Who is your favorite? I see the "Independence Day" guy got no mention, nor do I see Henry Fonda mentioned. Wasn't he the pres in "Fail Safe"?

Real Historians Rate Fake Presidents



• As if U.S. historians have nothing better to do -- and maybe they don't -- Atlantic Monthly magazine has assembled a whole distinguished panel of 'em to rate the best and worst movie presidents. Columbia University professor Alan Brinkley teamed up in the November issue with Boston University's Robert Dallek, Stanford's David M. Kennedy and Harvard's Ernest May to evaluate a dozen fictional commanders in chief ranging from Michael Douglas's Andrew Shepherd in "The American President" to Peter Sellers's Merkin Muffley in "Dr. Strangelove."

Shepherd is at the top, but provoked a wild disparity of opinions running from Dallek's "near great" rating "for doing the right things in the face of counter-pressures" to May's "below average" rating because he "evidently has no mind of his own." Shepherd is tied with Harrison Ford's James Marshall in "Air Force One," and Prof. Kennedy praised Marshall for being a "can-do, take-charge, damn-the-torpedoes kind of guy," but Dallek, rating Marshall a "failure," condemned his "personal histrionics."

Among the other celluloid presidents, May supplies a harsh assessment of Morgan Freeman's Tom Beck in "Deep Impact" -- "Hoover on a galactic scale" -- while Brinkley gushes over Fredric March's Jordan Lyman in "Seven Days in May," saying he "takes a courageous stand against Cold War orthodoxy." As for the hapless President Muffley -- "hapless," that is, if you discount May's "near great" rating for "fac[ing] one great crisis and concentrat[ing] on it" -- Kennedy eviscerates Muffley as "a pathetically moralizing do-gooder who dithered away a matchless opportunity to end the Cold War and the Soviet Union with a single bold stroke."

Harvard prof May, alone, had the intellectual integrity to recuse himself from evaluating Kevin Kline's Dave Kovic in "Dave," because, as May pointed out, Kovic was never really (in the Hollywood sense of that word) the president. "Coming soon: Movie actors rate presidential historians," Atlantic senior editor Scott Stossel told us yesterday.