schlessinger was one of those that helped fashion this lesson. in the age of roosevelt in which schlessinger presented this thesis, he discussed the coming of the republicans as though they were barbarians sacking rum. that was the perception that schlessinger put out there in the 1920s and he was not alone. and the widely acclaimed book, the pocket history of the united states, allen nevins and henry stewart wrote that the idealism of the wilson era was in the past. and the decade and the bhuj what and ruthless. that didn't sound exciting and if you were a student back in those days and you never thought about studying the 20s, and i took all of that at face value and that began the change among historian, and i think the biggest change was in the 1980s when reagan was elected and there was among conservative intellectuals and economists and there was the rediscovery of tax cuts and what came to be known as supply side economics and a new group of historians emerged with the view of the 1920s and folsom and some others and johnson has written th

but as arthur schlessinger said, the main criterium is self-correction. and we've had a series of self-corrections from a very disruptive event in 2001 to where we're in a position in 2012 where there's a remarkable legal and political consensus in this country in favor of what president obama is doing. that is a carryover of the process under president bush. whether we have the perfect counterterrorism policies for reasons i discuss in the book, that's very hard to know. we don't have enough information about the threat, our values different about how we want to way the trade-off between liberty and security. but the point i want to end with is that these many constraints on the presidency that i describe in the book -- the name of the book is "power and constraint," and one of the themes in the book is where we worry many people, including myself, worry as much about the excessive powers of the presidency as we do about the terrorist threat, that these many, many constraints have been important in guiding the presidency away from some of its excesses an

kind of lists have been just absolutely torturing expresidents since the first one was put out by schlessingerent clinton was rating himself before this second term, i think. trying to figure out where he would stand. bob, you talked about two different categories or what joe just said. voters have one view, historians have another. where do they -- with which figures do they intersect? >> well, my insight was that we needed to sort of bring the voters into it because we had these polls of historians -- that's a body of literature that's been established over the decades, but the voters have a very strong opinions of these guys and they either re-elected them and after they re-elected they might have kept their party in power after the second term or might have rejected them as they did say jimmy carter. in terms of the interesting thing is that there's a great deal of correlation between what history says and what the voters say. but there's a lot of distinction as well. harry truman is a great example. he was essentially shown the door by the american people. they were very unhappy with him.

arthur schlessinger used to say that the argument over intervention from '38 to '41 really was as divisivenot more so an argument than vietnam was. that in its time, whether or not we were going to become involved in europe's struggles, was -- tore america apart in a way like vietnam and as we are now. and yet in this remarkable hour of mobilization. from more or less a stand still in '40 and '41, we became the world's greatest superpower in four years. and we did it by everybody chipping in. it was a common culture of sacrifice. it was a common effort. it involved industry. it involved our presidential leadership. it involved diplomacy. my god. >> the president's leadership. >> absolutely. arthur herman has a new book out. >> great book. >> which is about the coming together. and here is another moment. january 1941, after fdr has beaten wendell wilke, wilke comes to the white house and roosevelt sends him on a mission to europe to sort of reassure the european leaders that america is one. and he wrote out a -- quoted longfellow. he wrote out sail on, oh ship of states, sail out, union gr