Were there any United States presidents who were thought at the time to be great successes, but who subsequent historians consider to be failures?

by peltist

It seems that the other direction (rising prestige of a president) has happened on at least some occasions. Have any past presidents' standings fallen substantially in the eyes of historians, or have those who have fallen in the rankings simply been surpassed by those whose standing has risen?

Bodark43

Sure, they rise and fall all the time. Some aspects are given more weight, now , than they used to get: War-time Presidents like Washington , Lincoln , Truman and FDR have tended to rate pretty high for leading the country through a crisis, but Wilson has now been taken down a few notches for his racism. Sometimes research brings more information, and time brings more nuanced judgement :Johnson was once held responsible for the Vietnam War disaster, now he seems to be more often ( notably in Robert Caro's books) an able politician saddled with a war he was advised to get into.

But ratings, numerical ranking of a President against all the others, are not that useful for understanding history. There are too many mixes , too many apples to compare to oranges. Wilson by our standards was an outrageous bigot- but he still was instrumental in creating what would eventually be the United Nations. JFK may have been a philanderer and did not manage to avoid getting into Vietnam...but he did start NASA and the race to the moon, which had countless very important technological spinoffs. And ratings can be quite biased: Libertarians think FDR was dead wrong in putting forward his New Deal, Socialists think it saved the country. I myself have had people argue that Polk was the greatest President because he brought Texas into the USA...(or maybe it was brought the USA to join Texas?...Texans, of course). In other words, in ratings there can be a lot of devils in the many details.