C-Span has released the second edition of its Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership. A cross section of 65 presidential historians ranked the 42 former Presidents on ten attributes of leadership.
Go to THIS LINK for complete details, including the Washington Journal segment about the survey and a list of the historians.
Here are the high and low scorers:
TOP Ten:
1. Lincoln
2. Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Teddy Roosevelt
5. Harry Truman
6. JFK
7. Jefferson
8. Eisenhower
9. Wilson
10. Reagan
BOTTOM Ten:
33. Hayes
34. Hoover
35. Tyler
36. George W. Bush
37. Filmore
38. Harding
39. Pierce
40. Andrew Johnson
41. Buchanan
UPDATE: The L.A. Time’s Andrew Malcolm takes a closer, more detailed look at this list — including a “shocker” at the bottom.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.