# War and Presidential Greatness: Updating Henderson and Gochenour's Results
Chandler S. Reilly, Vincent Geloso (2025). The Independent Review.
In “War and Presidential Greatness,” David Henderson and Zachary Gochenour (2013) empirically investigate the question of whether presidential greatness (as determined by historians) is affected by the intensity of the wars that presidents wage. Their findings provide convincing evidence that more-intense wars, as measured by military deaths per capita, have a positive relationship with a president’s greatness rating even after controlling for various presidential characteristics.
One limitation of Henderson and Gochenour’s study, however, is their reliance on a single survey of historians. The purpose of this article is to investigate the same research questions as Henderson and Gochenour using additional data. To do so we have compiled surveys of historians on presidential greatness going back to 1948 as well as updated surveys for 2017 and 2021. Using the same measures of war intensity and presidential characteristics, we examine whether Henderson and Gochenour’s findings hold over time. We also introduce additional controls for GDP growth that follow Higgs’s (1992) corrections during World War II. Our findings suggest that since the turn of the twenty-first century, historians reward presidents who oversee intense wars, but there is weak evidence that earlier historians did the same. This evidence in large part confirms earlier findings but does present an interesting puzzle as to why historians during the mid- to late twentieth century were more reluctant to reward presidents who oversaw more-intense wars.
There are many potential explanations for this shift in historians’ perspective on presidents, but we focus on two. First, consider the fact that the ten presidents who oversaw the most intense wars in U.S. history were those who held office during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Apart from the Civil War, historians surveyed in 1948, 1962, and 1983 would likely have had direct experience with at least one of the three other wars, whether or not they themselves had served in the military. Knowing friends, family members, or others who had served or perhaps even died in those wars may have influenced their perspective of the presidents that oversaw those wars. In contrast, the historians surveyed in later years, starting in 2000, are less likely to have had this direct experience and have therefore taken on a perspective more inclined to view presidents who oversaw more-intense wars in a favorable light.
Second, there may also be a political component to the shift in perspective.[^1] It is well documented that historians, as a profession, have increasingly moved to the political left over the last several decades (Magness and Waugh 2022). The political left is not necessarily in favor of war; however, historians on their side of the political aisle do tend to support higher levels of state intervention (Whaples 1995). Using our “classical liberal index,” we find a negative correlation between military deaths per capita and the degree to which the president was classically liberal. This suggests that presidents who oversaw more-intense wars were also more likely to implement other programs of domestic intervention. But as we show in our work on the relationship between the liberal index and rating of presidential greatness (Geloso and Reilly 2023), historians’ political beliefs do not appear to affect their assessments. We are therefore skeptical of the political argument, favoring the speculation regarding personal experience with more-intense wars to explain the shift in historians’ perspectives over time.
[^1]: For example, isolationist views were far more popular and respectable before 1941 than after. Historians closer to the 1940s might still have carried some vestiges of these views by the 1960s.
The next section of this paper details the updated data we use to expand the analysis of presidential greatness and presents our empirical model used to estimate the relationships of interest. Then, we discuss our results. The final section offers our concluding comments.
## Updated Data and Empirical Model
Following Henderson and Gochenour (2013), we rely on historians’ rankings of presidents as our measure of presidential greatness. However, while those authors used only the C-SPAN survey scores from 2009, we also include C-SPAN survey scores from 2000, 2017, and 2021. Additionally, we include three other surveys of historians: those from 1948, 1962, and 1982. The 1948 and 1962 surveys were conducted by the historian Arthur Schlesinger (1949; 1962), who asked panels of fifty-five and seventy-five experts, respectively, to rate the presidents. Murray and Blessing (1983) conducted the 1982 survey, sampling a much larger group of 846 historians.
