Ranking the Movie Presidents
Atlantic, The, November, 2002
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In 1948 Arthur Schlesinger Sr., a professor at Harvard, asked fifty-five historians to rate the American Presidents. The results, published in Life magazine, placed Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the top of the list, and Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, and Warren G.
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Harding at the bottom. In 1996 Schlesinger's son, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., repeated the exercise. But these surveys made some grievous omissions: they failed to take the measure of movie Presidents who had—for better or worse—led the nation through moments of great crisis. To address this lacuna, we convened a panel of top historians to rank America's Hollywood Presidents. We asked our historians to use the same categories the Schlesinger surveys did—Great (4 points), Near Great (3), Average (2), Below Average (1), and Failure (-2). Our board of historians consists of Alan Brinkley, the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University; Robert Dallek, ...
