Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century

Gallup's List of People that Americans Most Widely Admired in the 20th Century is a poll published in December 1999 by The Gallup Organization to determine who around the world Americans admire most, in the 20th century.^[1]

Gallup has constructed a yearly Gallup's most admired man and woman poll list since 1948^[2] but this poll covers the most notable figures of the entire century. They combined the results from the previous polls with a new preliminary poll to determine the 18 most admired people.^[1] The 1999 final poll produced an ordered list of 18 people, 12 of whom were males and 12 of whom were American citizens; the highest ranked non-American and non-male was (Saint) Mother Teresa, at #1.

As of 2025, at 78, Bill Clinton is the only surviving person on the list. Previously, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, and Billy Graham (the longest living person at 99) were all still living by the time the list was published, but they have since died.

Source: [1]

List of winners of the Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century poll

Rank	Portrait	Name	Percentage	Ref.
1		Mother Teresa (1910–1997)	49%	[3]
2		Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)	34%	[4]
3		John F. Kennedy (1917–1963)	32%
4		Albert Einstein (1879–1955)	31%
5		Helen Keller (1880–1968)	30%
6		Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)	26%	[5]
7		Billy Graham (1918–2018)	26%	[5]
8		Pope John Paul II (1920–2005)	25%	[5]
9		Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)	22%	[6]
10		Winston Churchill (1874–1965)	20%	[7]
11		Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)	18%	[7]
12		Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994)	18%
13		Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948)	18%
14		Nelson Mandela (1918–2013)	17%
15		Ronald Reagan (1911–2004)	17%
16		Henry Ford (1863–1947)	15%
17		Bill Clinton (b. 1946)	10%
18		Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013)	9%

• Gallup's most admired man and woman poll