What Makes A President Great?

The Insight of an American Historian, H.W. Brands

Who is your favorite president? Is it one of the Rushmore titans, Washington, Lincoln, and company? Or do you have a soft spot for Jimmy Carter or Nixon? Several months ago, Historian H.W. Brands gave a lecture on this topic at the Hauenstein Center. His criteria for presidential greatness is fascinating, although I disagree with some of it.

Brands' criteria for measuring presidential greatness consists of the following:


*Did the president meet the expectations of the presidency in his contemporary age?
*Did the president have a greater impact on American life and history compared with his recent predecessors and successors? 
*Did the president face a crisis great enough to shake the foundations of American life?
*Many things happen in American life which have nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution. In such cases, did the president find a solution that the Constitution didn't provide for?
*The great presidents were dividers, not uniters. Did the president use divisiveness cleverly enough to get elected and re-elected?


It seems fair to judge a president's leadership against the expectations of his day and age. Technology and global connections are of a far different nature than they were in George Washington's day. On the flip side, there is a danger in a leader always giving in to the demands of the crowd. Presidents are elected because people trust them to have greater wisdom [than themselves] to make the big decisions. A president must keep this in mind when opinion polls swing one way, then the other.

Having a greater (or transformative) impact on American life seems a prerequisite for greatness. After all, biographers and textbook writers need stories to tell. Still, Brands may take this a little further than caution should counsel. Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan had a transformative impact on world history. Yet, we don't hold them in high esteem (to put it mildly).

Brands is not alone among historians who claim a great, earth shattering crisis is essential to providing a president with sufficient opportunity to bring out his greatness. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR are placed at the top of most academic lists of presidential greatness precisely because each of them had to tackle a crisis that put the existence and/or prosperity of America at risk. Brands concurs.

This view deserves to be challenged, and some have made the case for presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, who avoided a major war and fostered prosperity during two terms. Drama and crisis need not be a criteria for greatness. There are other means through which a major impact (if quietly) can be made on the world, namely through smart diplomacy, sound economic policies, and the preservation and expansion of human freedom. It was not for nothing that Eisenhower didn't use an atomic bomb on another nation during his presidency, or that bloodshed didn't accompany the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe during Bush's term.

Historians are impressed by those who are ambitious for power and are successful in gaining it. More than two thousand years after his assassination on the floor of the Roman senate (by those less impressed than historians with people hungry for power) Julius Caesar has had no shortage of doting biographers. Brands falls victim to this spell by asserting presidential greatness depends on a willingness to set aside Constitutional scruples to find solutions to the problems of the day. 

To this point I must reply that the U.S. Constitution was designed to function the way it does precisely in the name of avoiding an American Caesar. The fact that the U.S. Constitution is the oldest (currently functioning) political constitution in the world, and has produced a society with a level of freedom that continues to expand to include ever greater numbers of people (some of them here illegally) is a testament that this document offers solutions to the problems of any day and age. Presidents should not be encouraged to seek solutions outside those permissible under the Constitution.

More troubling is Brands' assertion that the great presidents were dividers rather than uniters, and that a president aspiring to greatness must be divisive. Of the three greatest presidents (in Brands' reckoning), the one he uses most convincingly for this argument is FDR. At the Hauenstein Center, Brands called the audience's attention to President Obama's re-election campaign in 2012. The historian correctly explained that the current president resorted to tactics "we might call class warfare." But Brands believes Obama's demagoguery was tame compared to the class warfare employed by FDR in his successful campaigns in 1932 and 1936. Roosevelt spoke of "moneychangers" and "economic royalists" who were to blame for the Great Depression, and that Roosevelt was determined to rein them all in.

Regardless of how one may compare Obama's class warfare with FDR's, it is hard to accept Brands' claim that divisiveness is a hallmark of presidential greatness. Of anyone who reveres the memory of FDR, I doubt dirty political fighting is one of their reasons for admiring him. 

Harder still, is the case that the other great presidents, Washington and Lincoln, were divisive leaders. Washington was unanimously elected to be the nation's first president precisely because he was the only revolutionary figure all prominent Americans could unite behind. Divisiveness was rampant during the Civil War because it was a civil war. But Lincoln could hardly be blamed for it considering the southern states left the union merely because he was elected president in the first place. Furthermore, as the war drew to a close, Lincoln's reconstruction plans called for lenient treatment of the states being brought back into the union. There would be no treason trials. 

H.W. Brands' criteria for assessing presidential greatness is insightful because it reveals the way historians view human relations. Like others, historians tend to be obsessed with power and are impressed by those who wield it. They call our attention to those who organize and use people. Historians can be of great use in helping us make up our minds about our leaders, clarifying our own views of them, even if those views are contrary to those of the historian.

Patriot Thought