January 2011

Professor of history, University of California, Los Angeles

Most overrated:

Ronald Reagan. Supply-side economics is a myth. There has been no Reagan revolution, and the only significant legacy of his term will be the domestic and trade deficits, which will plague us for years to come.

Most underrated:

Harry Hopkins, adviser and assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hardly anyone seems to remember him anymore. Yet he played a large role in both easing the plight of millions of Americans during the Depression and forging the Grand Alliance that defeated the Axis in World War II.

Sterling Professor of History, Yale University

Most overrated:

Ronald Reagan. Because he has been so appallingly overrated, he has somehow managed to win two presidential elections. As a result, our system of constitutional democracy has been more seriously threatened, in Irangate, than at any time since the Civil War. Our economy is on the brink of disaster. We’ve been launched on an insane trajectory toward Star Wars. Above all, public life has become so addicted to fantasy and illusion that it may take decades before the nation has restored its sense of priorities.

Most underrated:

John Quincy Adams. Also, George Marshall. Both were patriots in the best sense of the word, brave men with vision and a commitment to the public good, not seekers of celebrity and public adulation.

Most overrated:

Betsy Ross. There is no evidence that she had anything to do with designing the American flag. The legend of Betsy Ross tells us much more about the intense patriotism in the United States in the late nineteenth century than it tells us about the story of the Revolution and the founding of the new nation.

Most underrated:

Charles Warren Professor of American History, Harvard University

Most overrated:

John Adams. It is astonishing that Adams, whose whole career was one of frustration and failure, should be considered one of our most important Founding Fathers. I do not minimize his intelligence or his devotion to his country, but his lack of tact and his wooden literary style should be weighed against these assets. And as President he had one of the most unsuccessful administrations in American history.

Most underrated:

Retired professor of history, State University of New York, Albany

Most overrated:

John F. Kennedy. He was charming in speech and person, which helped make him overrated. I voted for him in 1960, the only time ever I have voted for a presidential winner. And I lamented that vote after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the culmination of his own demagogic campaign rhetoric.

Most underrated:

Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was much denigrated by liberal intellectuals, chiefly over McCarthyism and the civil rights movement. In each instance he moved about as fast as he could in terms of American public opinion and showed considerable adroitness. In his two terms he did a better job of controlling inflation, militarism, and jingoism in diplomacy than any President since World War II.

Biographer and retired professor of social science, Fairleigh Dickinson University; author of Massachusetts

Most overrated:

Bernard Baruch. His failure to commit himself to an issue or a program has left Baruch in obscurity and denied him a significant place in our history.

Most underrated:

The most underrated American was Herbert Hoover, who received no credit for drawing up many of the plans and programs for which the New Deal took credit. He lacked the charisma to dramatize them and get them into action.

Most overrated:

President John F. Kennedy, who initiated our involvement in Vietnam, thereby beginning the long-term decline of the United States, and, while spreading the rumor that Adlai Stevenson had recommended a policy of capitulation to the Soviets at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, had himself secretly adopted precisely that policy.

Most underrated:

Henry Clay, for the reasons stated by Lincoln in his eulogy. Without Clay there would have been no Missouri Compromise, and without that compromise the Union would have been dissolved.

Most overrated:

All U.S. Presidents since George Washington. Nearly a century ago Henry Jones Ford proclaimed that the Presidency was an “elective kingship,” a phenomenon that has resulted in distorted, President-centered accounts of history and politics. We speak of the “age of Roosevelt,” the “Eisenhower years,” the “Reagan era”—convenient mileposts but misleading guides to the historical landscape. We credit Chief Executives with stupendous historical feats (remember “Dr. New Deal” and “Dr. Win-the-War”); our public rhetoric continues to offer the hope that newly elected Presidents will bring us peace, prosperity, and Olympic gold medals. Then we turn on these individuals when, as inevitably happens, they reveal all-too-human frailties. President worship leads us to undervalue the rich strata of middle-level leadership and talent that contribute to our civic history: legislative leaders, state and regional figures, even bureaucrats. More fame is due the Justin Morrills, the Gifford Pinchots, the George C. Marshalls, the James Webbs.

Most underrated:

Professor emeritus and John W. Simpson Lecturer, Amherst College; author of The Empire of Reason; Contributing Editor , American Heritage

Most overrated:

Aaron Burr. A brilliant, plausible, but desperate scoundrel.

Most underrated:

John Quincy Adams. One of our greatest, most honorable, most learned statesmen, largely responsible for the Monroe Doctrine and the Smithsonian Institution. He was the leading congressional champion of the antislavery movement and of civil liberties.

Director of American Studies Program and professor of history, University of Texas, Austin

Most overrated:

Woodrow Wilson. He was a provincial who appeared cosmopolitan, an academic who could not tolerate the free play of ideas or the minds of any women, and a world leader whose obsessions befouled human discourse and contributed materially to the chaos of the succeeding decades.

Most underrated: