Washington, Lincoln Most Popular Presidents: Nixon, Bush Least Popular

Six American Presidents are viewed favorably by at least 80% of all Americans. Those esteemed six are led by the first President George Washington. The Father of our Country is viewed favorably by 94% of Americans. The sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, is the second most popular. The man who gave us the Gettysburg Address is viewed favorably by 92% (see Presidential favorable ratings).

The next four are Thomas Jefferson (89%), Teddy Roosevelt (84%), Franklin D. Roosevelt (81%), and John F. Kennedy (80%).

Five other Presidents are viewed favorably by at least 70% of Americans today—John Adams (74%), James Madison (73%), Ronald Reagan (72%), Dwight Eisenhower (72%), and Harry Truman (70%). It’s worth noting that the nation’s first four Presidents—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison—all continue to earn rave reviews in the twenty-first century.

The highest unfavorable rating for any President is earned by Richard Nixon. Sixty percent (60%) of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the only President to resign from office. Thirty-two percent (32%) have a favorable opinion of the man who famously went to China.

Close on Nixon’s heels for most unpopular is the current President, George W. Bush. Fifty-nine percent (59%) have an unfavorable opinion of him. Lyndon Johnson (42%), Bill Clinton (41%), and the first President Bush (41%) are the only other Presidents viewed unfavorably by at least 40% of Americans.

“It is a shame that probably 90 percent of Americans do not understand that FDR is one of the worst, if not the worst, in American history.”

All the more reason to bring it up and correct people on it.
Surely the liberals have done a great PR job, calling it the “Great Depression” as if it was a force of nature, and not stopping to acknowledge that something must have been wrong with FDR’s policies if the number of unemployed in 1938 was as big as the number of unemployed in 1932.

There is a book out there called “FDR’s Folly” about how his policies worsened the country’s economy. I haven’t read it, but it goes into great depth pointing out FDR’s economic program as a complete failure (except in its PR).

Go Taft, Go!

"Don't know" is a big factor here. People know Carter so there's a limit to how low he can sink. That's true of Ford as well, though not for Nixon.

We know more about Madison and the Adamses thanks to recent biographies and their achievements outside the presidency so they're higher than Monroe, who must have had a more competent administration.

More people know about Buchanan, an awful President, than about Tyler who was bad, but not that bad, so Buchanan ends up higher.

And of course, there's Kennedy.

If anybody is looking for an interesting short read, there's Bruce Kuklick's The Good Ruler: From Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon. He attacks historians for imposing their own opinions on such ratings, concentrating on counterfactuals, and thinking themselves smarter than the people who had to live back then.

Kuklick relies on the opinions common at the time. So Hoover, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon are failures, FDR, DDE, and JFK successes.

In the end, his opinions aren't worth any more than anyone else's, but it's a clever point of view. Maybe too clever: how well does it work for earlier and later presidents?

I wasn't sure what you meant by "Don't know" not being a big factor in Nixon's case. Are you suggesting that judgements about Nixon are now fixed and will never change? In this context, and in the context of Kuklick's thesis, it seems noteworthy that there have been many quite positive 'takes' about Nixon in just this past year: Margaret MacMillan's 'Nixon In China', Conrad Black's 'The Invincible Quest' and the Broadway play (to be made into a movie), starring Frank Langella, who won a Tony Award for his performance in Frost/Nixon, to name just three. In the latter instance, even the inveterate Nixon-hater Frank Rich was moved to admit that he was led to have a measure of sympathy for the dreaded Nixon -- something he thought would never be possible.

In addition, I'd make a point that Kuklick seems to overlook, namely that, in the case of Nixon, it has become increasingly clear that there was an important 'Saddam 911' factor at work in public opinion in 1973 and 1974. According to Gallup polls throughout that period, and up to the day he resigned, nearly 50% of those who saw Watergate as a serious matter (almost the same percentage saw Watergate as "just politics"), believed Nixon had advance knowledge and took part in the planning of the breakin (much as a large block of the U.S. public believes Saddam had a direct role in planning 911). Even avowed Nixon critics such as Stanley Kutler and John Dean now concede that Nixon had no foreknowledge whatever of the DNC breakin.

