Anyway, the 20th century presidents have the edge because many of the historians who actually knew them personally are still alive. I’m thinking Slessinger (can’t spell his name now:-( Or even the adoring journalsist who knew Kennedy.– There are too many to list here!

Heck, we had more worshipful obits on TV about the Auzzie crocodile hunter’s death, than reports and documentaries about Betty Friedan… but hey crocodile hunter was a white man and he spoke English, and Friedan… helped launch a movement of half the U.S. population. Can’t have too many documentaries about feminism and feminists on malestream TV..still too dangerous a subject.

History is still about playing favorites and who wants to protect their place in the sun as a “Lincoln” or “Reagan” expert.

Industry Boy–I appreciate your defense of Washington, but your justification for his high rank sets the bar rather low. He only had to do better than avoid becoming King? Really? Well–the Whiskey Rebels and anyone else who was screwed by Hamilton’s schemes would argue that he failed even at that simple task.

Lincoln is the closest thing that we have to a national secular saint, if we leave out white Southerners. (Many of them probably have signed on for this rating too by now, but many haven’t.) But I think that has more to do with his assassination than with his leadership, formidable though that was. My guess is that if he had lived to serve two full terms and preside over the beginnings of Reconstruction, he’d rank much more closely to Grant than #1.

Of course, now that I’ve brought up Lincoln, I notice that the bottom two presidents came before and after him, respectively.