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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: More Gloss for the Gipper By Michael Benhoff Reagan left office bolstered by the oft-repeated media myth that he had been far and away the most popular of any president since World War II. But bearing in mind Mark Twain's observation that a lie gets half-way around the world before truth puts its boots on, the U.S. public deserves to know what the polling data actually says. According to Gallup polls taken throughout his presidency, Reagan was not one of the more popular presidents in the post-Roosevelt pack. At various points during his presidency he rated lower than the other presidents during comparable periods of their terms in office. For instance, during the first two years of Reagan's presidency, the public was giving President Reagan the lowest level of approval of all modern elected presidents. Reagan's average first year approval rating was 58 percent--lower than Dwight Eisenhower's 69 percent, Jack Kennedy's 75 percent, Richard Nixon's 61 percent and Jimmy Carter's 62%. The post-Roosevelt presidents who assumed office through circumstances other than elections scored higher approval ratings during their first months in office than Reagan. In October 1945, six months after FDR died, President Harry Truman received an 82 percent approval rating, down from 87 percent the previous June. In December 1963, shortly after JFK's assassination, Lyndon Johnson got a 79 percent public approval rating, and it stayed in the mid-to-low seventies until December 1964, when he scored 69%. Only Gerald Ford, who received a 71 percent approval rating in August 1974, declined below Reagan's first-year level. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1192 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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