Nixon aside, Truman, fewer than five years ago, was widely thought to have been an awful president, but he is now widely seen in a favourable light. It would have seemed almost unimaginable 5 years ago that Truman would approach Ike in a 'popularity contest'. Of course Truman's approval rating when he left office was lower than Nixon's was when he resigned. Nixon is the U.S. president in which most Americans currently have greatest interest and his 'popularity' is still a fluid commodity. I'm not saying there isn't merit in what Kuklick writes (there certainly is), but only that what he is writing about is a 'popularity contest' in 'real time' as opposed to a 'popularity contest' many years later. He is NOT dealing with duly considered judgements that are based on the best available sifting of fact from fiction, which is the proper role of historians.

The Roper use of 'Job Performance' as an index of presidential performance deserves to be respected, and indeed, Black, in his book, makes a strong and cogent case for his view that Nixon accomplished more than any U.S. president since Lincoln. I guess it boils down to what Mortimer Adler once referred to as 'expert judgement'. Whereas experts are as prone as others to making mistakes, their 'work product' is forced to undergo re-examination ad infinitum, and it is the strength of such a process -- so manifestly at work in the sciences -- that major breakthroughs in our understanding emerge. To be sure, the people have the political right to make the practical judgements, as to whether or not to impeach, but they are not necessarily right.

As self-proclaimed, onetime Nixon-hater, Stephen Ambrose, military historian and Ike's biographer, wrote in the last line of his trilogy of Nixon biography: "the country lost more than it gained when Richard Nixon resigned."

"The Father of our Country is viewed favorably by 94% of Americans. The sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, is the second most popular. The man who gave us the Gettysburg Address is viewed favorably by 92%

Amazing that such approval ratings can be sustained still when 1/2 the population consists of weasels who support our current raging Demagogues. While political issues don't easily translate across eras, there is no doubt that both Lincoln and Washington would thoroughly despise all of the charlatans who pass as Demagogues ala the CLintonistas, Reid, Pelosi, Edwards, Jon Cary, et al. The quavering yellow-backed Democrats of today would be completely contemptible to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, both of whom had to face down all kinds of doubters and weak sisters under far more difficult political and economic challenges than we face today. It was a serious question whether the colonies could even become independent in the 1770s or whether the nation could even survive in the 1860s, yet Washington and Lincoln persevered in ways unimaginable to the weasels of today.

I wasn't presenting Kuklick as someone I agreed with, but as someone who had a unique take on history. A lot of Presidents who were "failures" had to cope with more troubles and showed more grit than a show horse like John Kennedy. Right there, the problems with his theory are obvious.

Nixon's reputation improved a lot in the years after he left office. I don't think it's going to go any higher though. Sooner or later a reaction is going to set in. In spite of his foreign policy achievements, he was awful on the economy, and let political conflict get way out of hand.

I don't say this as someone who disliked Nixon when he was in office. In fact, I stuck up for him when I was very young. And I understand the difficulties of his era. But the bar has been raised for politicians since then, and I don't think he quite makes the cut.

I don't think you're right about Truman. He was horribly unpopular when he was in office, but by the time he died he was regarded as near great by historians. More here. Certainly, historians thought much of him when they were still denigrating Eisenhower.

There's much to be said for Truman as a Cold War president. But I have to wonder whether his reputation isn't going to decline as the Cold War recedes into history. Historians who are dissatisfied with Bush may take it out on his model, Harry Truman. Also, a lot of the headaches of the Truman years -- the economy, corruption, stumbling over the Communism issue -- are probably going to count for something.

So I thought Kuklick has a valid point about the Truman years. Anyway, it was a bit funny to read Newsweek's "Wanted: A New Harry Truman" cover story after reading Kuklick on all of the dissatisfaction people had with Truman when he was in office. I suspect American needs more of an Eisenhower -- maybe even more of a Nixon -- than a Truman right now.

