Who is the most overrated U.S. president in American history?

Reputations move. A president near the top of every school textbook is exactly the kind of name this question is looking for.

1. 1
   John F. Kennedy

   Ranks near the top of most public polls on barely a thousand days in office.
2. 2
   Woodrow Wilson

   Idealised for the League of Nations, and re-examined hard for everything else.
3. 3
   Andrew Jackson

   Celebrated for a century as the people's president, and judged very differently now.
4. 4
   Theodore Roosevelt

   The energy and the anecdotes are undisputed; historians argue about how much actually changed.
5. 5
   Thomas Jefferson

   Wrote the country's founding sentence and spent a presidency complicating it.
6. 6
   Franklin D. Roosevelt

   Twelve years, four elections and a reputation that leaves little room for the criticism.
7. 7
   Abraham Lincoln

   Sits at number one on nearly every list, which is itself a reason people argue about him.
8. 8
   Dwight D. Eisenhower

   The quiet decade gets credit that the decade itself may not have earned.
9. 9
   James K. Polk

   A historians' favourite for doing exactly what he promised, whatever that turned out to mean.
10. 10
    Calvin Coolidge

    Remembered for silence and prosperity, and for what followed the prosperity.
11. 11
    John Adams

    A founder whose single term is often graded on the founding rather than the term.
12. 12
    James Monroe

    Gave his name to a doctrine he did not write and an era he mostly presided over.
13. 13
    Ulysses S. Grant

    Rehabilitated so thoroughly in recent decades that the correction may have overshot.

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