All survey scores are standardized into z-scores. Presidents viewed more favorably by the surveyed historians received higher standardized scores; presidents viewed less favorably received lower scores. For example, a score of 1 is interpreted as a president being rated one standard deviation higher than the presidents’ average score for that survey year. Using these survey scores provides us with the opportunity to use six additional sets of scores to estimate whether historians consistently reward presidents who oversee intense wars.
Our primary variable of interest is the rank of military deaths per capita as constructed by Henderson and Gochenour (2013). Their construction of this variable included defining the time of a war (e.g., World War I) and then calculating the number of war dead as a percentage of the American population at the time. The variable is then converted to a rank where the lower the military deaths per capita, the higher the rank across presidents. One important note about this measure is that it includes only military deaths on the president’s side of the war, such that the values during the Civil War count only Union soldier deaths.
We also include a set of control variables for a number of presidential characteristics, drawing from Nichols (2012), Henderson and Gochenour (2013), Garmon et al. (2020), and Geloso and Shera (2023). They include the length of a president’s tenure, his intellect, wartime victories, the duration of war, the presence of a major scandal (e.g., impeachment), political assassination (e.g., President Kennedy), and war hero status (e.g., President Washington). Additionally, we include various measures of economic growth during a president’s tenure. The first is simply the official reported growth rate of GDP per capita. Second, following Geloso and Shera (2023), we apply the corrections to GDP during World War II as suggested by Higgs (1992). Our other two measures are the official and corrected for World War II mismeasurement deviations from long-run growth trends. The purpose of the deviation variable is to address the potential issue of a president experiencing high rates of growth largely due to his entering at the trough of a recession. In our view, the deviation variable corrected for World War II is the most accurate measure of economic well-being.
Summary statistics for each of our variables are shown in table 1. The top panel shows summary statistics for all forty presidents in our sample. The lower panel shows summary statistics for the restricted sample of twenty-nine presidents that appear across all the surveys in our data. Readers should note that we include only forty presidents (the most recent being George W. Bush) owing to a combination of more recent presidents being too fresh and data being unavailable for some of our control variables.
**Table 1: Mean and Standard Deviation of Each Variable Used to Rank Presidential Greatness**
| Variable | Mean | SD |
|---|---|---|
| Full Sample (N = 40) | | |
| Military deaths per capita | 559.1 | 2,512 |
| Military deaths per capita rank | 14.72 | 5.944 |
| C-SPAN 2017 survey score | 0 | 1.000 |
| C-SPAN 2021 survey score | 0 | 1.000 |
| President’s tenure | 5.387 | 2.441 |
| President’s intellect | −0.0325 | 1.002 |
| Victory in war | 0.375 | 0.838 |
| Duration of war | 1.150 | 1.847 |
| Scandal | 0.125 | 0.335 |
| War hero | 0.150 | 0.362 |
| Assassination | 0.0500 | 0.221 |
| GDP per capita growth | 0.0169 | 0.0217 |
| GDP per capita growth corrected for WWII | 0.0178 | 0.0210 |
| Growth deviation | 1.002 | 0.153 |
| Growth deviation corrected for WWII | 0.997 | 0.157 |
| Restricted Sample (N = 29) | | |
| Military deaths per capita | 740.9 | 2,943 |
| Military deaths per capita rank | 15.41 | 6.384 |
| C-SPAN 2017 survey score | −0.112 | 1.086 |
| C-SPAN 2021 survey score | −0.106 | 1.098 |
| 1948 survey score | 0.00103 | 1.001 |
| 1962 survey score | −0.00379 | 1.017 |
| 1982 survey score | −0.0279 | 1.070 |
| C-SPAN 2000 survey score | −0.106 | 1.094 |
| President’s tenure | 5.362 | 2.440 |
| President’s intellect | −0.0897 | 1.083 |
| Victory in war | 0.448 | 0.827 |
| Duration of war | 0.759 | 1.527 |
| Scandal | 0.0690 | 0.258 |
| War hero | 0.172 | 0.384 |
| Assassination | 0.0345 | 0.186 |
| GDP per capita growth | 0.0166 | 0.0246 |
| GDP per capita growth corrected for WWII | 0.0155 | 0.0224 |
| Growth deviation | 0.959 | 0.151 |
| Growth deviation corrected for WWII | 0.954 | 0.156 |
Our empirical model is given by the following equation:
*Scorei* = β0 + β1*Military Deaths per Capita Ranki* + γ′*X* + *ϵi*
In this equation, *Scorei* is the standardized score obtained by a president according to different surveys of presidential performance, and *Military Deaths per Capita Ranki* is the military deaths per capita rank, with rank 1 representing the highest number of military combat deaths per capita in our sample. Under those definitions of our variables, if β1 is negative, the interpretation is that presidents who oversaw more-intense wars are rated more favorably by historians. *X* is our vector of controls that include presidential characteristics as described above and our various measures of economic well-being. We first estimate specifications using the updated C-SPAN surveys from 2017 and 2021 for our full sample; then we replicate these results using the earlier survey years 1948, 1962, 1982, and 2000, which restrict the sample to twenty-nine presidents.
