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Melissa Harris Perry: I'm Melissa Harris Perry, and this is The Takeaway. Happy President's Day. Now, if you're a Takeaway regular, then you know that for more than 20 years, I've been a professor of political science, and a little bit of a nerd for all things related to American political history. For me, President's Day is not just a chance to get a great deal on a new mattress, it's an opportunity to reflect on the office of the American presidency, what it's meant, and continues to mean for our great experiment in democratic self-governance.

Now, public opinion polls consistently show that Abraham Lincoln is widely regarded as our greatest president, and George Washington nearly always makes the top five, which is why we celebrate President's Day on this third Monday of February. It's like a big old three-day weekend celebration for the Aquarian Lincoln, who was born on February 12th, and the Pisces George Washington born on February 22nd, but beyond the Founding Father Washington and the Union Preserver Lincoln, Americans have some pretty different ideas about what makes a president great. Though, a president for only a short time, JFK is often mentioned.

JFK: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

Melissa: America's first Black president, Barack Obama remains popular.

Barack Obama: Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, young, old, gay under the same proud flag, that's the America I know.

Melissa: Despite their very different ideological positions, both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan are highly regarded by both historians and the general public.

Lyndon Johnson: It is wrong, deadly wrong to deny the right to vote in this country.

Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

Melissa: What does it mean to be a great president, and who among the men who have been president meet that criteria? With me now is Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University. Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa: All right, is it possible to determine that a president is, in fact, a great president?

Doug: I think so. We know that Abraham Lincoln was, and if we just think about 1860, Melissa, and the fact that Lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in seven states, so you couldn't vote for him, and here he goes on a train ride from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and things were just a hotbed of secession. He came into the Executive Mansion. It's not called the White House until Theodore Roosevelt dubs at that, so it was the Executive Mansion in the 19th century.

Lincoln sitting in the Executive Mansion, people daily are marching in demanding to see him, meaning, there's a lack of security, goats just grazing and on chewing on grass in the front lawn. You have the Battle of Bull Run.

The Battle of Bull Run, the Confederates win. Bull Run is where Dulles Airport is today, so you're having the Confederates, half the country leave you as president. You lose a battle on what's today's suburbs of Washington, D.C., and you look doomed. There's no way to recover from what's going on, and yet, Lincoln ends up adding foundational text, by foundational, Melissa, I mean we have the Bill of Rights Constitution Declaration, also foundational are Lincoln's first and second inaugurals the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.

He's able, in a miraculous way to keep our union together. That is a president of greatness. The world recognizes it, and he's always ranked in any polls we do on President's Day as the number one president.

Melissa: I'm wondering if, in part, by this measure of, early on in the presidency, there being an existential threat, but then finding that throughout the rest of the presidency, there's a move towards greater unity and prosperity, if by that measure, George W. Bush is someone who we would need to also understand as a great president, given that he faced 9/11 early on, and then prosecutes a war during much of the rest of his presidency. Until the very end of his presidency, also manages to govern at a time of relatively more national unity, in part as a result of the post-9/11 moment.

Doug: Well, I feel that George W. Bush during 9/11 showed signs of greatness, the way he was able to unify the country in the weeks following the tragedy, culminating in his famous pitch at Yankee Stadium, and then going what we call the megaphone moment, the Bullhorn moment down at the rubble at 9/11, and showing both ardor and compass, that George W. Bush showed signs of greatness, but by all indications, the war in Iraq was a mistake, that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

He ended up taking America on a very costly endeavor in the Middle East, it that never paid off. Then, at the end of his administration, you have The Great Recession, and whether it's fair or unfair, can be debated, but we just judge presidents on the economy. President Biden's getting hurt in polling, and maybe in the midterms because of inflation, it may not be his fault.

There may be nothing he could have done about it, but if you're the sitting president, you get blamed for bad economic times. Unfortunately, at the end of Bush's two terms, the economy collapsed, and we had The Great Recession, and it made it quite easy for a Democrat Barack Obama to win that election, because hard to have a winning party when the economy is in tatters.

