History professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Kennedy has written famously about American presidents and their role in shaping our country, but until now he never went on record with his pick for the best president ever. In the movies, that is.
In its November issue, the Atlantic Monthly invited Kennedy, ’63, along with history professors from Harvard, Columbia and Boston University, to rate 11 movie presidents for their ability to manage the country in a crisis. The candidates ranged from Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove to Robert Fowler (James Cromwell) in last summer’s The Sum of All Fears.
The historians ranked the Hollywood presidents as great, near great, average, below average or failure. It was a sorry lot, but even so, Kennedy told Stanford, “Celluloid presidents offer far more nourishment to the imagination than most of the real ones.” In making his reviews, he quipped, “I followed the example of one of my favorite movie critics, Joe Bob Briggs, and treated this assignment with all the seriousness it deserved.”
James Marshall (Harrison Ford) of Air Force One and Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) of The American President won top honors, but even they were considered below average overall. Marshall, who rescues his family and the nation after terrorists hijack the presidential airplane, won Kennedy’s vote as “a can-do, take-charge, damn-the-torpedoes kind of guy.” As for Shepherd, a widower embroiled in controversy over his lobbyist girlfriend, Kennedy wrote: “He was a weak leader who succumbed to the admittedly abundant charms of Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening) and made himself a pawn of the environmental movement.” Shepherd did have one thing going for him: according to the script, he was a Stanford grad.
