Having recently explored the war decisions of the five worst wartime presidents of American history, we turn now to the country’s five greatest war presidents. Their success, like the failure of their counterparts at the bottom of the spectrum, offers lessons of presidential leadership worthy of notice and even study.
As noted earlier, of the country’s forty-four presidents, thirteen were serious war presidents—Madison, Polk, Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Obama. Of these, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and Obama inherited wars, while the rest (plus Truman again) initiated them. In all instances, their handling of the conflicts played a key role in the voters’ contemporaneous assessments as well as in history’s subsequent judgment.
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