John Lukacs

Professor of history, Chestnut Hill College; author of Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century

Most overrated:

Woodrow Wilson. A man of superficial ideas but no real principles, an academic politician ignorant of the world; the proponent of an abstract internationalism that was adopted by Republicans as well as Democrats—in sum, the founding father of our globalist predicaments.

Most underrated:

Grover Cleveland. A man of considerable decency and honesty who had to struggle to balance the destinies of his nation against the increasingly shrill advocacies of his Republican opponents and against the rising ignorant portion of his own party; a conservative liberal in the best sense of these two now widely abused and nearly meaningless terms.