It is difficult to compare presidents outside of a narrow context of time. It is like trying to compare baseball players, like Ruth and Aaron, or football players, like Johnny Unitas and Peyton Manning. For athletes, the games they play were different then; and for presidents, not only the country, but the world is different. There is no way of knowing how a president today would have fared when faced with the prospect of the First or Second World War, or how they would have handled the advent of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. These are answers we...