By the Maui Curmudgeon (31st in a 43-part series)

How do the U.S. Presidents stack up? I thought I’d find out by reading biographies of all 43 presidents, in the order of their administrations. Here are briefly the pros and cons of my discoveries, the interesting bits, and how I’d rank him. For comparison, I give you the 1982 Murrary-Blessing ranking, a survey of hundreds of leading historians who ranked each president by number. This survey is the gold standard of presidential rankings and is most cited when this kind of thing needs bringing up in media.

HERBERT HOOVER: 1929-1933 ~ 31st U.S. President

Herbert Hoover is the very embodiment of an important lesson in American public life: intelligence and experience does not necessarily make a leader. How smart was he? Well, at the end of World War I, he accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference.

Attending was John Maynard Keynes, the brilliant British economist. When the conference was over, Keynes said, “Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.”

Hoover came into the presidency as the heir apparent. Though President Calvin Coolidge despised Hoover (he called him “wonder boy” out of jealousy), Hoover, who had been Secretary of Commerce under the false “boom years” of the early 1920’s, took the reins supremely confident in American business and conservative rights. Was anyone more wrong? In less than seven months, people really were jumping out of windows to their deaths.

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