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

John F. Kennedy

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

2

Woodrow Wilson

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

3

Andrew Jackson

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

4

Theodore Roosevelt

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

5

Thomas Jefferson

Wrote the country's founding sentence and spent a presidency complicating it.

6

Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

7

Abraham Lincoln

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

8

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The quiet decade gets credit that the decade itself may not have earned.

9

James K. Polk

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

10

Calvin Coolidge

Remembered for silence and prosperity, and for what followed the prosperity.

11

John Adams

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

12

James Monroe

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

13

Ulysses S. Grant

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