Claim: According to a study by the Lovenstein Institute, President Bush has the lowest IQ of all presidents of past 50 years.
Status:
False.
The article quoted above began circulating on the Internet during the summer of 2001.
In furtherance of the hoax, later that year pranksters thought to register
www.lovenstein.org and erecting a web site around it in an attempt to fool people into thinking there really was such an institute.
The piece is simply a political jibe, made obvious by its ranking all the Democratic presidents of the last several decades as having high (even exceptionally high) IQs — note that Bill Clinton's IQ is listed as being exactly twice George W. Bush's — while ranking all the Republican presidents from the same time frame as average to moderate in intelligence, with the current president and his father assigned below-average figures placing them at the very bottom of the list. (President Nixon is the sole exception, presumably because his reputation is still so tarnished that not even a high IQ measurement can yet redeem him in the court of public opinion.)
[Some noticeable errors: Although the study includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died in office in 1945, the report is described as covering presidents in office "over the past 50 years." Also not true is the claim that "all the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under their belt" — some of them authored no books until after becoming president, and George W. Bush did have a book to his credit before being elected president, 1999's A Charge to Keep. Plus, if there's a "Swanson/Crain" system for ranking intelligence, nobody else seems to have heard of it.]
In any case, IQ is a dodgy enough concept even when measured by tests designed for the purpose — trying to guess not just relative rankings but specific IQ scores based solely on writings and speeches is bound to be error-prone. Based on President George H. Bush's extemporaneous speech-making, for example, he couldn't "speak with clarity" to save his life, but he was clearly far more intelligent than the insultingly low IQ assigned to him above. And a recent article reports President Kennedy's IQ as 119, far below the genius-level 174 ascribed to him here.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/presiq.htm
