Americans often prefer myth to reality, sanitizing heroes because we have difficulty accepting their humanity: their failures, prejudices, and hypocrisies. But accepting people’s faults does not require us to discard their achievements. Honest history recognizes that people are complicated.
Here are a few examples of prominent Americans with complicated legacies that come to mind:
George Washington
Having won the American Revolution, Washington established precedents that helped give the new presidency stability and legitimacy. Yet he suffered serious early military failures, including an attack in the Pennsylvania wilderness that helped ignite the French and Indian War—and ultimately the global Seven Years’ War. He speculated aggressively in Native American lands and enslaved people throughout his adult life. At his death, 317 enslaved people lived at Mount Vernon; Washington owned 123 of them outright.
Andrew Jackson
Riding a democratic movement that extended voting rights to nearly all White men, Jackson presented himself as the defender of ordinary citizens against entrenched privilege. Yet he enslaved people, tested constitutional restraints, destroyed the Second Bank of the United States as a national institution—with destabilizing consequences—and devastated Native communities through forced removal, contributing directly to the suffering and death remembered as the Trail of Tears.
Theodore Roosevelt
As a dynamic reformer, Roosevelt challenged corporate power and protected vast stretches of wilderness. Yet he strongly advocated imperial conquest, celebrated warfare, embraced racial hierarchy and eugenics, and believed that supposedly advanced peoples had a right to dominate those he considered inferior.
John James Audubon
Through beautiful illustrations, Audubon documented America’s birds and became one of the nation’s most revered artist-naturalists. Yet he enslaved people, opposed emancipation, promoted racist theories, and collected human remains from battlefields for a scientist studying supposed racial differences.
Charles Lindbergh
After flying alone across the Atlantic, Lindbergh emerged almost overnight as an international symbol of courage and technological progress. Yet he promoted eugenics, accepted a medal from Nazi Germany, blamed Jews and the British for pushing America toward war, and became the most prominent spokesman for an isolationist movement that included strong antisemitic elements.
Susan B. Anthony
Devoting more than half a century to winning political equality for women, Anthony helped transform women’s suffrage from a marginal cause into a national movement. Angered that the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised Black men but not women, she sometimes appealed to White prejudice and used racist language to argue that educated White women should not be placed politically beneath formerly enslaved men. Her remarks reflected both the racism of her era and her willingness to compromise the principle of universal equality when it conflicted with her own cause.
Douglas MacArthur
The popularity of the name Douglas peaked after World War II, coinciding with MacArthur’s military fame and his generally successful leadership of Japan’s reconstruction. During World War II, however, he badly mismanaged the initial defense of the Philippines before withdrawing his headquarters to the island fortress of Corregidor. Ordered to Australia, MacArthur left the defense of Bataan to other commanders. The forces there were ultimately captured; approximately 600 Americans and between 5,000 and 10,000 Filipinos died during the Bataan Death March. During the Korean War, MacArthur advocated attacking and blockading China, discussed the possible use of atomic weapons, and openly challenged President Harry Truman’s policy and authority. After Truman dismissed him, MacArthur defended himself before Congress, ending his theatrical farewell with the famous line, “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”
Margaret Sanger
Sanger improved access to birth control but associated her movement with eugenics and expressed troubling ideas about who should reproduce, including people with severe physical and mental disabilities. In 2020, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed her name from its Manhattan clinic, acknowledging her connection to eugenics and the systemic racism embedded in early family-planning movements.
John F. Kennedy
With his eloquence, youth, and call to public service, Kennedy inspired a generation after what many regarded as the political and cultural complacency of the 1950s. He managed the Cuban Missile Crisis with restraint and ultimately embraced civil rights legislation. Yet he concealed serious illnesses, approved the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and pursued numerous extramarital sexual relationships, including one with a nineteen-year-old White House intern. Kennedy authorized CIA operations that led to collaboration with organized crime in plots to kill Fidel Castro. In a 1962 confrontation with United States Steel, he used federal investigative and regulatory power in what I regard as one of the most brazen misuses of presidential authority in modern American history.
After Kennedy’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy and journalist Theodore H. White helped shape the “Camelot” image of his presidency. That image obscured a more complicated record, including Kennedy’s serial infidelity, which Jacqueline Kennedy knew about.
César Chávez
César Chávez became an American hero by organizing impoverished farmworkers, leading nonviolent strikes and boycotts, and helping them win better wages and working conditions. But his conduct badly contradicted the moral principles he preached. He ruled the United Farm Workers autocratically, purged perceived enemies, and sometimes treated undocumented Mexican laborers as threats to the union.
In 2026, Dolores Huerta, his longtime colleague and cofounder of the union, accused Chávez of sexually assaulting her twice. She said both encounters resulted in pregnancies. A New York Times investigation also reported allegations from women who said Chávez sexually abused them when they were minors.
Henry Ford
Few individuals changed everyday American life more profoundly than Ford, whose manufacturing innovations made automobiles affordable to millions and whose wages helped workers enter the middle class. Yet he violently resisted unions, imposed intrusive control over employees, and spread antisemitic conspiracy theories in the United States and abroad.
Ronald Reagan
Gifted at expressing national optimism, Reagan restored conservative confidence and helped create the conditions for a peaceful conclusion to the Cold War. Yet he resisted civil rights enforcement, responded slowly and inadequately to the AIDS crisis, presided over widening economic inequality, supported brutal anticommunist regimes, and oversaw an administration embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal. Administration officials secretly diverted proceeds from arms sales to Iran to support rebels fighting Nicaragua’s left-wing government, in deliberate defiance of congressional restrictions.
The question is not whether these people were heroes or villains. Most were neither—or sometimes both. The purpose of history is not to manufacture saints but to understand human beings, the choices they made, and the consequences those choices produced.
The reverse is also true: Just as history has concealed the faults of some celebrated figures, it has cast others in an unnecessarily negative light.
Ulysses S. Grant
Few major American figures suffered a more sustained assault on their reputation than Grant, who was portrayed for generations as a drunken butcher who later presided over a corrupt administration. In my view, his resolve helped transform a near-disaster at Shiloh into victory. In the Overland Campaign, he advanced against Robert E. Lee when previous commanders had retreated. As president, he used federal power to suppress the Ku Klux Klan and defend the most ambitious experiment in biracial democracy in American history.
Harry Truman
When Truman left office, Americans associated him with the Korean War, Communist infiltration, official corruption, and the “loss” of China. History has treated him far more generously, emphasizing the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the creation of NATO, recognition of Israel, desegregation of the armed forces, and his defense of civilian authority when he dismissed Douglas MacArthur.
Jimmy Carter
Overshadowed by inflation, gasoline lines, and the Iran hostage crisis, Carter’s substantial domestic and diplomatic achievements largely disappeared from popular memory. His record included the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal treaties, energy conservation, airline deregulation, human-rights diplomacy, and major diversification of the federal judiciary.
Muhammad Ali
By refusing induction during the Vietnam War, Ali sacrificed his heavyweight title, his livelihood, and some of the best years of his athletic career. He was denounced as cowardly, unpatriotic, and dangerous. The Supreme Court eventually overturned his conviction unanimously, and his resistance became an enduring example of principled opposition to an unjust war. To some extent, Ali was a victim of timing. He refused induction in 1967, before public opinion had turned decisively against the war. Draft resistance expanded rapidly afterward, and hundreds of thousands of men were accused of violating the Selective Service laws.
We should neither worship our heroes nor allow politically motivated denigration to define them. We should recognize them as human beings—as flawed and complicated as we are.
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