This week, Leonard Leo, Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Studies, spoke with the Center for Individual Freedom’s Renee Giachino, who hosts the radio talk show "Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense" on WEBY 1330 AM in Northwest Florida. Together with James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, Leo co-edited "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House," a recently released must-read book that examines our Nation’s leaders in a collection of refreshing, enlightening essays, written by a distinguished and diverse group of historians, journalists, and current and former high-ranking government officials. The list of essay authors reads like a Who’s Who list of American politics, including, to name only a few, Lynne Cheney, John McCain, Edwin Meese, Theodore Olson, Kenneth Starr, Peggy Noonan, and Terry Eastland, who serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for Individual Freedom Foundation.

What follows are excerpts from the interview.

GIACHINO: Good afternoon Leonard, thank you for joining me to talk about your book and what I can best describe as a must-read for every American – certainly this year and every fourth year when we tackle the critically important task of electing our Nation’s President.

LEO: It’s a pleasure to be with you, Renee.

GIACHINO: Thank you. The book commences with a brilliant forward written by author and former political appointee William Bennett, followed by a brief introduction to the Office of the President and the Constitution. What comes next, just to give our listeners a glance into the book, is what is likely the impetus for the book itself: the results of a national survey conducted by your organization, the Federalist Society, together with the Wall Street Journal, which ranks our nation’s leaders from Washington to Clinton.

Leonard, tell us briefly about that survey, how it was conducted and how it may be different from other surveys ranking our Nation’s Presidents.

LEO: What the Federalist Society and the Wall Street Journal set out to do was to basically, at the outset, create a more balanced ranking than had previously existed of the Presidents. Arthur Schlesinger, for a number of years, had been rating the Presidents, turning to a number of liberal political experts and scholars, and that ranking was very biased. For example, Ronald Reagan, in the Schlesinger survey most recently conducted, ranked 25th, which is a far cry from what I think most Americans, even most Americans who don’t agree entirely with his policies, would say he stands on our spectrum. So we wanted to create a more objective rating and ranking, and we set out to do that by approaching a balanced committee of scholars, six in total, who then picked 132 experts that they knew, again a wide variety of Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Those folks rated the Presidents and then we compiled those ratings for the Wall Street Journal, and those ratings were published in November of 2000. We did not intend on having a book that stemmed from the ratings. But the ratings were so interesting that we decided to go off and get essays on each of the Presidents and combine that with the ratings and have a more thorough examination of presidential leadership.

GIACHINO: Well, I think your selection of the authors really made a difference in the book. As I read the book, it meant more to me than a book about our Presidents; because in my opinion it is also a history book of our Nation. But unlike most history books, what I found is that this one is much easier to read and digest, and I think at least in part because of the format that you used, that is the short, four or five page essays on each President, each written by a different author, with a different writing style. And I found myself, whether I had only a limited amount of time to read a couple of essays at a one time, or time for a longer sitting, I found the different writing styles refreshing and easy to get through. So I think that for the listeners out there this is certainly a book that you can pick up and put down in our busy lives, although it is difficult to put down because it is written and edited so well.

You mentioned, Leonard, that Ronald Reagan has been ranked much lower than your book, your survey, ranks him. The survey ranks Ronald Reagan 8th, which falls in the category of "Near Great." Following on his death last month and the outpouring of admiration toward him, how do you think his ranking would change at all following his death?

LEO: I think that over time his ranking as a President will only increase. People are beginning to understand that President Reagan was not only as many people in the media described him as a "great communicator," but he had a great set of ideas to communicate. He had a vision. He had a sense of purpose. He had firm convictions about the role of government. And if there is a common thread that we found in both the rating and in the essays, between what made a President great and what made him less than great or a failure, it was whether that President had a vision, sense of purpose, whether that President was a man of ideas. Ronald Reagan clearly had those attributes as a President and as a world leader. And with the demise of communism and with the history that is being written now about his years of service, I think more and more people will come to appreciate that aspect of him.

GIACHINO: Yes, I think many already have. Leonard, in the foreword, William Bennett writes that "Some of our presidents came from humble means, some from quasi-aristocratic backgrounds; but they were our presidents, our leaders, and we celebrated them and taught their greatness – however they achieved it." And I am sad to say, but one conclusion I draw after reading the book is that it seems the public’s perception of the Office of the President has fallen over time. Do you think this is an accurate conclusion? And if so, who do you think we have to blame? Is it the Presidents themselves, would it be the media, would it be the public’s demands on the Office, or some combination of all or none of the above?

LEO: The Office of the President has ebbed and flowed in terms of its preeminence in American history. For example, just before Lincoln, the pre-Civil War period, James Buchanan and some other Presidents did a lot of disservice to the institution of the presidency by not being firm in their convictions. Now, I think one of the things that Ronald Reagan faced when he was President was an Office of the Presidency that had been greatly weakened. He was preceded, of course, by Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, all of whom in their own way weakened the institution of the presidency, the Office of the President. And, of course, Reagan was later book-ended by Bill Clinton, who also weakened the institution of the presidency by having it harbor under a cloud of lots of allegations of scandals.

