W is not (quite) the worst president

History has made its first appraisal of the presidency of George W. Bush and it turns out he is not, as many suspected, our worst president.

But he is close.

C-Span commissioned 65 historians to rank the presidents from George Washington to George Bush and the historians have assigned Bush to 36th place, which is pretty bad, but better than six others. Those deemed worse than Bush are Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan.

Abraham Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and 32 others were determined by the historians to have been better presidents than Bush.

If you insist Bush is the worst president we have ever had, you may be comforted to know that he is the worst president in the lifetimes of just about all of us. Presidents judged worse than Bush by the historians lived and died long ago. Harding, the youngest of that group, has been gone 86 years, which means a person has to be on the farther side of 90 to even remember him in the White House. All of the others on the worse than Bush list were around in the 19th century.

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The historians evaluated the presidents in a number of categories, including their management of the economy, international relations, crisis leadership, administrative skills, pursuit of justice, moral authority, public persuasion, vision and agenda setting and relations with Congress.

Bush barely cracked the top 25 in three categories, being ranked 25th in crisis leadership, presumably for his conduct immediately following 9/11. He came in 24th in pursuing equal justice for all, which groups ranging from gays to Guantanamo residents may dispute. He also reached 24th place in the category “Vision/Setting an Agenda,†and it must be acknowledged that once he set his vision on something, like tax cuts and bringing democracy to Iraq, he stubbornly stayed the course, as they say.

In every other category, Bush’s evaluators ranked him 35th and lower. He finishes next-to-last in international relations. There are, however, legitimate questions as to whether last-place William Henry Harrison, who died a month after his inauguration, should be rated at all. Bush ranks higher than only Herbert Hoover and the hapless Harrison in managing the economy.

Bush’s father, George H.W., did much better with the historians than the son who so often competed with him. The first Bush ranks 18th overall, between the Adams father and son, John and John Quincy. It might rankle the younger Bush, the next-to-last place holder in international relations, to find Dad in the top 10 as a foreign policy president.

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These surveys of historians of liberal to conservative persuasion have been conducted since Arthur Schlesinger Sr. did the first one in 1948 and the findings have been remarkably similar over the years, especially in the selection of the best and worst presidents. Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt have always been on every list’s top three, with Lincoln almost always first and the other two competing for place and show. Harry Truman, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and later, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have reached top 10 rankings.

The bottom has also been consistent, with James Buchanan, who served just before the Civil War and did nothing to prevent the threatened secession of the southern states, just about permanently ensconced in last place.

As noted above, there are doubts that historians should even rank William Henry Harrison. Harrison was inaugurated on March 4, 1841, and died in office April 4, 1841, exactly one month later. The poor man’s active presidency lasted only three weeks, as he spent the last week of his tenure dying from a cold that turned into pneumonia. Yet, in the view of some of our most eminent historians, past and present, he did enough to make him one of the worst presidents.

He was hardly around long enough to think about such things as setting an agenda, pursuing equal justice, exerting moral authority and most especially, dealing in international relations. In his inaugural address, he makes only vague references to a strong defense but he did speak of his “earnest desire to preserve peace with foreign powers.â€

That “earnest desire†alone should move him ahead of Bush.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.