Most overrated: Ronald Reagan. I know that one can be accused of being present-minded and lacking perspective, but I still think President Reagan is the most overrated of our public figures past and present. I base this on his record in California, where as governor he constantly opposed what the legislature had concluded was necessary in the way of taxes, social services, and schools. In short, he did not understand the society in which he was living. Professional PR firms glossed this over, and so he went on to national office, appealing to fear, prejudice, and nostalgia. Most underrated:
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Contributing Editor, American Heritage Alexander Hamilton. I side with Thomas Jefferson, who called him “a man whose history, from the moEment at which history can stoop to notice him, is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country which not only has received and given him bread, but heaped its honors on his head.” Abigail Adams, who was the hidden asset and “Dearest Friend” of John Adams. Wife of one President and mother of another, she managed the Adams farm and raised five children during her husband’s long absences. If history had rated the Founding Mothers, this intelligent woman would have secured her rightful place.
Uncle Sam. I will not comment on his silly garb, but I think his ambiguous postures, expressions, mien, and actions in cartoons and on posters do not do justice to America as a body. He rolls up his sleeves, he struts, he scowls, he smiles. A metaphorical embodiment of the nation in its corporate mode should be far more extreme. When we blast away, we really blast away. On the other hand, when the nation as nation turns out to show its better face, silly Uncle Sam won’t do. I would not try to express both sides through a single anthropomorphic figure. John Q. Public. He usually comes off as bewildered, put upon, harmless. We need stronger images, including feminine ones. There’s enough belief in original sin in me not to go looking for perfection or progress in John Q. Public. But over the long pull, one has to have admiration for a citizenry that outlasts so many demagogues and follies, so many red tapings and false promises—and still persists, still hopes.
Distinguished professor of history, Indiana University, Bloomington; author of Truman: A Centenary Reminiscence Most overrated:
Capt. William Kidd (c. 1645-1701) of New York City. His reputation as our outstanding pirate is a gross exaggeration, although he did hang for it. Had he been half the pirate his punishment suggested, Kidd would have left some valuable treasure buried somewhere.
My nomination goes to the same William Kidd, the sea captain. As a householder, a family man, and a leading citizen, he was devoted to civic causes. Trinity Church could not have been built without Kidd’s generous contributions.
Novelist and historian; author, most recently, of The Officers’ Wives John F. Kennedy. I write this with a lump in my throat. But the record shows his public relations approach to the Presidency was an almost total disaster for the nation, from the Bay of Pigs to the Berlin Wall to the missile crisis to the halfhearted intervention in Vietnam. The revelations of his private life have added more tarnish to the once golden image. James K. Polk. Obscured by the curtain the Civil War has drawn across antebellum America, he deserves to be ranked with the great Presidents. He was hardworking and decisive, a leader who brought a program to the office and realized almost all of it. Arthur Tourtellot, in his book The Presidents on the Presidency , says of Polk: “His was probably the most dynamic concept of presidential leadership.” We could use a large dose of his example today.
Executive Editor , The New York Times Abraham Lincoln. John Marshall.
Author of Fanny Kemble ; winner of the 1982 Georg Freedley award of the Library of Performing Arts Most overrated: John Brown. The classic small-time fanatic, probably paranoid at least intermittently. Buoyed up emotionally by amateur bloodshed in Kansas in the abolitionist cause. Then his fumbling filibuster at Harpers Ferry failed either to free any slaves or to demonstrate his claims to skill in guerrilla warfare. But its repercussions did go far toward committing North and South to tragic polarization. True, he had dignity and the courage of his delusions. But he belongs in a psychiatrist’s casebook. Most underrated:
Professor of Geology, Harvard University I nominate the general category of people who became icons for patriotic phrases but played no palpable role in our history. I’m sure that Nathan Hale was a fine young man, and I regret that he had to give up his one life, but nothing would be different (beyond a pious pronouncement memorized by generations of schoolchildren) if he had never lived. So much so that we do not even know his name. I nominate whichever early European settler first brought smallpox to the New World. Our conquest of the indigenous Indians may have been inevitable by dint of firepower (and racist ideology), but imperial expansion has been moved forward far more efficiently by disease than by the Maxim gun.
Andrew Jackson. Not one of our great Presidents in my view. He was too spiteful and bigoted (especially in his attitude toward Indians). Carl Schurz. He had one of the more significant political careers in the nineteenth century but is remembered today primarily by German-Americans. Had he not been born abroad, he probably would have been a presidential candidate.