ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 10, 1997 TAG: 9702100104
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
BUT SOME SAY "Rating the Presidents" is pointless. After all, greatness is in the eye of the beholder.
If misery loves company, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton can take comfort: All three get only mediocre ratings in the two newest surveys to rate the pantheon of presidents.
Among the 41 presidents, Bush ranks 22nd, Clinton 23rd and Reagan 26th in ``Rating the Presidents,'' published this month by Citadel Press. The ratings are based on a poll of 719 historians, political scientists and others around the country.
America's three most recent presidents were lumped among 12 in the average-low category based on a survey of 32 jurors by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. for The New York Times Magazine in December.
Presidential rankings invariably provoke spirited debate among those who feel passionate about their presidents, and the latest entrants in the ratings ritual are no exceptions.
``There You Go Again, Liberal Historians and the New York Times Deny Ronald Reagan His Due,'' the Heritage Foundation complains in a headline in its March-April issue of Policy Review magazine.
The magazine goes so far as to offer space to a number of voices more sympathetic to the Gipper.
``Reagan belongs on Mount Rushmore,'' wrote William F. Buckley Jr.
``Reagan's was a near-great presidency,'' said Henry Kissinger.
All sides acknowledge the particular difficulty of rating presidents of recent vintage, with Schlesinger predicting these men are the most likely to rise or fall in future surveys.
That's what's happened to Eisenhower: He crept from 22nd in a 1962 survey by Arthur Schlesinger Sr. to average-high in the younger Schlesinger's latest survey and ninth in ``Rating the Presidents,'' written by William J. Ridings Jr. and Stuart B. McIver.
It wasn't until Eisenhower's presidential papers became available in the 1970s that the impression of him as a ``sleepy, symbolic leader'' gave way to the idea that he was well informed but used intermediaries to carry out his will, says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University and an Eisenhower biographer.
The ability of recent presidents to move up in the polls should be encouraging to Clinton, who wondered aloud to former political adviser Dick Morris last year about what he could do to rise from his current third-tier ranking.
Presidential ratings first took off as a scholarly pursuit with a 1948 survey by the senior Schlesinger, who asked 55 leading historians to place each president in one of five categories ranging from great to failure.
From that simple beginning, the ratings have grown increasingly sophisticated, with all sorts of statistical models, quality assessments and fancy methodologies.
Through it all, the headline results have been relatively consistent: Lincoln, Washington and Franklin Roosevelt invariably end up on top, and Grant and Harding tend to bring up the rear, with considerable shifting in between.
The truly great, all sides agree, achieved that stature by leading the country boldly through times of particular trial, such as the Civil War, World War II and the Great Depression.
Still, some historians shrink at the notion of assigning presidential grades at all.
``It's an empty and vacuous exercise,'' says Greenstein. ``Presidential greatness is in the eye of the beholder and, therefore, different raters will reach different conclusions.''
Further, Greenstein says, the rankings condense too many different qualities into one result. Is it useful, he asks, to give Richard Nixon an ``A'' for foreign policy and an ``F'' for dirty politics and then average the two?
Nixon is classified as a failure in the latest Schlesinger poll, and ranks 32nd in the Ridings-McIver survey, his demerits for character partially offset by above-average grades for political skill and crisis management.
Schlesinger himself acknowledges the limitations of presidential ratings.
He recalls John F. Kennedy asking him, ``How the hell can you tell? Only the president himself can know what his real pressures and real alternatives are. If you don't know that, how can you judge performance?''
Nonetheless, Schlesinger thinks it's healthy to ponder how a president measures up against his peers - particularly for the president himself to do so.
``It may bring them to do something more courageous or more ambitious so they'll be remembered well,'' says Schlesinger. ``They don't want to end up being regarded as mediocre.''
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart by AP.by CNB