Customer Reviews

Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House (Wall Street Journal Book)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Leonard Leo and James Taranto beautifully orchestrated this amazing leaugue of respected authors to compile a book much in need today. Most books on Presidents have either an overwhelmingly in-depth look at one president or are simply a collection of interesting facts and data about all of them. This book attempts to give to its readers insight into the actual presidency and how America, as a people, see are leaders. Each President has not a biography, but an analysis. This idea is new and makes the presidents that we all know much more accessible to an older crowd with a wide-array of information without drowning the reader with obscurities.

The idea to rate the Presidents is a daunting task. No matter how you rate them, someone is going to be critical. James Taranto, Leonard Leo, and William J. Bennett do this job justice. While I may not agree with all their rankings, I find their rationale fair and non-partisan. The essays about each President also give a description of each man that set the tone for their terms in office.

Well, done!

This book opens with a question "What Makes A President Great?" It proceeds to answer this by ranking every President with a range from "Failure" to "Great". The rank was awarded by a mixed group of 78 liberal and conservative scholars.A numerical score determined the rank. I believe the book arrived at a fair ranking system. This is in contrast to previous rankings by mostly liberal university professors who would rank Reagan average, and Clinton above average. A series of essays about each presidency is written by eminent and distinguished contributors. Every chapter is readable, exciting, and fascinating. Christopher Buckley's essay on James Buchanan was amusing and memorable. Ater reading, you will never forget the ill-suited, fecklesss, hand-wringing bachelor Buchanan. Paul Johnson, a British historian, has written a chapter on Clinton that was right on the money. Jay Winik's essay on Lincoln was good, but his book, April 1865, was superior to the too-brief chapter. Overall this book is a good reference and makes excellent reading. I think it is superior to comparable books of because of its brevity and evenhandedness.

Bennett, Taranto, Leo and an unbelievable host of others have combined efforts to bring us PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP: RATING THE BEST AND WORST IN THE WHITE HOUSE. This is a terrific introduction to the nations first 43 administrations, with brief accounts written by noted scholars on what each one accomplished and how they approached their own unique challenges.

The cast of contributors is dynamic, indeed, with names like Richard Brookhiser, Forrest MacDonald, Peggy Noonan and others. Also notable is the cast of talented historians who rated the presidents. History buffs are sure to recognize more than just a few of the names listed.

It is doubtful that anyone will be in full agreement with the rankings, but the book gives great detail as to the criteria used. Given that criteria, it's hard to make a valid argument against many of the conclusions. I wont go into the details of the ranking criteria, as that makes up a fair portion of the book and each reader should be left to decide for him or herself as to the accuracy of the approach.

This is a fascinating look at our presidents, their leadership, successes and failures. Each one is documented ranging from 2 to 6 pages, along with some personal data, such as birthplace, marital status, etc.

This book is sure to spark a few arguments, but is also sure to validate a lot of what we all already know. This is also a valuable tool for introducing students to presidents they may know very little about.

Monty Rainey
www.juntosociety.com

this is a very valuable, useful, efficient way through which to understand the essence of our american presidents, especially for those who do not have the time or patience to read anything of greater detail and depth. the book rates the presidents using very reliable, trustworthy criteria. perhaps the biggest surprise i had in reading it is that the little known democratic president, grover cleveland, was rated as one of the greater presidents, while john f kennedy was rated mediocre at best, and terribly overrated.

According to the 132 prominent authorities who rated "the best and worst in the White House" using a 5-point scale, the envelope please.

The winners are...

George Washington 4.92
Abraham Lincoln 4.87
Franklin Roosevelt 4.67

and the losers are

Andrew Johnson 3.36
Franklin Pierce 3.36
Warren Harding 3.33
James Buchanan 3.29

Now that we have that out of the way, I hasten to explain that co-editors James Taranto and Leonard Leo have done far more than merely conduct a survey and then publish the results. What we have here is a chronological sequence of analyses from Richard Brookhiser's of George Washington until Paul A. Gigot's of George Walker Bush. There is a separate chapter devoted to each of the 43 presidents, all of them written by an expert on the given president. I especially appreciate the reader-friendly checklist of key facts which precedes each of the commentaries. Contributors include Lynne Cheney (on James Madison) and John S. McCain (on Theodore Roosevelt) and both have much of substantial value to say about their subjects, as do all of the others.

Presidents are classified within six categories: Great, Near Great, Above Average, Average, Below Average, and Failure. Some rankings surprised me as being too high (e.g. Dwight Eisenhower as Near Great and John Kennedy as Above Average) or too low (e.g. Richard Nixon as Below Average) but such reactions are no doubt indicative of my lack of expertise. In any event, I was grateful to learn the reasons for various rankings.

