You don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to become the President of the United States. Some of these US Presidents didn’t even have a college education while others went to Harvard and Yale. Others got an IQ over 173 which is over the genius level. Here are some of the smartest, and some of the not so smart men who were the leaders of this great nation.
George W. Bush
IQ: 124 The media constantly questioned the 43rd President of the United States’ intelligence with his common verbal slip-ups, but he is as smart as college graduates in the United States.
Gerald Ford
IQ: 127 Gerald Rudolph Ford was the 38th President of the United States. He attended South High School where he excelled in both academics and athletics. He was in the honor society as well as the All-City and All-State football teams. After graduating, he went to the University of Michigan getting a degree in Economics and Political Science. He received offers to join the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions but decided to be the assistant of the varsity football coach at Yale.
Herbert Hoover
IQ: 129.77 Born and raised in a small town in West Branch Iowa for the first nine years of his life, Hoover went on to the Friends Pacific Academy in Newberg, Oregon. He got accepted into Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, though he barely passed the university’s entrance exam. He majored in Geology and was the class treasurer for the baseball and football teams. He was known for being the President at the start of the Great Depression.
Ronald Reagan
IQ: 130 The 40th President of the United States, he was in office between 1981-1989 and was an actor before becoming a politician. He is considered to be one of the most effective presidents of his time and was even ranked among the best modern U.S. presidents.
George H.W. Bush
IQ: 130.1 Bush served in the Navy until the end of World War II. He then graduated from Yale University and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and the captain of the varsity baseball team.
Richard Nixon
IQ: 131 The 37th President of the United States, he earned his bachelor’s from Whittier in 1934 and got his law degree from Duke University in 1937.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
IQ: 131.9 Before he became the 34th President of the United States (1953-1961), he was a five-star general in the Army during World War II. During his time as president, he helped desegregate public school and signed the civil rights legislation to protect the right for African-Americans to vote.
George Washington
IQ: 132.5 He may not have been the smartest President, but he was the first president of the United States. He had no formal education and only had the education of an elementary school child.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
IQ: 139.6 FDR was the 32nd President of the United Sates and one of the few presidents who had 12 years in the White House. He is thought of as one of the most intellectual presidents having a Harvard University degree.
Abraham Lincoln
IQ: 140 He started out his younger years on the family farm in Southern Indiana and didn’t have much of an education. But he was one of the few presidents to have a patent after inventing a device to free steamboats that had run aground.
John Adams
IQ: 142.5 The second President of the United States and the former Vice President under George Washington between 1791-1801. He studied at Harvard University and was one of the men who helped to negotiate a peace treaty during the Revolutionary War and avoid a war with France during his time as president.
Barack Obama
IQ: 145 The first African-American President of the United States graduated in the top 15% of Harvard. Even his law professor Laurence Tribe said that Obama was one of the best students he ever had.
Theodore Roosevelt
IQ: 149 The 26th President of the United States was the youngest president in the nation’s history, leading an entire nation at the age of 43. He graduated from Harvard in 1880 and went on to Columbia to study law.
James Earl “Jimmy” Carter
IQ: 153 The 39th President of the United States (1977-1981), he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for advancing human rights around the world. He graduated from the Naval Academy and enacted energy policies and civil service reform.
Bill Clinton
IQ: 156 The 42nd president who served from 1993-2001 won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He earned a law degree from Yale in 1973 and was governor of Arkansas by 1978.
John F. Kennedy
IQ: 158 The 35th President of the United States only served three years before he was assassinated in 1963. He was a Harvard graduate who served in the Navy and World War II. He was remembered for helping to expand the US’ economy and his fight for civil and equal rights.
Thomas Jefferson
IQ: 160 Another founding father he served as president between 1801-1809 and was the nation’s third president. He strongly opposed centralized government, and one of his first policies was to eliminate a highly unpopular tax on whiskey.
John Quincy Adams
IQ: 168.8 Before being the 6th President of the United States (1825-1829), he was a highly regarded lawyer graduating from Harvard University. He was also a brilliant statesman and fluent in at least four different languages.
Jeb Bush
IQ: 128 Jeb Bush attended the Andover, Massachusetts boarding school Phillips Academy and served as the captain of the tennis team before he met his future wife, Columba Garnica Gallo. Rather than attend Yale University, he went to the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Latin-American studies. He went on to have a lucrative career in the Texas Commerce Bank before following his family’s legacy in politics.
Ted Cruz
IQ: 135 Ted Cruz was among the smartest students in Alan Dershowitz class when he went to Harvard Law School. Dershowitz said, “He was always very active in class, presenting a libertarian point of view. He didn’t strike me as a social conservative, more of a libertarian.” He also gave very high esteem to the Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Mitt Romney
IQ: 142 Mitt Romney graduated from high school in 1965 and enrolled at Stanford University. His time there was cut short when he traveled to France and did missionary work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When he returned, he went to Brigham Young University and graduated with a 3.97 GPA in English. He then enrolled in Harvard Law and Harvard Business School and graduated in 1975 cum laude finishing at the top of his class.
Hillary Clinton
IQ: 140 Hillary Rodham Clinton is a presidential hopeful for the 2016 race. She enrolled at Wellesley College where she majored in political science. She went to Yale Law School and was even a member of the impeachment inquiry staff during the Watergate Scandal.
Donald Trump
