the Schlesinger polls.

Over the years, it had been suggested that I replicate my father's polls, but the difficulty of making overall judgments about the presidents after Eisenhower stumped me. In the cases of Kennedy and Ford, because of the brevity of their time in office; in the cases of LBJ, Nixon, and Bush, because their foreign policy and domestic policy records were so discordant. Scholars might be inclined, for example, to rate LBJ high in domestic affairs but a failure in foreign affairs, and might be inclined to do the reverse for Nixon and Bush.

Then, in 1996, the Times Magazine persuaded me to do a poll, in which only 32 scholars out of a much longer list participated. However. I doubt that the longer list would have produced a much different result.

I would like to add a point about failures. Most polls inevitably end up with Grant and Harding as the two conspicuous failures among American presidents. I wonder whether Grant and Harding really deserve this. They're stigmatized because of the scandal and corruption that disgraced their administrations, but they were careless and negligent rather than villainous; their sin was excessive loyalty to crooked friends. Grant, for example, had not a bad record on civil rights; Harding commuted the prison sentence of Eugene Victor Debs, the Socialist leader whom the Wilson administration had sent to prison.

Scandal and corruption are indeed indefensible, but they may injure the general welfare less than misconceived or errant public policies. I think it is reasonable to suggest that James Buchanan. Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover. and Richard Nixon damaged the republic a good deal more than did the hapless Grant and the feckless Harding. They are, it seems to me, the true failures in the White House.

Consequences of the ranking? I can report President Kennedy's reaction. In 1962, my father included in the list of historians and political scientists who were to be polled the historian who had written Profiles in Courage and A Nation of Immigrants. JFK started to fill out my father's questionnaire, and then changed his mind. As he wrote my father, "A year ago I would have responded with confidence, but now I am not so sure. After being in the office for a year, I feel that a good deal more study is required to make the judgment sufficiently informed. There is a tendency to mark the obvious names. I would like to subject those not so well known to a long scrutiny after I have left this office."

President Kennedy said to me, "How the hell can you tell? Only the president himself knows what his real pressures and real alternatives are. If you don't know that, how can you judge performance?" Some of his greatest predecessors, President Kennedy went on, were given credit for doing things when they could have done nothing else. Only a detailed inquiry could disclose what difference a president made by his individual contribution. "War," Kennedy observed, "made it easier for presidents to achieve greatness. But would Lincoln have been judged so great a president if he had to face the almost-insoluble questions of Reconstruction?"

For all this skepticism, JFK read the results of my father's 1962 poll with fascination. He was greatly pleased that Truman came out as a "Near-Great," nor was he displeased that Eisenhower came in 22nd, near the bottom of the "Averages." Later, jokingly (or half-jokingly), he blamed Eisenhower's vigorous entry into the 1962 congressional campaign on the historians. He said to me, "It's all your father's poll. Ike has been going along for years basking in the glow of applause that he has always had. Then he saw the poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history, way below Truman, even below Hoover. Now he's mad to save his reputation." This is the only evidence I know to suggest that scholars' ratings of presidents have much practical impact.

Of course, there remains the impalpable power of example--what Harold Bloom of Yale calls "the anxiety of influence." Presidents in the present may draw inspiration from the top ranking presidents of the past. When confronted by hard decisions, it might be appropriate for presidents to ask, "What would Lincoln do? What would FDR do?" As Emerson said, "We feed on genius. Great men exist that there may be greater men."

Fred I. Greenstein:

I have come here determined to be a lion in a Daniel's den and assail the very practice of rating presidents. The title of my remarks is "Don't Rate Presidents, Heed Their Lessons." My thesis is that the presidential rating game is a distraction from what can be most valuably accomplished by a close examination of the nation's past presidents, culling lessons from their character and performance.

These may be positive lessons, as in those that can be derived from Harry Truman's success in persuading a conservative, isolationist-leaning Republican Congress to enact the Marshall Plan. They may be negative lessons, as in those that can be derived from the Kennedy administration's abortive effort to land a brigade of anti-Castro rebels at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. Positive lessons sometimes can be taken from presidents who are typically ranked low in the ratings scale, for example, Richard Nixon's impressive first-term foreign policy successes. And negative lessons can be derived from so called "great" presidents, as in Franklin Roosevelt's counterproductive effort to "pack" the Supreme Court. My remarks derive from the book that my two predecessors have kindly referred to: The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton.