So, I think one of the things that actually makes President Reagan a great President according to our rankers is that here is a man who stepped into these huge shoes of the Office of the Presidency at a time when people didn’t really think that it was possible to find a man great enough to fill those shoes and he managed to do it. So, in a way, his presidency is one chapter in the life of the Office of the Presidency where we sought to recapture some of its glisten and some of its shine.

GIACHINO: Leonard, you talk about how some of Reagan’s success may be because he had a vision. But, despite the Number 2 ranking that the book gives to Abraham Lincoln, in the essay written by Jay Winik, he remarks how ill-prepared he felt President Lincoln was for the job and the strong criticism against him during his presidency, including some people even calling him a "cowardly imbecile." Can you offer any explanation as to why he is now generally ranked as one of the best Presidents we have ever had?

LEO: Lincoln was ill-prepared for the Office, and, as Jay Winik points out in his wonderful essay on Lincoln, Lincoln was derided for his conduct of the war by almost everybody, including his own cabinet. But the difference between a great President and one who faces those types of challenges is one who is able to turn those challenges around and overcome adversity, and that Lincoln did. Lincoln adopted a policy of unconditional war, unconditional surrender. He decided at some point before his second term that he was going to win this war and stop at nothing to accomplish that. I think that is what secured for him a place of presidential greatness because once again he showed a level of conviction, a sense of tenaciousness in the face of adversity that is generally the stuff of presidential greatness.

GIACHINO: Before we get to our callers who have questions, I want to highlight again the importance of this book. People see a book like this sitting on the shelf and they say, "I have read so much about the Presidents, I have heard all about them through schooling," but I want the listeners to know that I promise them that if they read this book there is a lot more that they will learn about our Presidents. And, the book obviously contains the highlights and, in some unfortunate situations, the low points, of each presidential office. But what I also found interesting about the book is the amount of, for lack of a better word, "lesser" information, what some might call fodder for "trivial pursuit" playing, that’s peppered throughout. For example, I never knew that our 12th President, Zachary Taylor, never voted or held elective office before becoming President, or that our 14th President, Franklin Pierce, "fainted after falling from his horse, ‘being injured in that portion of a man’s anatomy that is least tolerant of suffering,’" or that our 15th President, James Buchanan, "was farsighted in one eye and nearsighted in the other." And then perhaps my favorite, that our 25th President, William McKinley, "had no mistresses." Why do you think as an editor that it was important to include these sorts of tidbits in your book?

LEO: We wanted people to have a sense of who each of the Presidents were. In other words, greatness and leadership is something that is a consequence of circumstance and of up-bringing and of innate intellectual ability. I think a lot of what constitutes greatness has to do with who you are and who you have been as a person over the years. We wanted to give people a flavor for who these folks were. For example, it’s amazing that James Madison, a man who’d never traveled more than 400 miles from his home, could have been the drafter of one of the greatest documents of all time, the Constitution. It says a lot about his ability. It says a lot about his conviction and sense of purpose. So those little tidbits I think give you an insight into the man, the challenges they face, the eccentricities they have, which may or may not contribute to their greatness or lack thereof.

GIACHINO: I think you also did a great job of hitting both sides of partisanship in selecting the authors and giving them a lot of leeway to write their essays. For example, in the essay about James Buchanan, Christopher Buckley writes that President Buchanan was blamed for the Civil War and that "he finally did what most Democratic ex-Presidents do — write a book blaming everything on the Republicans." I mean, you could not help but chuckle out loud when you read that.

Leonard, if you don’t mind, I would like to take a call from one of our listeners.

CALLER: I don’t know if Mr. Leo has read the book "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas DiLorenzo, but I wonder, judging by the name of Mr. Leo’s organization, the Federalist Society, if he believes in state’s rights, which is what a federal government should have, then I would think that you would rank Lincoln probably at the bottom.

LEO: That’s a very good question or comment. Lincoln, of course, did a lot to aggrandize the power of the federal government during the Civil War. I do think that some of our legal scholars who were rating the Presidents probably took some of that into account. Part of the problem with rating Lincoln based on what he did to the institution of the federal government is that rating the Presidents is in some ways a game of weighing a lot of different things in a person’s background and career. I think Lincoln gets very high marks because he was a man of ideas and he had a vision of what he wanted to accomplish. He certainly was tenacious in his pursuit of that goal and he did speak out very boldly about the scourge of slavery, something which, for example, his predecessor James Buchanan did not do, and because of Buchanan’s flip-flop nature on that issue, he has uniformly been ranked as a failure as a President. So it’s a complicated issue. But I think that when you look at Lincoln in the aggregate, those achievements, those qualities, that determination, right or wrong, contribute to his high ranking.

GIACHINO: And I encourage our listeners who go out and buy the book, which I hope they will, to look in the back of the book and examine the Appendix and they will see that there are a lot of criteria that were used in the rankings and that that certainly evidences that it is not just the issue of state’s rights, but many others, that went into ranking the different Presidents as they did in the survey book.

Leonard, we are just about out of time and I know that the book is available in local bookstores but can people also purchase it on your website? What is the address?

LEO: Yes, they can purchase it from either of two websites. One is the Federalist Society’s website which is www.fed-soc.org or from a website dedicated to the book called www.presidential-leadership.com.

GIACHINO: Leonard, thank you again for your time and this wonderful book.