Melissa: Part of the reason I brought up W. Bush in that moment, is just because I wonder about our ability, no matter what side of the aisle or ideological positioning we're sitting in, to actually be able to measure the greatness of presidential leadership, free from our own either partisan or ideological viewpoint, and, so, I guess, it's part of my interest in how historians think about this. Do historians think of both Democratic and Republican presidents, as both farther right and farther left presidents, as having been great and terrible?

Doug: It depends. It's a great question. First off, we cop out as a class of scholars, presidential historians will say, "We need 25 years before documents come open, Freedom of Information Act, so we can actually judge a presidency in full." Meaning, let's look at what really happened when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan? How will that look 25 years from now?

It allows us to avoid being pundits in a contemporary politics sense. I think the big thing is reputations, rise and fall of presidents for all sorts of different reasons, and it usually is about our own times. For example, Andrew Jackson used to be one of the top seven presidents. Now, he in recent polling is extremely low. Well, Jackson's been gone a long time, what in the world happened?

Well, I think President Trump had a lot of critics, and Trump put a portrait of Andrew Jackson behind him in the White House. Then, Donald Trump visited the Hermitage in Tennessee saying, "Jackson's my favorite president." Steve Bannon said, "Donald Trump's like Jackson." There was a movement to take Jackson off the $20 bill, replaced by Harriet Tubman, that's not come to fruition.

It just became, suddenly Jackson got politicized in our current moment, and it's a moment when we're learning more about indigenous people's history. We're looking then at the Trail of Tears of Jackson as being a genocide, and, so you see Jackson's reputation sinking, where 20 years ago, the Democratic party, the biggest thing you could do was to go to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners.

These reputations go up and down. I will say, Melissa, we're kinder to presidents after they leave office. Jimmy Carter in his 90s, people now are saying he wasn't that bad a one-term president. He gave us Camp David Accords, and recognized China, put aside lands in Alaska, Panama Canal Treaty, created FEMA. The list starts going on, where, again, 20 years back, people would've said Jimmy Carter was one of the worst presidents.

We saw George Herbert Walker Bush when he'd passed, another one-term president like Carter, suddenly being counted as a really important one-term president. Because of the way he oversaw the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 in German reunification, and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the liberation of Kuwait and other things. These reputations can rise once the president's out of the White House, and then they become like the ultimate American celebrity presidents.

We judge our era, where it's the Eisenhower years, the Kennedy years, the Johnson years on and on, and they become in a celebrity-drenched culture presidents, and as ex-presidents become our top celebrities.

Melissa: I wonder, as you were mentioning presidents who we have, in fairly recent times, thought of as bad presidents or unsuccessful presidents, and now maybe look at them more kindly, I'm wondering how important is winning that second term, to the possibility of history considering you as a great president, given your point about H.W. Bush and about Carter.

Doug: I think it's extremely important to get reelected, because it's the first referendum on one's presidency. If you're being booted out of the White House, it's an indication that people weren't happy with your leadership. One, it's a hard to be a really good one-term president, but it happens. John F. Kennedy did not even have one term due to the assassination, yet, he lives eternal in the public imagination due to a number of factors, his guidance to the Cuban missile crisis, his great civil rights speeches, his challenge to put an astronaut to the moon, his speeches like the American University Peace Speech, or his inaugural-- Kennedy's didn't even have one term, but he's a giant.

James K. Polk, some people feel was a pretty good one-term president. You get in there, but by and large, you need to be a two-termer to be really dominate an era. That means for eight years, you were the power source of the United States, and the people liked your early action that they were willing to double down on you.

Melissa: I'm wondering if that's, in part, why Reagan ends up holding this place that he's a two-term president, and then his vice president is elected, so in certain ways, he dominates, ideologically, 12 years.