All of the nation's chief executives from George Washington to the present incumbent are potential sources of positive and negative insight, but the eleven presidents I examine in The Presidential Difference are particularly worthy of contemporary attention. Beginning with FDR, there was a transformation of the presidential job. Almost from the moment he assumed office, the president began to displace Congress as the principal agenda-setter of the political system. During the Roosevelt years, the United States and therefore its chief executive began to play a central role in the international arena. In the same period, the nation acquired a massive federal government, greatly augmenting the responsibilities of its chief executive. The Roosevelt years also saw the creation of the Executive Office of the President, which provides the occupant of the Oval Office with a support system that makes it possible to carry out his expanded responsibilities.

Let me now provide illustrations of how negative, as well as positive, presidential experience can be instructive, doing so in terms of the six categories I use to assess presidential performance in The Presidential Difference--public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence.

In the realm of public communication, I am struck by how few of the modern presidents perform at the level of a high proportion of the professionals in such spheres as the mass media, academia, and the church. This, despite the critical importance of public communication in presidential leadership. George Herbert Walker Bush is a case in point. As we know from the 1997 Hofstra conference on his presidency, Bush went out of his way not to emulate the gifted presidential communicator whose vice president he had been. Reminding his speech writers that he was no Ronald Reagan, he insisted that they provide him with rhetorically unadorned texts. His preference was to address the nation from the White House briefing room rather than from the Oval Office. His was a conception of the presidency in which there was little room for the bully pulpit.

Bush's minimalist approach to public communication was unproblematic as long as the going was good. He had high levels of public support in 1989 and 1990, when the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe collapsed and the economy prospered. Early in 1991, his public approval reached the highest level in the history of presidential polling after his administration's dramatic victory in the Gulf War. Then the economy took a nosedive, in the crucial fourth year of his presidency. Bush failed to communicate a persuasive message about how he would restore prosperity, and he was swept from office, garnering a mere 38 percent of the popular vote.

John F. Kennedy provides the contrasting example of a president who was able to surmount political difficulties by dint of his communication abilities. Kennedy's response to the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was of a piece with the larger focus on rhetoric in his leadership style. Convening a press conference, he addressed the assembled reporters gravely, but with confidence, declaring that he assumed full responsibility for what had occurred. He then wryly remarked that "victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan," and moved on to a discussion of his administration's plans for the future. The next Gallup Poll registered an increase in his public approval, rather than the plunge that might have been expected.

My second category, that of organizational capacity, may seem pedantic, but it is of crucial importance. The debacle of the Bay of Pigs is again informative, because it was the product of flawed decision-making. The disorganization of Kennedy's presidency was such that the member of his administration who had the most to contribute to the Cuban deliberations was out of the loop. That member was Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, who had been second in command in the Eisenhower State Department and in charge of the contingency plan Kennedy inherited from his predecessor. The precise effect Dillon would have had on the outcome of Kennedy's deliberations cannot be known, but his participation would have made for a better informed and wiser decision-making process.

Just as Kennedy provides an object lesson on how not to organize the presidency, Eisenhower is a font of constructive insight. No American president had richer and more demanding pre-presidential organizational experience than the architect of the Normandy invasion. One of the first tasks Eisenhower set for himself on taking office was that of providing the White House with a more rational and systematic structure. His efforts resulted in a set of organizational arrangements that commend themselves to any future chief executive.

My third category, political skill, is the ability to engage effectively in the art of the possible. Here again there is an illuminating negative example. Jimmy Carter displayed impressive skill in coming out of political obscurity and winning the presidency. However, he and his fellow Georgians came to Washington bent on not engaging in politics as usual. Even before Carter took the oath of office, his chief political aide had offended Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill by refusing his party favorable seats at the inaugural ceremony. Carter barely got in the White House when he canceled water projects in the congressional districts of key members of Congress.