## Results
Table 2 first shows our results for the relationship between war intensity and scores from the 2017 C-SPAN survey. Column 1 shows the linear relationship between the military deaths per capita rank and presidential scores, which is negative and statistically significant. The negative relationship given by this coefficient suggests that as the rank of military deaths per capita decreases (i.e., the higher military death per capita for a given president), the standardized score of a president increases (i.e., the president is viewed more favorably by the surveyed historians). For instance, comparing the favorability of Richard Nixon (military deaths per capita rank 9) to Woodrow Wilson (military deaths per capita rank 4), over half of a standard deviation increase in Woodrow Wilson’s favorability is attributed to his lower military deaths per capita rank.
**Table 2: OLS Estimated Regression Results from the 2017 C-SPAN Survey Scores**
| Variable | (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Military deaths per capita rank | −0.111\*\*\* | −0.067\*\*\* | −0.062\*\*\* | −0.077\*\*\* | −0.078\*\*\* |
| | (0.017) | (0.017) | (0.016) | (0.019) | (0.019) |
| Number of observations | 40 | 40 | 40 | 40 | 40 |
| R-squared | 0.439 | 0.787 | 0.796 | 0.806 | 0.804 |
| Controls for presidential features | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GDP per capita growth | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| GDP per capita growth corrected for WWII | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Growth deviation | No | No | No | Yes | No |
| Growth deviation corrected for WWII | No | No | No | No | Yes |
*Note:* Robust standard errors are in parentheses.
\**p* < .05 \*\**p* < .01 \*\*\**p* < .001
Columns 2 through 5 introduce our control variables into each specification, and we find that the estimated relationship continues to be negative and statistically significant. While the estimate does decrease somewhat in magnitude as our controls are introduced, these results show a robust relationship between the rank of military deaths per capita and presidential scores. Comparing Richard Nixon with Woodrow Wilson again, Wilson’s military deaths per capita rank is associated with a 0.4 standard deviation increase in his favorability, not much lower than the initial estimate.
Table 3 replicates the regressions from table 2 using the scores from the 2021 C-SPAN survey. Across our specifications we again find a negative and statistically significant relationship. The magnitudes of our estimates are also close to those found for the 2017 C-SPAN survey scores. According to the estimate on military deaths per capita rank in column 5 of table 3, there is a 0.39 standard deviation increase in favorability attributed to military deaths per capita rank when comparing Richard Nixon with Woodrow Wilson. Much like Henderson and Gochenour (2013), we find strong evidence that historians tend to view presidents who oversaw more-intense wars more favorably.