Doug: Exactly, and the other two-term presidents are doing well. People like Dwight Eisenhower in recent polling has gone up. Barack Obama pulls exceedingly well a two-term president, probably, could have won a third term, and so, yes, do not underestimate the power of Barack Obama. I'm in Los Angeles right now, Melissa, and I just saw they're naming a major street after Barack Obama Boulevard.

I realized that, eventually, there're going to be schools and parks, and it's going to be ubiquitous, things named after Obama, so his legacy is already pretty secure, and to my point, probably, Barack and Michelle Obama are our nation's biggest celebrities, meaning, they draw the most attention, crowds, more people want to meet them, and, so their stature is huge. They're about to open up their Presidential Center in Chicago.

That's the other thing, we save-- Here, it's President's Day today, and just think what we do, we save the birthplaces of presidents. We save their boyhood homes, their graves. We build these big presidential libraries for them. I was recently in Plains, Georgia, where Jimmy Carter is, and there's a sign on a building that says, "This was where Jimmy Carter was conceived."

Melissa: [chuckles] Whoa.

Doug: [chuckles] Yes, I know. We do president mania in our country, and for good and bad, it's mainly because the great novelist, Thomas Wolf, used to say, "There are a billion forms of America," and we have all of these cultures and subcultures, and the one factor that tends to unite the country, if not in actuality, but in a sense of time and place are our presidents. As I said, we define our eras by them.

Melissa: Last question, I think to at least pop in on the question of President Trump, and maybe less about whether or not a president who was, I can't think if it's the word "inaugurated", that a president who was twice impeached during his presidency, might someday be understood as a great president, but I guess what I'm actually a bit more interested in is, whether or not the Trump years, not unlike the Nixon years, have simply changed Americans' relationship to the presidency for the long term that, perhaps, we can't ever see presidents in quite the same way after those years.

Doug: I believe, Melissa, that to be true. I think things ended. I would argue that the two giant political forces in our country were of the 20th, and even into the 21st century, whereas FDR, who won four times, but also there was a belief in FDR that the federal government is your friend, that whether it's social security, or the building of bridges and infrastructure with the new deal, government's your friend.

With Harry Truman created the CIA and Joint Chiefs of staff and the Pentagon and Secretary of Defenseship, on and on, and Eisenhower, the interstate highway system. The St. Lawrence Seaway, NASA, Kennedy, do the moon. All of these programs with Johnson, I could go on, there's this sense of government, and the presidency viewed in a constructive way.

Trump has said, the whole federal government, the so-called "Deep State" is corrupt, that the federal government is the enemy. That these previous presidents, whether it's Bill Clinton or George Bush, were corrupt puppets of this elite, dark government state, and that to be able to run on a message like that and win, and then show a lot of disrespect to our institutions, means we're in a new era now, we're not in the age of Reagan or the age of Roosevelt, we're in this strange inter zone of Trumpism being a dominant power and force across the land.

We don't know yet whether it was a blip on the radar screen, or it's a permanent new way of thinking about politics, but it's unusual to have a president in both Trump and Biden, both only were able to marsh about a 40% approval rating. That's unusual, but then Congress right now is at whatever 18% or less. In journalism, people aren't looking favorably on.

We're seeing the politicization of the Supreme Court, and only the armed forces to be-- Our men and women in uniforms seem to be admired and loved by both sides of the political spectrum right now. At the very least, we're in a surreal, strange new era, and whether we can return to traditional presidential history is yet to be seen.

Melissa: Douglas Brinkley is Professor of History at Rice University. Thanks for spending a little bit of President's Day with us.

Doug: Let's make it an annual occasion, Melissa.

Melissa: Oh, let's do that. It's a date for sure.

Doug: [chuckles] It's a date. You take care, my friend.

Melissa: Thank you.

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Speaker: This is The Takeaway, with Melissa Harris-Perry from WNYC and PRX, in collaboration with WGBH Radio in Boston.

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