Robert K. Murray is Professor Emeritus of History at the Pennsylvania State University.
Tim H. Blessing is Associate Professor of History at Alvernia College.
“Murray and Blessing have picked up the baton, as it were, from
Schlesinger as the recorders of temporal evolution in the opinions
of historians regarding U.S. presidents. The results of their
recent update poll, subsequent to the publication of Greatness in
the White House, of just under five hundred historians—the first
such poll to include Ronald Reagan—were presented at a meeting of
the Organization of American Historians in April, 1991. . . . The
most ambitious objective of studies of presidential greatness,
suggested in the authors’ summary, is to identify the
characteristics which make a successful president, in order to
predict the performance of candidates. Murray and Blessing provide
a fairly comprehensive survey of the studies that attempt
this.”—Maryland Historical Magazine
“Greatness in the White House provides us with the latest of the
presidential polls, and the finest. . . . In seven chapters and a
concluding section, [Murray and Blessing] discuss the ratings game,
past polls as well as their own. Successive chapters follow on
appearance, background, character, personality, and administrative
achievements—as rating criteria—and reactions to presidential
rankings.”—The Historian
“Those who criticize presidential ranking ‘games’ for attempting to
quantify the unquantifiable should welcome this report, possibly as
much for what it tells us about American historians as for its
specific tabulations.”—The Journal of Southern History
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