Lyndon B. Johnson (41%) William Howard Taft (39%) James Madison (38%) Ulysses S. Grant (38%) James Monroe (30%) Woodrow Wilson (29%) Calvin Coolidge (22%) James A. Garfield (19%) James K. Polk (17%) Warren G. Harding (16%) William McKinley (15%) John Tyler (12%) James Buchanan (12%) Grover Cleveland (11%) William Henry Harrison or Benjamin Harrison (11%) Martin Van Buren (11%) Rutherford B. Hayes (10%) Zachary Taylor (10%) Millard Fillmore (8%) Franklin Pierce (7%) Chester A. Arthur (7%) Criticism David Herbert Donald, noted biographer of Abraham Lincoln, relates that when he met John F. Kennedy in 1961, Kennedy voiced his deep dissatisfaction and resentment with historians who had rated some of his predecessors. Kennedy remarked, "No one has a right to grade a president—even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions." Historian and political scientist Julian E. Zelizer has argued that traditional presidential rankings explain little concerning actual presidential history and that they are "weak mechanisms for evaluating what has taken place in the White House." The broadly static nature of the rankings over multiple decades has also been called into question, particularly given the frequent exposure of previously unknown material about American government. In 2002, Ron Walters, former director of the University of Maryland's African American Leadership Institute, stated that ranking based on the presidents' ability to balance the interests of the majority and those of excluded groups was practical in respect to American debate on racial politics. Presidents have traditionally been ranked on personal qualities and their leadership ability to solve problems that move the nation in a positive direction. Walters stated that there was a qualitative difference between presidential evaluations from white and African-American intellectuals. He gives as an example of this difference a comparison between two contemporary studies, a 1996 New York Times poll by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., where 31 white historians and one black historian ranked presidents as "Great", "Near Great", "High Average", "Average", "Below Average", or "Failure", and a survey performed by professors Hanes Walton Jr. and Robert Smith and featured in their book American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, where 44 African-American political scientists and historians ranked presidents as "White Supremacist", "Racist", "Racially Neutral", "Racially Ambivalent", or "Antiracist". A 2012 analysis by Mark Zachary Taylor faulted presidential surveys with "partisan bias