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my enquiry. Your comment that "In spite of his foreign policy achievements, he was awful on the economy, and let political conflict get way out of hand." is unarguable -- although I'm ever-mindful that Milton Friedman said 'Nixon was one of the smartest men I ever met.' and that Nixon's temporizing with wage & price controls, as a short-term measure, did work; and abandoning the Gold Standard prevented most of the U.S. Gold Reserves from being shipped to the U.K. Although I'm sure we could get into an argument about the appropriateness of Nixon's having acted on expediency rather than on principle (as Friedman thought he had), I think our principal point of disagreement is with respect to the way in which public assessments of U.S. presidents will or will not change in a time-dependent fashion. Again, I can't disagree with your view that the rating for Nixon, if it continues to be measured the way it is now done by Gallup, is unlikely to change, or to change only slowly in the short term: at 32% now, it might approach 50% in a few years time, when the GOP finds it necessary to support a nominee who has 'moderate' credentials and, like Arnold, is unafraid to mention Nixon's name at a GOP Convention. We'll see.

What I do expect will change, but only in the longterm, is the way in which the assessments are made, i.e., not using the words Approval and Disapproval, but using the words Job Performance, Policy Competence or Accomplishment. As Gallup now structures its poll in this era when annual retrospectives on Watergate continue apace (but will eventually peter out), the Gallup poll question is the equivalent of asking a respondent if he/she approves of their President being a crook. I'm a bit more optimistic than that. If you have the patience to read further, I would outline what I think is wrong with both 'populist' (Gallup, Harris etc polls) and 'elitist' (by professional historians) polling.

In time, I think Gallup assessments, like the Lovenstein Presidential I.Q. polls and the Arthur Schlesinger & Son polls of expert opinion, will be viewed as laughable anachronisms from a bogus era in U.S. journalism-cum-history. Insofar as I can determine, the renaissance of Truman's reputation came in the midst of Watergate when HST's alleged 'plain speaking' reputation came to the fore [Were there ever any hints of this renaissance in HST's reputation in the intervening years between 1952 and 1972? -- not as far I can determine]. However, as in the case of the 'Saddam 911' effect I mentioned in my earlier post (#92), the public was, by 1972, almost totally oblivious of the fact that HST lied his way shamelessly through the Alger Hiss scandal. Truman proclaimed to his death that he wasn't sure Hiss was guilty even though all of Bradley, Marshall, Hoover and the Canadian Prime Minister (via Gouzenko) had privately told him what decoding of Venona [and later the GRU files of the former Soviet Union] would later reveal to the public: Hiss was a Soviet agent code-named ALES who pocketed his Stalin Medal during the Yalta Summit.

I recall Frank Newport or one of his minions, on a network newscast, announcing, almost in tears, that recent polls suggested Nixon is better known for the China opening than for Watergate, and he -- a polling official yet! -- then volunteered that this was a very disturbing trend in view of the assault on 'our' Constitution by the Nixon adminstration. Surely there is a doctoral thesis 'out there', one that can be recycled into a Best Seller, which takes an appropriately mawkish view of the whole corrupted system of Presidential evaluation, and offers a vision-of-amendment that would elevate the quality of both 'populist' and 'elitist' polling by linking the results to some palpable knowledge (on the part of the respondent) of the notable achievements (job performance) that emerged from a given president's administration. As things now stand, one has to wonder if most respondents aren't about as informed as those charming airheads who are the subject of Jay Leno's 'man-in-the-street' type interviews. Thanks for your patience if you've come this far -- and thanks, also, for the tip about Kuklick's book, which I just ordered from AbeBooks.

The first and largest shock from my first graduate course was to “learn” that Richard Hofstadter was an unbiased historian. The old boy had a keen view of history, but he saw it through the present tense as much as anyone. So kudos to Kuklick for reminding us that historians write to mirrors. Still, his model, to measure presidential value solely by contemporaneous sources, is troublesome.

