Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
A new approach to a favorite pastime--rating the presidents--just in time for the inevitable debate about President Bush's place in history.

It's a perennial pastime to rate U.S. presidents on an all-time ranking: Certain presidents were "Great," others were "Near-Great," and so on down to "Failures" and "Unmitigated Disasters." (OK, we made that last category up.)

But as Alvin Felzenberg points out, there are many flaws with these rating systems. Despite reams of new historical information, the rankings never seem to change very much. They all favor a certain kind of president--those who tended to increase executive power. That aside, the idea of rating presidential performance on a simple linear scale is absurd.

The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't) breaks presidential performance into easily understandable categories--character, vision, competence, foreign policy, economic policy, human rights, and legacy--and assesses, for each category, the best and worst. The result is a surprisingly fresh look at how the various presidents stack up against each other, with some of the "greats" coming off far worse than their supposedly mediocre colleagues.

Rating : - It's a Fun Game
Whether you agree or disagree with Prof. Felzenberg's assessments, it's difficult to dislike a book like this one. Everyone, whether a history buff or not, enjoys the presidential rating game. And Felzenberg has given us a fresh approach. Instead of just giving us the results of some survey of opinions, he makes an attempt to quantify his results. Before giving us an overall score, he rates the presidents in six separate areas: character; vision; competence; economic policy; preserving & extending liberty; and defense, national security and foreign policy. It's clever, actually. Instead of giving a vague overview of a presidency, it gives him an opportunity to criticize particular areas of a president's performance while still giving credit where credit is due.

Felzenberg does some other things right, too. He does a good job of focusing specifically on a person's performance while president, and not on his achievements outside of his term(s). Jefferson, for example, rates lower on his list because the character and ideals of liberty he espoused so well in the Declaration of Independence and in the opposition party were not carried out in his presidency. He does a good job at assessing not only the immediate but also the long-term impacts of a president's policies. Jackson, for example, suffers much in this regard. He is also very good at giving us some background on most of the presidents. We get to hear some detail about Coolidge, Harding, Polk, Fillmore and Buchanan, among others who usually get short shrift in these kind of works. (Still, Lincoln, Washington, the Roosevelts, etc. get most of the pages.)

But let's not fool ourselves. The game is rigged. All of the analysis is Felzenberg's own so it reflects his own prejudices. The presidents he chooses to discuss in each chapter seem haphazard at times. His chapter on preserving and extending liberty focuses almost exclusively on the rights extended to African Americans. While this is important, issues like the Alien and Sedition Acts, immigration policies, womens rights and suspension of habeas corpus surely deserved more discussion. Despite his attempts at objectivity, he's clearly a fan of certain presidents and not fans of others. His chapter on economic policy clearly favors Reagan's ideas as opposed to FDR's. Other historians and economists might have different opinions on this, changing the ratings of these and other presidents.

Ultimately, I suppose, how one likes this book will depend, on some level, on how much one agrees with his ratings. For example, I like that he gives serious attention to Washington's achievements as president. I liked that he rated Grant and Truman high. I like that he didn't give into the Nixon revisionism and kept him near the bottom. On the other hand, I think he overrates presidents Teddy Roosevelt and underrates Clinton. And, though he doesn't rate G.W. Bush since his administration wasn't complete by the writing of the book, he clearly seems to favor him. Though, to his credit, he points out that only time will tell on this.

He finishes the book with some suggestions on what to look for and what to avoid in a presidential candidate. Again, his categories are interesting but almost impossible to apply in advance. It completely depends on how you interpret things. It was kind of a flat closing to an otherwise interesting book.

In the end, Felzenberg deserves real credit for a smart way of analyzing presidencies and writing interesting accounts of the presidents to illustrate his ideas. What I would like to see is Felzenberg's treatment attempted by a group of scholars to see what kind of consensus they come to. That would make for some very interesting reading--a great supplement to a very good book.