Richard Brookhiser on George Washington: “He did every job that came his way, including going home once the job was done. The French poet Chateaubriand put it well: ‘Search the forests where Washington’s sword shone: What do you find there? Tombs? No a world.’”
Richard Brookhiser on John Adams: “Smart, feisty, crazed: If John Adams’s presidency were all we had to remember him for, we wouldn’t remember him. But he led a patriot’s life, from the run-up to the Revolution to his late correspondence with his frenemy, Thomas Jefferson.”
Michael Knox Beran on Thomas Jefferson: “Lincoln said Jefferson worked out ‘the definitions and axioms of free society.’ Yet Jefferson’s belief that ‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’ did much harm, for it encouraged temporal provinciality.”
Richard Brookhiser on James Madison: “The Father of the Constitution, he was also the Father of Politics, helping shape the Democratic party. His presidency was 50/50. The White House burned on his watch, but he went on to win the War of 1812.”
Tevi Troy on James Monroe: “James Monroe is the least-known of our first seven presidents. He had the misfortune to preside over the Era of Good Feelings, showing that presidents who serve in times of relative quiet are often neglected by history.”
Richard Brookhiser on John Quincy Adams: “Ditto all his father John’s qualities, only more so. His great achievements were outside the White House: writing a classic statement of American foreign policy (the Monroe Doctrine), and fighting the slave power as an elderly congressman.”
Gil Troy on Andrew Jackson: “Andrew Jackson entered the White House furious, blaming his wife Rachel’s recent death on the attacks they endured during the 1828 campaign. The first western president, he was the first war hero to become president since George Washington.”
Gil Troy on Martin Van Buren: “Martin Van Buren was the George H. W. Bush of the 1800s. Like Bush in following Ronald Reagan, in following Andrew Jackson Van Buren essentially served a charismatic transformational president’s third term, only to inherit a recession.”
Larry Reed on William Henry Harrison: “Arguably the only president who did no harm. He died one month into his term from pneumonia, which he caught while delivering a two-hour inaugural address in the rain. Had he lived, ‘Tippecanoe’ would probably have been a lousy president.”
Alvin Felzenberg on John Tyler: “John Tyler was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency upon the death of a predecessor. A former Democrat, ‘His Accidency’ immediately repudiated the program on which he and Harrison campaigned. He ended his term without a party.”
John Hood on James K. Polk: “During his presidential bid in 1844, he promised to settle territorial disputes with Britain and Mexico, cut taxes, resist federal intrusion into matters best left to states or the private sector, and serve only one term. He fulfilled every promise.”
Alvin Felzenberg on Zachary Taylor: “A slaveholder, a southerner, and a strong unionist, Taylor had standing and clout in all sections of the country. Before dying in office sixteen months into his presidency, he showed himself willing to use them to avert civil war.”
Alvin Felzenberg on Millard Fillmore: “Fillmore was a ‘doughface’ a northerner committed to advancing the policies of the ‘slave interest.’ After leaving office, Fillmore ran for president as the standard bearer of the ‘Know Nothings,’ a party particularly hostile toward Irish Catholics.”
Alvin Felzenberg on Franklin Pierce: “Weak and distracted, Pierce deferred on most matters to his secretary of war, Jefferson Davis. (Enough said.) Pierce signed the Kansas Nebraska Act, which raised the possibility of opening up territory acquired from Mexico to slavery.”
Gil Troy on James Buchanan: “A party hack, Buchanan was the ideal Democrat, a Northerner sympathetic to slaveholders and hostile to abolitionists. Beyond that, he lacked convictions and sat passively, watching impotently and flailing occasionally as the nation collapsed.”
Allen Guelzo on Abraham Lincoln: “With one pen, he freed slaves, moved armies, revived a national banking system, instituted a protective tariff, and funded a transcontinental railroad. And through it all, he exhibited the humility which distinguishes democratic leadership from monarchy.”
Allen Guelzo on Andrew Johnson: “His reckless tongue, his free passes to former Confederate leaders, and his managerial clumsiness not only wrecked the hopes of post-war Reconstruction, but stamped him with the first presidential impeachment.”
Tevi Troy on Ulysses S. Grant: “While his scandal-ridden tenure in the White House is best forgotten, his brilliant generalship during the Civil War and his compelling memoir written as he was dying of throat cancer were his most valuable contributions to this nation.”
Alvin Felzenberg on Rutherford B. Hayes: “Hayes took office as the beneficiary of a backroom deal that made him abandon all he had once held dear. In exchange for the presidency, Hayes promised to withdraw troops from three states that still had ‘Reconstruction’ governments.”
Tevi Troy on James Garfield: “James Garfield is best known for being assassinated by Charles Guiteau 200 days into his presidency. The fact that Guiteau was crazy augured an important 20th-century development: the insanity defense for criminals.”
John Hood on Chester A. Arthur: “Chester Alan Arthur deserves popular acclaim for several reasons. He fought against corruption in government. He bucked the Republican establishment by seeking to lower the federal tariff. He also preferred to be called ‘Chet.’ Gotta like that.”
