The roll will pit the shuttle toward an imaginary target in space. The 1981 nasa documentary, Space Shuttle a remarkable flying machine on the voyage of columbia. Sunday morning on road to the white house rewind, the 196 Campaign Film for candidate Richard Nixon. I have decided that i will test my ability to win and my ability to cope with the issues in the fires of the primary. And not just in the smokefilled room of miami. At 1 00, a panel of authors on their books chronicling mix can American Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1970s. This coalition of labor unions, mexican American Civil Rights leaders and religious authorities came together to protest the exploitation of the program and, in fact, accelerated Congress Decision to terminate it the next year in 1964. I think this was a moment of blossoming for the chicano movement. For the complete schedule, go to cspan. Org. On lectures in history, Dickinson College professor David Oconnell examines president ial legacies and what factors contribute to making a president ial term successful. He discusses several rankings of president s and compares the criteria and results. His class is about an hour and ten minutes. Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on to this continent a new nation conceived in libber tir and dedicated to proposition all men are created all kwaequal. The brilliance of those words wasnt necessarily recognized at the time. In fact, lincoln was not the featured speaker at gettysburg. It was actually edward evert, a senator from massachusetts, who spoke for two hours while lincoln waited until the end to give his closing words. Today, of course, we recognize the gettysburg address as perhaps the greatest moment of president ial speech in history. I think the fact that people didnt necessarily see the speech that way at the time that lincoln wasnt the featured speaker at gettysburg points to the fact that lincolns greatness wasnt necessarily recognized at the time in general. You have to remember that when lincoln became president , he hadnt served in Public Office for ten years. His Country Style of dress, his speaking mannerism, his selfeducation, all that was meant lincoln was looked upon with some degree of kond session from the eastern elite in the country. Perhaps not much was expected from his presidency. However, today, theres little dispute on lincolns greatness. I encourage my students to see Political Science not as a science but a debate. There are no laws, there are no findings, theres no discoveries. Instead, what you have who are people making argue ulments thay or may not be persuasive to you. Thats important to note when we think about president ial greatness. Were going to look at five different ways of measuring president ial greatness. What he will see these polls, these Academic Studies that involved hundreds of historians, political scientists and others, theres a consensus that lincoln was the greatest president. Today, we may have some concerns about some of the thing ez did. That he certainly took libber tis with the constitution. He suspended the right of habous corpus. He closed newspapers that were printing material critical of the union effort. He spent money that congress hadnt appropriated. The raised the size of the military without congress approva approval. Did he this for a great end. Preserving the union at a time of maximum peril for our country. He had the ee manse indication proclamati proclamation. He nerve lost sight of what the United States was fighting for. There was a lot of pressure in 1864 to call off the president ial election feeling you couldnt go through with an election at a time of war. Lincoln would be justified cancelling this contest. What lincoln said was what lincoln believed was that if the United States were do to do so, the rebellion would have won. What i want us to do today is think about president ial greatness. The whole class has been leading up to this point. We have been studying president ial power, leadership, trying to understand how president s are or are not able to overcome these obstacles in their way when they can successfully navigate the challenges and when they fail to navigate the challenges. The point of doing so is to become great achieve greatness. I want us to think about how we might understand president ial greatness, how we might conceptualize it. We will look at ways that different scholars have tried to rank the president s. From one to 44. And then were going to talk about why potentially today greatness is more difficult to achieve. We may never see another person like Abraham Lincoln. The modern president s, they have been weak. They have not achieved the level of greatness the people like lincoln have. We want to try to understand why that might be. And if there are reasons or if the fault really lies in the individuals who hold the office in recent terms. One thing we know is that americans love to rank things. I estimate that maybe 67 of the contest on the internet are lists of things. This is buzz feed. Its lists. Here are some interesting rankings that i recently came across in the hard work that have i been doing as a professor. The definitive list of stupid people on twitter, let me tell you, version 4. 0, better than 3. 0 and 2. 0. The internets 25 worst pass wortds. If your password is on the liver, its saying enough. Top 25 College Football teams ranked by stupidity of fans. A ranking of every big brother season from worst to lead worst. The 26 best drake meems that have exited. That is kind of cool. The definitive ranking of the 50 worst selfies. I looked at that one. The message is dont take selfies at funerals. Thats the takeaway point there. Americans also love ranking their president s. We have read the president ial power, the most famous book ever written on the presidency. A book that has been influential for scholars and president s alike. A guidebook of how to successfully exercise executive authority. Very first sentence of the book, the United States in the United States, we like to rate a president. We measure him as weak or strong and call what we are measuring his leadership. We do not wait until a man is dead. We rate him from the moment he takes office. Thats true. Gallop begin sur vagveying amers on obamas presidency the day after his inauguration. unh8 that rating, that starts immediately. Of course, there are all these benchmarks that are set in a presidency where we stop and consider their legacy. 