Which presidents sit closest and farthest apart

Uncanted places each U.S. president once, from the public governing record, on economics and on authority versus liberty. Distance is the straight line between those two numbers. It is not a ranking of greatness, and it is not a claim that the closer pair governed alike. The closest pair on the current file is Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, two points apart. Washington and Van Buren, Madison and Garfield, and William Henry Harrison and both Hayes and Eisenhower sit just under three points apart. The longest distance is Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, about 122 points. Coolidge and Roosevelt are essentially the same stretch. Johnson and Reagan are a little shorter, and Harding and Roosevelt are still over a hundred.

Start with the short distances, because they are the easiest to misuse. Andrew Johnson’s placement note is that he fought Congressional Reconstruction, was impeached and acquitted, and slowed Black citizenship. Nixon’s note is a different century: the opening to China, wage and price controls, a war he inherited and widened and then left, and a resignation. They land close because both records pull toward authority and neither pulls far toward a public-ownership economy. The chart has no third axis for Reconstruction, and no third axis for Watergate. A reader who treats the two-point gap as a theory of the presidency has asked the square to do work it cannot do.

Washington and Van Buren are close for a quieter reason. Both sit modestly to the right of center on economics and modestly toward authority. Washington’s note is federal credit, a commercial republic, and restraint about faction. Van Buren’s is hard money and an independent treasury through a depression. The similarity is a temperament about the federal establishment, not a shared crisis. Madison and Garfield are close because both sit near the middle. One wrote the Constitution and chartered a bank in wartime. The other was shot before a program could become a record. The page for Garfield says the dot is that unfinished program. Closeness to Madison is not a compliment and not an insult. It is what a short, moderate file looks like next to another moderate file.

Harrison, Hayes, and Eisenhower sit together because the file puts all three near a mild market reading and a mild authority reading. Harrison died a month into the term. The dot follows the Whig ticket he ran on, and the page says that. Hayes withdrew troops from the South and started a civil-service cleanup. Eisenhower’s record is a highway system, a restrained conservatism, and the use of federal troops at Little Rock. Those are not the same presidencies. They are three records that do not pull hard toward either edge. The middle of the square is crowded for that reason. Most governments are not trying to be an edge case.

The long distances are easier to narrate and just as easy to overread. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and wartime state sit far toward a public role and toward authority: public works, Social Security, regulation, and a presidency that used emergency power for a decade. Ronald Reagan’s note is the opposite corner of the economic axis: tax cuts, a harder line on the Soviet Union, and a rhetoric of getting government out of the way, with deficits and a drug war that did not match the rhetoric. The 122 points are those two directions. They are not a measure of who was a better president. A reader who wanted that argument was never going to get it from a coordinate.

Calvin Coolidge sits near Reagan on the economic axis and far from Roosevelt. The placement note is a small government, a quiet White House, and a boom he did not try to manage. Lyndon Johnson sits toward Roosevelt: civil-rights statutes, Medicare, and the war in Vietnam. The distance between Coolidge and Johnson, and between Johnson and Reagan, is the New Deal argument drawn as a line. Harding sits far from Roosevelt for the same economic reason, with less of a record to stand on. The page does not promote Harding’s reputation in order to make the gap look larger. The gap is the governing note, not the scandal sheet.

Party does not sort these pairs. Roosevelt and Johnson are Democrats far from Coolidge, Harding, and Reagan, who are Republicans. That is the familiar story, and it is incomplete. Cleveland, a Democrat, sits right of Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, on economics. The closest pair in the whole file crosses the usual morality play: a nineteenth-century Democrat from Tennessee and a twentieth-century Republican from California. If the chart had forced every Democrat left and every Republican right, Johnson and Nixon would have been pushed apart and the file would have been false.

Use the pairs as a check on the method, not as a parlor game. If a distance offends, read the placement note and decide whether the note is wrong. The numbers move only when the note moves. They do not move to make a better story. The farthest presidents are far because one record built a national welfare state in a depression and a world war, and the other spent a career trying to cut that state back. The closest presidents are close because two numbers cannot see the rest of the job.

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