Other sections of special interest include William J. Bennett's Foreword, Steven G. Calabresi's Introduction, and four brilliant essays on various "Issues in Presidential Leadership" (i.e. economic policy, during wartime, the judiciary, and after disputed elections). If you share my keen interest in issues such as these and would enjoy examining similarities and dissimilarities between and among the 43 U.S. presidents, this is a "must read."

I'm enjoying this book very much. The authors have long been established as respected authorities on American government and politics, and are very well qualified.

They enjoyed writing this work, too. It comes through in the "feel" of the read. It's very helpful for an author to actually care about the subject matter, and this book has that quality throughout.

What is it now, 43 men who have held this very exclusive job? Every morning on my way to my office, I pass a bookstore window full of nasty sniping attacks on the current one, overly self-serving recounts of recent ones, and almost nothing on the ones who held the job for the first 190 years. This assemblage of reviews, all by noteworthy contributors, gives you the chance to quickly, cleanly, get a glimpse into the life and job performance of each of these men.

Given that the Federalist Society is seen by some as a dark cabal of hyper-right wing lawyers and judges, it's a little disappointing to see that the survey of presidential historians that forms the basis for this book is so decidedly un-revolutionary. By the book's own admission (p. 251), and despite the effort to balance the survey pool between conservatives and liberals, the results of this survey varied hardly at all from one done by the overtly liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in 1996. In fact, if you compare the results of this survey to those of three others (not including Schlesinger's) analyzed by statisticians Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway in the far more interesting Reassessing the Presidency : The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom (Mises Institute, 2001), you'll see that nearly all surveys of "presidential greatness" turn out pretty darn similar to one another.

Vedder and Gallaway have a theory about this: the historians and other academics surveyed for things like this are dependent on government for their income, and thus have a clear bias in favor of presidents who increase the size, scope, and expense of state power. Presidents who don't flex the muscle of government and generally leave the American people alone, get ranked much lower. Despite (or these days because of?) the conservative leanings of the Federalist Society, the Wall Street Journal, and many of the contributors, the bias here seems to lean the same way.

It's too bad the folks who assembled this collection chose to focus on the presidential survey, because the forty-two essays on the individual presidents are the more interesting part of the book. Like the presidents themselves, some of these essays shine, some are disappointing, and quite a number are unremarkable. The decision to have Ken Starr write on Richard Nixon was a stroke of genius, while Peggy Noonan on JFK was up to the high lyrical standards of her Reagan biography. The two best essays, in my opinion, were a fascinating piece by Jeffrey K. Tulis arguing for Andrew Johnson as a far more significant transitional figure in the history of the presidency than he is usually given credit for being, and John O. McGinnis' portrait of Calvin Coolidge as perhaps (my words, not his) the most libertarian president we've ever had. Ari Hoogenboom's look at Rutherford B. Hayes reminded me that Hoogenboom's Hayes biography has been on my to-read list for an awful long time, and made me want to move it up that list somewhat.

On the down side, I don't think you need to be a fan of Thomas DiLorenzo and his The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (although I am) to be a little skeptical of the Christlike-colossus-bestriding-the-earth sort of language with which Jay Winik clothes the holy martyr, Abraham Lincoln, or the breezy ease with which he dismisses Lincoln's trampling of law and Constitution. Similarly disappointing was John McCain's discovery, in a recycled bit from his memoirs, that Theodore Roosevelt was a proto-John McCain (so much for my hope that he would report Mark Twain's conclusion that "Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible").

Unsurprisingly -- it's typical for books about the presidency -- the descriptions of recent presidents are always more problematic than those of men shrouded in the mists of time. I thought Paul Johnson, for example, did a masterful job dissecting Bill Clinton (the third best essay in the book), but I can imagine it will give his still-active legion of supporters hives. Joshua Muravchik's essay on Jimmy Carter, the smallest and least of our ex-presidents, gives this sanctimonious failure the hiding he deserves.

The pages of the Wall Street Journal frequently feature some of the best opinion writing going today, and the quality of that writing is carried over into this book. It doesn't break much new ground, however. Disregard the "best and worst" survey numbers and just surf the essays.

I know it sounds like a left-handded complement, but this is an absolutely perfect book for the bathroom. I'm sure many will get all hung up on the rankings and say X should be ahead of Y, but the authors do a wonderful job of encapsulating each presidency into an essay that hits all of the highlights and lowlight, and explains the historical context in which they were set. Furthermore, each essay can be read in the amount of time it takes to make an average crap. It is the perfect read for those who weren't interested in history during high school or college, but are now.