Bringing Color to Presidents Past

February 17, 2013

By Nancy Gibbs

Armchair historians — and actual ones — have always enjoyed ranking American presidents, recasting Mount Rushmore, debating who was greatest of them all. There are the perennial favorites —Washington, Lincoln, FDR — and the eternally scorned: James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce. Then there are those who voters abused but history redeemed: Herbert Hoover was hung in effigy, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit, as he left office in the midst of the depression in 1933; yet twenty years later, after his epic humanitarian missions leading post-war disaster relief, he ranked among the most admired men in in America. Harry Truman had a 22% approval rating his last year in office, yet is now exalted for his common sense and steady hand during the dangerous birth of the atomic age.

Among those least inclined to judge and rank the presidents are the presidents themselves. They know the deep and often damaging toll the job takes on all those who hold it, successful or not: the toll on health, on family, on any kind of normalcy. A few weeks after his reelection in 2004, I asked George W. Bush whether he thought more or less highly of his predecessors, now that he’d been in the job a while.

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