The most conspicuous failure of Carter's presidency was of his signature policy proposal, an ambitious plan to reform the way the nation produces and consumes energy. Carter placed a politically insensitive official in charge of hatching the bill, which was framed in secret without consulting the legislators whose backing would be needed to enact it. It reached Capitol Hill in the form of a lengthy and complex document that was ill-suited for processing by the Congressional committee structure. Congress did eventually enact energy legislation, but well after Carter's deadline for passage and in a highly diluted form.

Carter's mishandled energy reform proposal should have provided an object lesson for his successors, but it did not. Bill Clinton was the next president to propose a major legislative departure--a comprehensive reform of the nation's health care system. Clinton also put the planning of his proposal in the charge of a controversial figure (his wife). His proposal also was drafted in secret without consulting Congress. And it too emerged in the form of an unwieldy bill that did not lend itself to Congressional deliberation. Not surprisingly, it failed to be passed.

I now turn to policy vision. By this I refer to the possession of a realistic sense of direction. The case of Lyndon Johnson is telling. Johnson may well have been the most skilled presidential politician in the nation's history, but his skill was not wed to a capacity to forge workable policies. During his first two years in office, Johnson's political prowess led to such landmark legislative breakthroughs as Medicare, the voting rights bill, and the first effective civil rights law since Reconstruction. In 1965, however, Johnson entered into an open-ended military intervention in Vietnam, never asking such critical questions as the following: How many troops will it require? How much will it cost? What impact will it have on the administration's political support? By 1968, a half-million American troops were mired in Southeast Asia. The war had become so unpopular that Johnson felt compelled to halt the escalation, enter into negotiations with the Vietnamese communists, and withdraw from running for reelection.

My fifth category, that of cognitive style, has many facets, including the sheer ability to process and analyze information. There can be no doubt of the importance of that capacity. Kennedy proceeded with a high degree of caution in the Cuban missile crisis in part because he had been reading a book on the accidental origins of World War I. Still, a president need not be a bookworm or a mental giant to turn in a creditable performance. Ronald Reagan, for example, was far from conversant with the details of most of his administration's policies, but he had compensatory strengths. He was a superlative public communicator, he excelled in face-to-face negotiations, and he had the quality that Professor Bums ranks second highest in his list of desirable presidential traits--conviction. All of this contributed to Reagan's success in bringing about a major first-year economic enactment and working effectively with Mikhail Gorbachev in the negotiations that spelled an end to the Cold War.

Finally, there is the category of emotional intelligence, a notion that refers to an individual's capacity to turn his or her emotions to constructive purposes and avoid being dominated by them. Bill Clinton was the only Rhodes Scholar to have made it to the White House. Yet it was not necessary to have studied at Oxford to realize there would be political repercussions over a dalliance with an emotionally volatile White House intern. The Monica Lewinsky affair was a single episode in the presidency of a chief executive whose defective impulse control contributed to his administration's lack of consistent direction.

The modern president who most compellingly illustrates the importance of emotional intelligence is Richard M. Nixon. Everyone associated with Nixon was awed by his political skill and strategic intelligence. This, after all, was a president who entered office with the highly demanding foreign policy goals of getting out of Vietnam, arriving at an accommodation with the Soviet Union, and establishing a constructive relationship with China, and succeeded in all three. But Nixon also was notable for his dark suspiciousness and simmering anger, and in the same period he embarked on the politically unnecessary covert campaign of political espionage and sabotage that was to destroy his presidency.

I conclude by returning to my initial assertion. We derive more from the presidential record if we mine all of it. In ranking presidents, we are likely to focus only on the positive and fail to derive lessons from the low-ranking presidents. Here is my advice for those who persist in the presidential rating game. Stamp your reports with the political equivalent of a Surgeon General's warning: "Beware. The contents may be hazardous."

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR. is Albert Schweitzer Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson (1945). He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965). He recently published the first volume of his memoirs, A Life in the Twentieth-Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000). He has written numerous books on the American presidency and American politics, including The Cycles of American History (1986), The Imperial Presidency (1973, 1989), and a three-volume study of Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Age of Roosevelt (1957-60).

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