100 daze, how does the president s first 100 days compare to Franklin Roosevelt. The reelection campaign, the ultimate opportunity for vote torz cast judgment on president ial performance. You have pundits and columnists who are asking how anything a president does affects their legacy. A way of saying how it affects their place in history. Even though we like do this, ranking the president s is actually really hard to do. So theres some systematic reasons why its difficult to try to rank president s. Its difficult to rate their performance. Number one, were not neutral observ observers. We all have our own opinions. We all have our own biases. That will affect hour we evaluate any president s performance. Research has shown that ideology play a role in assessments of president ial greatness. This does not come as a surprise to you. Conservatives of will think Ronald Reagan say great president. Liberals will think john kennedisy great president. The impact of our biases doesnt stop there. Its also going to impact the criteria we use to determine president ial greatness. What our standards are. Research has shown liberals are more likely than conservatives to think that Something Like idealism is a standard of president ial greatness. Those are two ways that our biases will affect our evaluation of greatness. We also know that context matters. President s take office at different times facing a different set of leadership challenges. Thats going to have to be taken into account when we try to rate their performance. On the one hand, we might give president s sympathy for taking office in difficult circumstances. If we think about barak obama, at the end of his presidency, we may want to step back and say, you know what . He took office at a time of a massive recession, with the United States engaged in two wars, and because of all these challenges, even if he didnt achieve quite as much as other president s, that he deserves to be rated higher because the context in which he served was more difficult. We know that voertz aters are c of doing this. At the time of his reelection, if voters considered obama and bush to be equally responsible for the countrys economic condition, then obama would have been nine points less popular. People seem to be willing to give president s leeway for necessarily have a lot do with. But difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing. Because crises, they can be opportunities for greatness. I dont think its a coincidence that the two greatest president s, we will see in the rankings, that the top three is always the same. Its some combination of lincoln, then washington and then roosevelt or roosevelt and washington. Its always the same. Two of the president s served in perhaps the biggest crises that america has seen. Civil war and then world war ii and great depression. That gave them an opportunity to do things other president s who served in more calm times might not have had the chance to do. Didnt necessarily mean they would meet the challenges. But it was something that they could potentially do that others could not. This is actually clinton lamented. After 99 11, clinton said he wished he was president at that time. You had to have a signature moment of leadership. He never had the opportunity do so. A third problem is that president ial greatness is not set in stone. When we rate president s, those ratings, they will change over time as new information emerges. And as our own values change. An example of a president whose ranking has gone down over time would be john ken dichlt den. When john kennedy died, he was popular. He died under tragic circumstances. And the first appraisals of his presidency were written by people who had worked in kennedys presidency, held him in extremely high regard and didnt criticize really anything that he had done. But over time, we have learned new things about kennedy that has affected our opinion of him. We have learned about his chronic womanizing, womanizing that jeopardized his personal security as he was involved with prostitutes and other people that his staff procured for him. Womanizing that general ard diesed his independent ens. The afear with the mob boss. Womanizing that would be sexual harassment, involved with white house secretaries and employees within the government. We learned he has some responsibility of the unths involvement in vietnam, Foreign Policy that wasnt in Americas National interest. We learned that a lot of the new frontier was more for show than anything echls kennedy didnt have an interest in domestic policy. All the talk that his administration had about culture, those were thing were personally important. He seems to be a president that in the critics eyes showed more profile when he needed to show more courage to play on his book title. As a result, in the last ranking that were going to look at of political scientists in 2014, john kennedy was selected as the most overrated president. The most historically overrated president. Two president s who have gone in the other direction, their reputations have improved, are truman and icen hour. When truman left office, he was unpopular. Approaching where nixon was when he left office as a result of the watergate scandal. In february of 1952, harry truman hit 22 in