Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House (review)

Analysts and pundits alike continue to be fascinated by the presidential ratings game, even though the very act of assigning numerical rankings to our presidents is an exercise that, at the least, sacrifices accuracy and complexity in exchange for a one-dimensional presidential horserace. This book not only sacrifices accuracy and complexity, but nearly bludgeons them into incoherence.

This book has three objectives: to provide brief (three- to six-page) essays on all 43 presidents, including the current President Bush, authored by a disparate array of academics, journalists, and others; to offer limited commentary on topics including presidential greatness and history, presidential wartime leadership, presidents and the judiciary, and presidential behavior in the aftermath of disputed elections; and to report the findings of a new, "ideologically balanced" rating of the presidents. To address the last of these first, editors James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society conducted a new survey of 78 presidency scholars in the fields of law, history, and political science. Yet they "explicitly balanced the group to be surveyed with approximately equal numbers of experts on the left and the right." Their justification for this exercise: "Because political leanings can influence professional judgments"; the result, they claim, is "the most politically unbiased estimates of presidential reputation yet obtained for American presidents" (249). The editors provide no evidence for their claim that past assessments of presidents by academics are skewed because of the ideological predilections of the experts who offer them, nor do they explain how, exactly, they divined the personal political views of those surveyed, except to say that they did not gather demographic information about the 78 respondents. These claims are further undercut by the fact that, aside from the familiar Schlesinger ratings, they do not mention or cite any of the considerable and respectable literature on presidential ratings published in the last 40 years (from Bailey's [1966] Presidential Greatness to Landy and Milkis's [2000] book of the same name).

Whatever their personal or professional shortcomings, scholars of the presidency are like scholars in any field of study: their work stands or falls on its intellectual merit. The possibility of creeping personal bias is a legitimate matter of inquiry, but like any academic assertion, it must be supported by evidence; Taranto and Leo's claims are buttressed by no such evidence. They therefore commit the very sin they attribute to the accused—pawning off personal bias as analysis. In fact, the evidence provided in this book, such as it is, contradicts the editors' claim of academic bias on the part of those who have preceded them, in that the rankings correlation between the Schlesinger study and their allegedly "ideologically balanced" one is "a staggeringly high .94" (251).

The editors' decision to frame their presidential rankings around the question of scholarly bias encourages the reader (this one at least) to pose the very same question about the contributors to this book. By my conservative count, more than three-quarters of the contributors are themselves ideological conservatives, based on their biographical notes provided by Taranto and Leo, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Weekly Standard, the Federalist Society, and the Wall Street Journal (which contributed eight essayists plus editor Taranto). Now if I were to dismiss this book as the work of partisan hackery, the editors would surely insist that the chapters be judged by their content, not by the pedigree of their authors. And they would be right. How, then, do these essays stand up?

A few are artful. For example, journalist Richard Brookheiser's essay on George Washington, political scientist Jeffrey Tulis's on Andrew Johnson, and historian Robert Dallek's on Lyndon Johnson demonstrate that it is possible to write a brief essay on a president and offer a trenchant and thoughtful treatment. On the other hand, it is hard to get past the...