What Makes a President Great? Clipping? Sipping? Slashing?
|
Version 0 of 3. So Presidents Day has come and gone, along with the whingeing over C-Span’s latest ranking of American presidents, which predictably put Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on top (yawn); demoted the beleaguered Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson; and positioned Barack Obama, in his post-presidential debut, at No. 12. Such lists are a fun parlor game, if one that tends to provoke weary sighs from scholars, including some of the 91 who participated in the poll. “It’s not a thing that lends itself easily to quantification,” said one of them, David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University (and author of books about Richard Nixon and Calvin Coolidge). “But still we play along.” Our attachment to these rankings, Mr. Greenberg said, reflects something real. “The president is a singularly important symbolic figure in our national culture,” he said. “Because the head of government is also head of state, the president just becomes this vehicle for emotional attachment that might otherwise go to a king.” Fair enough. But are “public persuasion,” “crisis leadership,” “moral authority,” and pursuit of “equal justice for all,” to name some of the criteria C-Span used, really the only things that count? Now that the Presidents Day pieties are over, let’s look at some alternate ranking systems that take account of the things that really matter. Politics ain’t bean bag, so when things get really tough, don’t you want a blade-wielding maniac in your corner? That’s the premise behind a classic blog post “In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?” The post, written in 2009 by a Canadian named Geoff Micks, started as a comment in a Reddit forum, but quickly outgrew that site’s length limit. He has updated it a few times, including this year, when Vice asked him to collaborate on an animated version, which brings Donald J. Trump into the fray. “I really wrote it as a joke,” Mr. Micks, an industry conference planner in Toronto, said in a telephone interview. “But then it really took on a life of its own.” Mr. Micks’s bet is on Theodore Roosevelt, imperialist brawler and butcher of many animals. (Also, he writes, “anyone who gets shot at the start of a long speech and delivers the whole thing anyway,” as Roosevelt did in 1912, “has the tenacity to endure more than a few knife wounds if he thinks he’s right and everyone else is wrong.”) But he wouldn’t count out other members of the “Holy Trinity”: Jackson — a likely “murder machine” — and Lincoln, a “big guy who knew how to wrestle.” Besides, “who wants to be the guy to stab Honest Abe?” Among the wussier are William McKinley (“famous for sitting on his porch and letting the party machine do the heavy lifting”), and Thomas Jefferson, who would probably go out “somewhere in the middle” of the fighting, though his dying words would be “incredibly quotable,” Mr. Micks wrote. Mr. Obama would “probably try to negotiate an end to hostilities, and while seeking a middle ground, some loon would get the better of him,” Mr. Micks writes. “In an arena full of knife-wielding war veterans, I don’t hold out a lot of hope that he’d make it through the first few minutes.” And President Trump? Suffice to say that his braggadocious style — and firsthand experience with professional wrestling — would serve him well. “Even if he got stabbed over and over, he’d say that it was fake news, and that he was making knife fights great again,” Mr. Micks said. Here’s something they don’t teach you in school: Only 12 American presidents have had beards, mustaches or other notable facial manscaping. If you don’t believe me, believe Wikipedia, which devotes a page to the subject. Or better yet check out GQ’s “Official Power Ranking of American Presidential Facial Hair. Lincoln is there, of course, though his “strictly chin-beard situation” keeps him in the middling ranks. So are Chester A. Arthur, above, hailed by GQ for “that absurdity going on on his jaw,” and Martin Van Buren, whose prodigious mutton chops — more of a side Mohawk, actually — made him “the Bernie Sanders of the 1800s.” But GQ’s top marks go to Ulysses S. Grant: “Well-trimmed, yet not overly manicured, jawline? Check. Smattering of gray hairs, alluding to years spent on the battlefield reuniting a nation? Check. Slight hair wave, for added effect? Check.” President Trump has said he never drinks. How history will judge him for his abstinence remains to be seen, but until then, there are 44 other imbibers-in-chief to ponder. Which is exactly what the website VinePair has done. The list puts Franklin Roosevelt on top, for repealing Prohibition (duh). Wilson is No. 2 — not because he vetoed the Volstead Act, but because he rode into office in 1912 on a campaign song borrowed from an insidiously infectious whiskey jingle. (And you thought “Fight Song” was bad.) Mr. Obama, the sometime beer-summitteer, is at No. 5, thanks to his penchant for serving a special honey ale, fortified with nectar from the White House beehives, while the wily Lyndon B. Johnson is cited for liking his drink weaker than everyone else’s, to better outwit them. Rutherford B. Hayes is dead last, thanks to his habit of serving guests punch with rum flavoring instead of the real stuff. Hayes was apparently deferring to his teetotaling wife, but what was Richard Nixon’s excuse? Nixon, a near-Jeffersonian oenophile, reportedly “hoarded $700 bottles of vino for himself and served cheap red to the guests.” The day after the inauguration of President Trump, millions of anxious Americans poured into the streets to protest what they saw as his incompetence and nefariousness. But Jeremy Derfner, a former doctoral candidate in history and freelance writer in Seattle, got cracking on something more productive: creating a website called Crummy Presidents. (O.K., it’s actually called something stronger, but we must have respect for the office.) The idea is to write one entry a week, covering all the presidents, focusing on parallels between Mr. Trump’s missteps and outrages, as Mr. Derfner sees it, and those of his predecessors. “Presidents stink,” Mr. Derfner said in a telephone interview, again using a saltier term. “It’s this unique office that people come into with no experience by definition doing it. What I’m finding out is that almost all of them are terrible at the start.” The first entry was for Grover Cleveland, whose taste for “tuzzy-muzzy” or “crinkum crankum,” as the Victorians put it, makes Mr. Trump’s locker-room talk look tame. (Cleveland “is lucky they hadn’t invented the hot mic in 1884,” Mr. Derfner writes.) The anti-immigrant Coolidge is chided for trying “to flash freeze the ethnic composition of the country,” while the sainted Dwight Eisenhower (No. 5 per C-Span) is described as presiding over the moment “when our health system learned its neat trick of costing twice as much to give care that’s half as good.” Mr. Derfner is looking forward to lighting into some real baddies, like Andrew Johnson (second to last in the C-Span rankings), who in addition to bungling the aftermath of the Civil War held a disastrous round of rallies, called the Swing Around the Square, that helped lead to his impeachment. “He was drunk half the time, and a raving lunatic,” he said. Mr. Derfner said he wasn’t looking forward to finding mean things to say about George Washington. But the real challenge may be the mere mediocrities. “I mean, what did Millard Fillmore even do?” he said. “I’m going to have to do a lot of research.” |