Rating the Presidents -- By One of their Own

It is a favorite parlor game for Americans to rate or rank their presidents; it is also a preoccupation of presidential scholars and over the decades they have pretty much reached a consensus on at least the great or so called near great presidents. The pantheon includes: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, and then often Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt or Harry S. Truman. It is rare though that presidents rank their own, although John F. Kennedy is supposed to have looked at one list and remarked that one had to either die in office or lead the country to war to be on the top. Some presidents have risen up in recent times though, especially Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Some have taken a beating such as Wilson, and others are being looked at with a more critical eye such as Kennedy himself. Still others such as James K. Polk and Richard Nixon have not had a really fair appraisal for a variety of very different reasons.

But we now have Gerald Ford’s observations of other presidents, at least those he knew. He has argued that Ronald Reagan is overrated, especially in terms of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He finds him a poor manager and argues that his own role in the Helsinki accords on human rights did more to win the cold war than Reagan and his much heralded military buildup which is supposed to have bankrupted the Soviets. Ford called Jimmy Carter a disaster, then as he became friends with him praised his work on the Panama Canal treaty, China, and the Middle East. He also views John F. Kennedy as overrated and Bill Clinton as simply an average president. Still he praises the older George Bush and his handling of the Kuwait war, and is very complementary about Richard Nixon as a foreign policy master despite the abyss of Watergate. He regards the best president of his time as being Dwight Eisenhower, although he too praises Truman for his handling of foreign crises during his years in office. Lastly, he was concerned about George Bush the younger’s war in Iraqi and his justification for it.

The remarkable conclusion that one can draw from Ford’s observations is that they were generally on the mark, especially as historians begin to step back and look at the contemporary post Rooseveltian presidency. Having served in that unique and demanding office gives one a different perspective than presidential historians and even most memoirists. It is interesting to see where they agree and why.