Public Opinion polls. Just 22 approved of the job he was doing as president. But since then, we have come to see that his foreign policies had a lot of wisdom to them. Establishing nato. Sheparding the marshal plan through congress. These things were seen as essential members to forestall soviet expansion throughout europe. Trumans demeanor, his uponesty, plain spoke b ways, we gained greater appreciation for that when he was succeeded by Lincoln Johnson who lied to the country about the involvement in vietnam and Richard Nixon who was not a crook when he actually was a crook. Eisenhow eisenhower, another press who has been improved, whose ranking improved over time, when eisenhower left office, people thought he had been a nice guy but he had not really worked hard at his presidency. He had spent more time golfing than leading. He was a presider, not a president. New archival evidence has shown that was an image that eisenhower allowed people to have of him. He worked extremely hard behind the scenes to point of pushing himself to heart attacks. He claims to not engage in personalities. But he manipulated people left and right. And generally speaking, we have developed an appreciation for his political skills that people didnt have at the time. We also value some of the decision s eisenhower made as president that back then didnt necessarily seem significant. 1954, the french fall in vietnam, theres pressure on eisenhower to intervene. He says no that a ground war in Southeast Asia cannot be won. Therefore, should not be fought. Ten years later, the United States begins to seriously get involved in vietnam and we have a decadelong conflict that doesnt work out in our national interest, that seemed to be a wise decision with a lot of foresig foresight. In 1958, as people are argue the government needs to boost defense spending in response to sputnik, eisenhower warns against an industrial complex. A warning that seems press enter. This is why i also mention bush. Not saying bush is going to go down as a lincoln. We dont flow where bish is going to go down. When bush left office, people wrote columns, some scholars rated him as the worst president of all time. For me that was preposterous. He had just finished his presidency. So many of the thing ez did, were not going to know the true impact of those decisions until decades from now. If years from now iraq and afghanistan become Free Democratic societies that are bell waerns of change, lead to a spread of freedom, then ultimately, it does away with one of the Key National Security threats facing the United States, terrorism, then bush is going to down as a great president. Is that likely to happen . It doesnt seem that way. But we dont know. We have to wait and see. Its too early to be sure about where bush is going to fall in the pantheon of president s. Another problem is do you get point for trying . There are a lot of president s that successfully identified key issues before they became issues of national concern. They were on the right side of history. They took importance moral stances. But they didnt do anything to actually fix the problems. 194, truman spoerss a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform. Kennedy in 1963 finally comes out in favor of comprehensive civil rights legislation in congress. Something he dragged his feet on he promised a number of steps for civil rights, including ending public discrimination discrimination in Public Housing which he could do with the stroke of the president ial pen. Didnt actually take action until the pressure got to much in 1963. Theyre on the right side of the issue. But they dont get that legislation through congress. Its not until Lyndon Johnson is president that we see comprehensive receive you will rights legislation. How does that affect aan evaluation of their gradeness. Do they get credit for being on the right side of an issue or do we blame them for not fixing the issue . The issue of credit is a problem in general. A lot of times the accomplishments that were willing to attribute to a given president are debatable accomplishments. Whether they actually had something to do with those things or not. Its something that is open for discussion. A lot of timeless people say the president is great because the economy was great. This is used to make an argument for roosevelt, his great accomplishment is that he ended the great depression. Is that true . Well, not really. Things that roosevelt did certainly helps the United States set itself along a path for recovery. Public works programs are needed in the immediate aftermath of the start of the great depression. His financial reform legislation helped set the contact for more stable economy going forward. But by 1937, country has fallen into a massive recession. You be employment is around 20 . The thing that pulls the United States out depression is, of course, world war ii. Can we fairly say that roosevelt ended the depression . A lot of people think thats a great president do. But its debatable. Similarly, some scholars have said that the reagan winning cold war is the greatest Foreign Policy accomplishment of any president in the postwar period. Did reagan win the cold war . I mean, not really. Did he do things to help end the cold war . Absolutely. Reagans program of increased defense expenditures, including strategic defense initiative, star wars Missile Defense system, forced the soviet union to engage in an arms race at which they were no longer capable of doing so. That triggered reforms that ultimately led to their downfall. But other people had a role, too. Pope john paul ii, you take them out of the picture, maybe we get a different outcome. You can argue the soet jeff union had internal vulnerabilities that meant it was going to collapse some day anyway. Maybe reagan hastened that collapse. But he didnt necessarily cause it. These are two of