As much as I distrust Hoftstadter’s reactionary “Paranoid Style of Politics,” he’s correct that hysteria and fear are some of the primary currencies of the American present tense. If so, there must be something beneficial in it, as we’ve been damned successful despite our paranoias (my inclination here is to emphasize that word, “despite”). A friend put it to me the other day: “Why is it that Americans are always about to be taken over by someone else?”

If it is fair to say that Americans don’t always choose well in their votes, then how can Kuklick find in their opinions more accurate wisdom of presidential performance? What if we built into the model of “presidential greatness” the extent to which the presidents rely upon paranoia. Would this be any less problematic than the judgments already employed? It would also provide a basis for judgment absent electoral results. Going this way would require of Kuklick’s model recognition of conservative voices during a president’s term (those resisting paranoia), and it would require the usual historical view of larger outcomes to evaluate where our presidents have strayed too far in reaction to and in creation of hysteria.

The worst presidencies, or the worst presidential moments, sieze paranoia for self-aggrandizement. Sometimes it’s necessary and good to act upon a national impulse; other times it’s just hysterical, otherwise known as demogogy. Were we to add that one to the “greatness” scales, more than a few presidencies on the list would tilt far lower.

You're right that these polls are popularity contests. You'd have to evaluate presidents separately on separate criteria to have meaningful answers.

Truman did become a folk hero during Watergate. He'd just died and his book Plain Speaking had just come out, as had a stage show with James Whitmore. People took "honest, plain spoken" Harry for the Anti-Nixon. But he'd already cracked the top ten in Schlesinger's 1962 poll of (liberal) historians, so his reputation had been rising with academics before the Seventies.

There's a lot to be said for Truman, and some truth in the notion that "he was right about all the big things (though he was wrong about a lot of the little ones)." It's more the folk hero, wonderful little Harry that I object to. People who longed for him to return after he died probably would have hated him if he were in office again. He rubbed people the wrong way.

And some of those decisions that he did make were very questionable -- the Hiss case, nationalizing the steel industry, wage and price controls. While he may have been right on the "big question" of firing McArthur, there was an awful lot of bungling in his administration's policies on China and Korea. I can accept the idea that the country was still struggling to figure out its Cold War policies in the Truman years, so nobody could have gotten things completely right, but Truman's fans let him off too easily.

I'd agree with you that paranoia causes a lot of problems for Presidents. I don't know how Kuklick would react to your theory. It looks like the kind of "second guessing" he'd object to. But you could argue that he cherry picks his Hoover to Nixon sample. He could have picked another time and his theory might not fit as well.

Looking at another period, he might be forced to conclude that the people got it terribly wrong. The theory-breakers would be a president who was loved when he was in office who turned out to be horribly wrong or inadequate, and one who was hated in his day who turned out to be a real prophet. People loved Harding during much of his Presidency, but public opinion turned on him after he died and the scandals came out. So which is the true verdict?

Historians can't help building their theories based on what comes later. A Great Depression, a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11 forces them to rethink their theories. Some of them really relish being "proven right" by events, and Kuklick may be reacting against that. The Depression was the major historical event for a whole generation of historians and their opinions of politicians was based on whether they were Roosevelts or Hoovers, and you can see the delight some of them had in hoping that Eisenhower or Reagan would turn out to be the Hoovers of their day.

Kuklick's a philosophy professor, and curiously, a major scholar in the history of American philosophy. But you can see the problem. His history is a nuts and bolts version of who said what when. If Kuklick writes "If William James had said this rather than that" or "If John Dewey hadn't come to that conclusion" he's already doing something like philosophy.

If an historian of science questions Einstein's conclusions he's pretty close to doing science, rather than history. But if a historian writes "If Franklin Roosevelt had done this rather than that," he's not "doing" politics. He's still in the realm of history (more or less). There isn't a separate discipline to deal with critical or hypothetical questions.

I guess Kuklick's theory works better as a corrective for other perspectives than as the final answer. You do have to take into account just what people at the time thought of a president. You can't dismiss it, but it doesn't have to be the final word. Most people who vote in such polls or discuss them are probably choosing on the basis of ideology, and Kuklick's view, as flawed as it may be, isn't a great danger today.

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