The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple
“Anybody in the United States can grow up to be president,” quipped Gore Vidal. “And anybody has.” This was uttered long before our 45th president had even considered running, so clearly Vidal had other Oval Office occupants in mind.
Rankings of presidents tend to be popularity contests and not judgments about how consequential, for better and for worse, their years in office were. Barack Obama is far more popular than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, but can any serious historian argue that what he did was more consequential than what those two did?
