Follow the leader

7. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Where the eagle landed: Afghanistan, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom

Home and abroad: Dwight D. Eisenhower might have had a great career as a travel agent (after all, he planned the most complicated expedition in history, the D-Day landing in Normandy), but he was also a world traveler in his own right. Despite his love of his Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, farmhouse, and the calm pleasures of fishing and golf (he once gave his valet permission to shoot to kill any squirrels found burying acorns in the White House putting green), Ike knew that the job also required a more aggressive form of travel. He was swept into the White House with a promise to go overseas ("I will go to Korea"), which he fulfilled even before entering office. Then he continued to hit the road, ultimately visiting far more countries (35) than any president had previously. Eisenhower used travel as a creative way to engage America's friends and allies around the world. In addition to visiting the expected NATO capitals, he went out of his way to see parts of the world that had become newly relevant to the United States in the changed landscape of the Cold War. Eisenhower was received in Turkey with great warmth, and in Pakistan, he drove through huge crowds in an open carriage—unthinkable today. In India, people cheered, "Long live the king of America!"

8. George Washington

Where the eagle landed: Barbados

Home and abroad: When George Washington's half-brother Lawrence, suffering from tuberculosis, went to Barbados to improve his health in 1751, he brought George along for company. Young Washington, then 19, kept a sprightly diary ("The Ladys Generally are very agreeable"), then recorded grimly that he was also sick, "strongly attacked with the small Pox." Fortunately, he survived, scarred but no longer vulnerable to the disease—a fact of supreme importance during the Revolution, when many Americans under his command perished from the pox. Although he never again ventured abroad, Washington was extremely well traveled by colonial American standards. As president, he maintained the tradition, knowing that his visits to the 13 not-very-United States helped to shore up a nation that often lacked a center. A few critics grumbled about Washington's monarchical airs and what was, for the time, an enormous presidential motorcade—a stagecoach with a valet, two footmen, and a coachman, led by four white horses—but Washington's travels were an essential step on the path to nationhood.

9. John F. Kennedy

Where the eagle landed: Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia

Home and abroad: JFK was one of the better-traveled presidents even before he came into office in 1961. Thanks to his wealthy father, he had access to lavish vacation homes in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida. As a young man, he journeyed across Europe during the tense days leading up to World War II, then saw a bit more of the South Pacific than he expected when his PT boat was sunk by the Japanese. After his election to Congress in 1946, Kennedy traveled to out-of-the-way places like the Middle East and Southeast Asia to investigate their future relevance to Americans, which earned him a reputation as a foreign policy savant well before his run. From 1962, JFK traveled in style on a plane that was soon painted in the colors we now recognize on Air Force One. But it was more than the paint job—Kennedy's youth and "vigah" excited foreign audiences in ways that no American politician ever had. No moment conveyed this more clearly than the outdoor speech ("Ich bin ein Berliner") the president gave to tens of thousands of euphoric Germans in Berlin on June 26, 1963. On the same trip, he flew home by way of Ireland, visiting his great-grandfather's hometown of New Ross, and thrilling the locals with a bit of blarney. Whether sailing off of Cape Cod or visiting cousins in the Old Country, JFK had a knack for making his vacations seem like a natural part of the job.

10. Ulysses S. Grant

Where the eagle landed: Burma, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, the Middle East, Thailand, United Kingdom

Home and abroad: Ulysses S. Grant undertook one of the great presidential journeys of the 19th century when he traveled around the world between 1877 and 1879. True, he was no longer president (having happily left office in 1877), but this little-known expedition did an enormous amount of good, introducing a former president to tens of thousands of people in foreign lands. The trip began with Ireland and the British Isles, where Grant appeared before huge crowds and dined with Queen Victoria. He then ventured across Europe, finding a particularly warm welcome in Germany, where Chancellor von Bismarck was fascinated by both his democratic demeanor and his military prowess. From Europe, Grant went to lands that no president would again visit for nearly a century, including Egypt, Turkey (where the sultan gave him two Arabian stallions), the Middle East, India, Burma, Thailand, China, and Japan (where he became the first American to shake the emperor's hand).

11. Woodrow Wilson

Where the eagle landed: Belgium, France, Italy, United Kingdom

Home and abroad: Woodrow Wilson logged 87,000 miles of domestic travel as president, but it was as a foreign traveler that he made his mark on history. In 1918 and 1919 he traveled to Europe on two extended trips, trying to build new post–World War I agreements that would make such catastrophes impossible in the future. His prestige was so great at that moment, when he symbolized the world's hopes for peace, that H. G. Wells likened him to the Messiah. Huge crowds lined the streets of Paris wherever he went, and he was lionized as the "God of Peace" and the "Moses from across the Atlantic." Wilson's dream of the League of Nations failed, but with his heroic exertions (which nearly killed him), he created a new image for the president as a globe-trotting diplomat.

12. Barack Obama, 2008 Democratic presidential candidate

Where the eagle landed: Afghanistan, France, Germany, Iraq, United Kingdom

Home and abroad: Barack Obama gets massive attention wherever he goes, be it a foreign destination like Berlin in July 2008, where he spoke to more than 200,000 people (perhaps trying to bask in some of JFK's aura); on vacation in the U.S. Virgin Islands (where he risked the "elitist" tag by staying at the Ritz-Carlton); or visiting his grandmother in Hawaii. His most recent trip to the Aloha State, in August 2008, was for a family holiday after 18 months on the campaign trail, although the political reporters remained at his side—even if it was merely to document a splash in the surf. But what would Obama be like as a presidential traveler? If elected, he can be expected to spend more time than usual in the developing world, from Africa, his father's birthplace, to the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. And there may be quite a few visits to Hawaii, which, if it were to become a regular stopover, would become our most extreme "Western White House" yet.

13. John McCain, 2008 Republican presidential candidate

Where the eagle landed: Iraq, Vietnam

Home and abroad: John McCain seems less thrilled than Barack Obama to be in other countries—perhaps understandable, given his nearly six-year stay in the "Hanoi Hilton," although he's been back to Vietnam at least seven times since his release in 1973. On his most recent trip in 2000, McCain posed for photographs with fellow visitors at the former prison, now a stop on the city's tourist trail. McCain revels in the comforts of his vacation house along Oak Creek in Arizona, where he entertains guests with his barbecue secrets. However, like other senators, including Obama, McCain has undertaken several highly publicized trips to Iraq. It would be a simple matter to predict that if elected, he will concentrate on more traditional foreign visits—London, Paris, Brussels, Moscow—stopping at military bases on the way (he's already visited South Ossetia, Georgia). Hopefully McCain's advisors will dissuade him from attempting to visit "Czechoslovakia," as he's referred to it on two separate occasions, despite the fact that the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

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