As I sat down to read my new TIME magazine this evening, the very first substantive item included this assertion from managing editor Richard Stengel:

Kennedy’s hold on the popular imagination has remained strong: national polls over the past 20 years have consistently placed him in the top three of greatest American Presidents.

You don’t have to be conservative to find that notion hard to believe. Most of the lists I’ve seen have featured some combination of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR as the top three.

Rather than trust Stengel, I decided to conduct an incredibly unscientific test: I Googled “president rankings” and looked at every result on the first page of returns.

To my surprise, there was some evidence to bolster his case. Wikipedia (take the reliability of the results with a grain of salt) tells us Kennedy ranked 2nd in a 2000 ABC News poll. He ranked 3rd in a recent Gallup poll.

Kennedy ranked first in a 2006 Zogby poll, but that survey covered only those presidents serving since FDR. And a Quinnipiac Poll ranked him No. 3, but this survey covered just the last 60 years.

Stengel probably would have been on more solid ground had he said “some national polls over the past 20 years have placed him in the top three….” Why?

Quoting the Wikipedia entry on the topic:

Three Presidents?George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt?are consistently ranked at the top of the lists. Usually ranked just below those three are Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. The remaining “top 10” ranks are often rounded out by Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and James K. Polk. In recent polls, James Monroe, James Madison, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have sometimes been ranked in the “top 10”.

The same entry tells us that in rankings among scholars, Kennedy merits the No. 12 spot for “average scholar ranks.” He rated 12th in a C-SPAN viewer survey as a well.

Another Google return — from Infoplease — says:

In recent years surveys of presidential greatness have become more common and more complex. Nevertheless, the top- and bottom-ranked presidents have remained a fairly stable group, with the rest moving up or down in rank in the middle. Presidents who appear to have moved up include Eisenhower and Reagan, while Kennedy has moved down in some surveys.

A joint Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal poll ranked Kennedy 18th, the last president listed as “above average.”

I wouldn’t use these results to say definitively that Stengel is wrong. But I’d like to see some proof of his assertion before I’ll believe it.