**Table 3: OLS Estimated Regression Results from the 2021 C-SPAN Survey Scores**
| Variable | (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) | (5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Military deaths per capita rank | −0.106\*\*\* | −0.048\*\*\* | −0.043\*\*\* | −0.060\*\*\* | −0.061\*\*\* |
| | (0.019) | (0.015) | (0.015) | (0.013) | (0.014) |
| Number of observations | 40 | 40 | 40 | 40 | 40 |
| R-squared | 0.400 | 0.759 | 0.769 | 0.767 | 0.765 |
| Controls for presidential features | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GDP per capita growth | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| GDP per capita growth corrected for WWII | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Growth deviation | No | No | No | Yes | No |
| Growth deviation corrected for WWII | No | No | No | No | Yes |
\**p* < .05 \*\**p* < .01 \*\*\**p* < .001
We supplement our main results by investigating the same regressions using presidential scores from earlier surveys. Table 4 presents the results from these regressions. Starting from the 1948 survey, we find a negative relationship between military deaths per capita and presidential scores, though it is not statistically significant, as shown in column 1. Similarly, columns 2 and 3 show the results for the 1962 and 1982 surveys, which are negative but only statistically significant at the 10 percent level. It is not until we reach the 2000 survey in column 4 that the negative relationship becomes statistically significant at the 5 percent level. The magnitudes of our estimates using the restricted sample are also smaller. For example, comparing two other presidents whose military deaths per capita rank differs by 5, Harry Truman (rank 6) and Abraham Lincoln (rank 1), shows only a 0.21 standard deviation increase in Lincoln’s favorability according to the estimate given in column 6 of table 4.
**Table 4: OLS Estimated Regression Results Using Scores from All Survey Years and the Restricted Sample of Presidents**
| Variable | 1948 Survey (1) | 1962 Survey (2) | 1982 Survey (3) | 2000 Survey (4) | 2017 Survey (5) | 2021 Survey (6) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Military deaths per capita rank | −0.030 | −0.040\* | −0.046\* | −0.044\*\* | −0.041\*\* | −0.042\*\* |
| | (0.021) | (0.020) | (0.025) | (0.017) | (0.016) | (0.019) |
| Number of observations | 29 | 29 | 29 | 29 | 29 | 29 |
| R-squared | 0.806 | 0.818 | 0.860 | 0.851 | 0.843 | 0.786 |
| Controls for presidential features | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Growth deviation corrected for WWII | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
\**p* < .05 \*\**p* < .01 \*\*\**p* < .001
This set of results presents an interesting puzzle. Though there is strong evidence that historians since 2000 have viewed presidents who were in office during intense wars as great, the evidence of this during previous decades is much weaker. More contemporary historians appear to view higher levels of death during war as a major component of presidential greatness than did historians of the past. Although we can provide only conjectures to explain this pattern, earlier historians may have placed less of a premium on this component of presidential greatness because they were more likely to have witnessed the realities of the more-intense wars. They may also have been personally impacted. The presidents who oversaw the most intense wars include those in office during World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. All three wars had high military deaths per capita, and soldiers were conscripted to bolster American forces. These factors make it likely that historians being surveyed in 1948, 1962, and 1982 knew people who had died in war or people who had been conscripted and survived but remained impacted by it (e.g., from PTSD). We want to emphasize that this explanation should be interpreted only as speculation as we do not have survey data to test the hypothesis.
An additional hypothesis that may explain why only historians since 2000 seem to perceive as great the presidents who oversaw more-intense wars is related to changes in the political beliefs of historians. Many surveys have shown that, as a profession, historians have been predominantly left leaning since the 1960s (Spaulding and Turner 1968; Klein and Stern 2005; Langbert et al. 2016; Magness and Waugh 2022). However, those on the political left have opposed some of the most intense wars waged by the U.S. government, such as the Vietnam War. Furthermore, using a classical liberalism index, we have tested the hypothesis that the political beliefs of historians influence their rankings of presidents (Geloso and Reilly 2023). The index measures how classically liberal each president was using factors such as changes in the size of government relative to the economy, changes in trade tariffs, and changes in inflation. We find no evidence that historians are systematically biased against more classically liberal presidents (who would also tend to be more inclined toward nonmilitary solutions in foreign affairs). Those results are useful here in that they also provide evidence against the hypothesis that ideology is behind the shift in historians’ perspectives with respect to presidential greatness and war. Although the other hypothesis discussed above is mere speculation, we believe that personal experience with more-intense wars has more to do with changes in the ratings of presidential greatness over time as presented in this article. Additional research is necessary to test the hypothesis more directly.
