Heads up. Here’s another post from the President geek. Today I talk about the Presidents club.
What is that you ask? Well, at any point in history, it’s the list of all living ex-Presidents. Especially with the mind breaking complexity and stress of being a US President during the American Century, being the President is a lonely job. The myriad of decisions, each of which has only reached your desk because a whole bunch of smart people with great expertise could not figure it out, that you have to make on a daily basis is unimaginable. Lives are at stake for many of these decisions. No other job can compare.
If there is a solace to this lonely job, it’s that even though you are alone, you are not without precedent. There have been people before you that have had to make similar decisions of a gut wrenching nature. These are the former Presidents. Historically, current Presidents have reached out to former Presidents. This often crosses party lines. One of the more famous examples is when John Kennedy received a verbal tongue lashing from Dwight Eisenhower regarding his dealings with the Soviet Union.
This isn’t a guaranteed club. Donald Trump clearly has no interest in hanging out with the former Presidents and I pretty seriously doubt that President Biden spends much time dialing Mar-a-Lago for foreign policy advice.
Even so, current Presidents do occasionally find it useful to solicit advice from those that previously held office.
So, the question that I asked myself is, how many times has the President truly been alone? Have there been Presidents that had no living predecessors? Where there was truly no one that could truly understand what they’re going through?
The answer is, unsurprisingly, yes. Let’s take a look.
Let’s deal with the easy ones first. Clearly George Washington had no predecessors being the first, you know, President. Washington died about two years after left office, so the second President, John Adams, also had a spell with no former Presidents.
Well, this is going to be a long list, isn’t it? Well, not so much. John Adams lived for twenty-five years after he left the Presidency. He was around for a long time, available to serve as a sounding board to whomever might need one. This sets a pattern. Although there are certainly Presidents that died in office or that died shortly thereafter (I’m looking at you James Polk, who survived a scant three months as an ex-President), there are Presidents that actually did live for some time after leaving office. We’re talking everyone from John Tyler, who lived seventeen years after he left office, to Herbert Hoover, who lived for over thirty years, to Jimmy Carter, who’s at forty-two years and counting, although since he’s now in hospice (at least at this writing), it doesn’t look like he will be too much longer.
So, does that mean that Washington and Adams are the only Presidents that have been truly alone?
Nope! There are a few others. Let’s go through the list. After the second President, John Adams, we leap all of the way to the eighteenth President, US Grant. He served until 1877. Millard Fillmore died in 1874 and Andrew Johnson died in 1875. I’m guessing that Grant didn’t spent a whole lot of time consulting those two accidental Presidents. One was kind of a nonentity and the other came within a vote of getting kicked out of the Presidency.
Now we go all of the way to the thirty-first President, Herbert Hoover gets in by a whisker. Yes, the same Hoover that lived for some thirty years as a former President had, for a while, no other living former Presidents. I call that a whisker because Hoover’s term ended in March of 1933 and the last living ex-President, Calvin Coolidge, died in January of 1933. Hoover had to live in Presidential isolation for only a couple of months.
This takes us to everyone’s favorite President, the thirty-seventh, Richard Nixon. Nixon served from 1969 to 1974. Harry Truman died in December of 1972 and Lyndon Johnson died in January of 1973. Yes, they died about a month apart. That’s not quite as dramatic as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying on the same Fourth of July, but still interesting. So, Nixon had about a year and a half of no former Presidents to lean on. Given the tremendous stress that he was under during this time, having someone to talk to might have been helpful.
And that’s it! George Washington, John Adams, US Grant, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon are the only Presidents that served at a time when no ex-Presidents were alive. Considering that some eight Presidents have died in office and that usually Presidents aren’t all that youthful, I find that surprising.
Given the advances in medicine with the side effect of longer life spans, is this the end of the lonely Presidents? