presidential greatness

A news item has been running around that historians have once again been asked to rank all US presidents in order of greatness, with the obvious one coming last and the relatives of James Buchanan thanking the scholars for getting him out of the bottom hole at last. However, it's hard to get at the actual list, and I had to fight my way past a series of "Danger Will Robinson" warning labels from my internet security provider to do it.

So as a public service, here's the list, enhanced by me with full names and terms of office. The authors forgot that there were two presidents named Harrison so they didn't distinguish them, so I just guessed which was which. Also, although Biden is called #46 there are only 45 names because there was a 19th-century president, Grover Cleveland, who served two separated terms and gets two numbers - a numbering practice not followed in any other case I know of office-holders more likely to experience repetitions.

1. Abraham Lincoln (1861-65)
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45)
3. George Washington (1789-97)
4. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09)
5. Thomas Jefferson (1801-09)
6. Harry S. Truman (1945-53)
7. Barack Obama (2009-17)
8. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
9. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
10. John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
11. James Madison (1809-17)
12. Bill Clinton (1993-2001)
13. John Adams (1797-1801)
14. Joe Biden (2021- )
15. Woodrow Wilson (1913-21)
16. Ronald Reagan (1981-89)
17. Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77)
18. James Monroe (1817-25)
19. George H.W. Bush (1989-93)
20. John Quincy Adams (1825-29)
21. Andrew Jackson (1829-37)
22. Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
23. William H. Taft (1909-13)
24. William McKinley (1897-1901)
25. James K. Polk (1845-49)
26. Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97)
27. Gerald R. Ford (1974-77)
28. Martin Van Buren (1837-41)
29. Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81)
30. James A. Garfield (1881)
31. Benjamin Harrison (1889-93)
32. Calvin Coolidge (1923-29)
33. Chester A. Arthur (1881-85)
34. George W. Bush (2001-09)
35. Richard Nixon (1969-74)
36. Herbert Hoover (1929-33)
37. John Tyler (1841-45)
38. Zachary Taylor (1849-50)
39. Millard Fillmore (1850-53)
40. Warren G. Harding (1921-23)
41. William H. Harrison (1841)
42. Franklin Pierce (1853-57)
43. Andrew Johnson (1865-69)
44. James Buchanan (1857-61)
45. Donald J. Trump (2017-21)

I would find it difficult to vote in a survey like this. How do you account for actual malignancy in presidents? I count five clear-cut cases, not all of which are ranked at the very bottom; plus about three more with malignant traits passing beyond foolish or erroneous policy, and no, I'm not counting "being a slave-owner in a slave-owning society" as evidence of malignancy. (Though it is notable that only 3 of our first 18 presidents were entirely free of either the taint of this practice or of fellow-traveling in its favor.)