## Conclusion
In this paper we have presented evidence that from 2000 through 2021, historians have indeed viewed a president’s involvement in intense wars as a major component of greatness. These results provide additional evidence to the findings of Henderson and Gochenour (2013), who were troubled by results indicating that historians celebrate presidents that go to war. Our results for earlier historians suggest this has not always been the case. There is very weak evidence that historians in 1948, 1962, and 1982 saw intense wars as a major component of presidential greatness. Personal experience, political beliefs, or both may explain why earlier historians did not reward presidents that go to war. However, the results of other research lead us to place more weight on the personal experience hypothesis.
## References
C-SPAN. 2000. C-SPAN 2000 Survey of Presidential Leadership. Accessed September 1, 2024. https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2000%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF.
C-SPAN. 2009. C-SPAN 2009 Survey of Presidential Leadership. Accessed September 1, 2024. https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2009%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF.
C-SPAN. 2017. C-SPAN 2017 Survey of Presidential Leadership. Accessed September 1, 2024. https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2017%20C-SPAN%20Presidential%20Survey%20Scores%20and%20Ranks%20FINAL.PDF.
C-SPAN. 2021. C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership. Accessed September 1, 2024. https://static.c-spanvideo.org/assets/documents/presidentSurvey/2021-Survey-Results-Overall.pdf.
Garmon Frank, Jr., Vincent Geloso, and Phillip Magness. 2020. Divided Government and the Bias against Presidential Restraint. *Social Science Journal* 61 (2): 474–91.
Geloso, Vincent, and Marcus Shera. 2023. Presidents in Deficit: Are There Historical Rewards to Deficits? *Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice* 38 (4): 1–16.
Geloso, Vincent, and Chandler S. Reilly. 2023. Are Historians Increasingly Illiberal? GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 23-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4519683.
Henderson, David R., and Zachary Gochenour. 2013. War and Presidential Greatness. *The Independent Review* 17 (4): 505–16.
Higgs, Robert. 1992. Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the US Economy in the 1940s. *The Journal of Economic History* 52 (1): 41–60.
Klein, Daniel B., and Charlotta Stern. 2005. Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of Social Scientists. *Critical Review* 17 (3–4): 257–303.
Langbert, Mitchell, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein. 2016. Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology. *Econ Journal Watch* 13 (3): 422–51.
Magness, Phillip W., and David Waugh. 2022. The Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed: Trends in Faculty Political Ideology, 1969–Present. *The Independent Review* 27 (3): 359–69.
Murray, Robert K., and Tim H. Blessing. 1983. The Presidential Performance Study: A Progress Report. *Journal of American History* 70 (3): 535–55.
Nichols, Curt. 2012. The Presidential Ranking Game: Critical Review and Some New Discoveries. *Presidential Studies Quarterly* 42 (2): 275–99.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. 1949. *Paths to the Present.* New York: Macmillan.
———. 1962. Our Presidents: A Rating by 75 Historians. *New York Times Magazine*, July 29, 1962. https://www.nytimes.com/1962/07/29/archives/our-presidents-a-rating-by-75-historians-a-poll-of-exports.html.
Spaulding, Charles B., and Henry A. Turner. 1968. Political Orientation and Field of Specialization among College Professors. *Sociology of Education* 41 (3): 247–62.
Whaples, Robert. 1995. Where Is There Consensus among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions. *Journal of Economic History* 55 (1): 139–54.