Larry Reed on Grover Cleveland: “He supported sound money, free trade, and balanced budgets. . . . ‘Though the people may support the government,’ he opined, ‘the government should not support the people.’ And he was a Democrat!”
Alvin Felzenberg on Benjamin Harrison: “Unlike Hayes, Harrison refused to forsake black Americans. He was the first president to press for laws that would have made lynching a federal crime. On other matters, Harrison favored a moderate tariff and signed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.”
Larry Reed on Grover Cleveland: “Our only two-term president whose terms were not consecutive, Cleveland is vastly underrated by conventional historians perhaps because he took the federal government’s constitutional limitations seriously.”
Alvin Felzenberg on William McKinley: “A strong ‘sound money’ and high-tariff man, McKinley helped make the United States into a world power. The Spanish-American War, commenced and ended upon his own terms, proved a trial run for American participation in World War I.”
John J. Miller on Theodore Roosevelt: “Boy scientist, boxer, politician, rancher, Rough Rider, TR was neither as great as his most loyal devotees make him out to be nor as bad as his loudest critics like to imagine. He was a boisterous, incorruptible force of nature.”
Vin Cannato on William H. Taft: “Taft was the only man to ever serve as both president and chief justice. (He also began the tradition of presidents throwing out the ceremonial first pitch on baseball’s opening day.) He was a moderately successful one-term president.”
Larry Reed on Woodrow Wilson: “Perhaps the worst president, Wilson gave us the Federal Reserve, the progressive income tax, the popular election of U.S. senators, and American involvement in World War I the most unnecessary conflict since the War of Jenkins’s Ear in 1739.”
Gil Troy on Warren G. Harding: “‘I have no trouble with my enemies,’ Harding sighed shortly before he died suddenly in 1923 as the Teapot Dome scandal boiled over, ‘it’s my damn friends that keep me pacing the floor at night.’”
Steve Hayward on Calvin Coolidge: “The last president to write his own speeches, he also read the classics in the original Greek and Latin in the evenings in the White House for relaxation.”
Burt Folsom on Herbert Hoover: “An engineer, he tinkered with the U.S. economy by passing the highest tariff in U. S. history, creating a government agency to bail out failed corporations, and increasing the top income-tax rate from 25 to 63 percent.”
Amity Shlaes on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Today we associate both generous Social Security and strong public-sector unions with Roosevelt. But FDR deemed it ‘almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980.’”
Elizabeth Spalding on Harry S. Truman: “Harry Truman understood the stakes of the Cold War and fought communist aggression: aiding Greece and Turkey, rebuilding Western Europe, guiding Japan and West Germany toward liberal democracy, and defending Korea.”
Philip Henderson on Dwight D. Eisenhower: “We liked Ike for good reason. His legacy includes two balanced budgets, and the largest surplus to that point in American history. He managed the most perilous years of the Cold War by holding the Russians in check.”
Alvin Felzenberg on John F. Kennedy: “Kennedy’s greatest legacy was his ability to inspire others. When he was president, Americans believed that anything they set out to do whether as individuals or as part of a joint enterprise was possible.”
Linda Chavez on Lyndon B. Johnson: “Johnson used his influence in the Senate to secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That law transformed the country, largely bringing to an end nearly 200 years of state-supported discrimination on the basis race.”
Chuck Colson on Richard M. Nixon: “Nixon knew he could pit the Soviets against the Chinese. And he did, undertaking secret negotiations with both Communist powers, which resulted in a strategic-arms agreement with the Soviets and the opening of relations with China.”
Philip Henderson on Gerald Ford: “He was a man of great conviction and great character. His pardon of Richard Nixon, which stirred much derisive commentary at the time, has since earned the imprimatur of the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award (2001).”
Steve Hayward on Jimmy Carter: “The only president who ever filed a UFO-sighting report with the federal government.”
Steve Hayward on Ronald Reagan: “In the 1970s, Reagan spoke of a ‘prairie fire’ of resistance to big government, and he saw the tax revolt as the match igniting the fire that swept him to office. The tea partiers might well be considered Reagan’s children.”
Roger Porter on George H. W. Bush: “He assembled an international coalition to reverse Saddam Hussein’s aggression, ended the Cold War, and unified Germany. He fashioned bipartisan legislation to advance market-based regulation and reduce deficits.”
Rich Lowry on William J. Clinton: “A canny politician with prodigious ambitions and talents, who ended up cementing the Reagan legacy. A parenthesis in Democratic politics between McGovern liberalism and Obama liberalism, but I repeat myself.”
Jay Nordlinger on George W. Bush: “Like Truman in the Cold War, Bush laid the foundation for America’s conduct in the Terror War. He discerned that U.S. security depended, in part, on other people’s freedom. He was not just an American president, but a world leader.”
Stanley Kurtz on Barack Obama: “Barack Obama was shaped by the visions of community organizing, as he himself has told us. Community organizers work incrementally, gently nudging the aspirations of others in the direction of their personal hopes. The result, over time, is substantial change.”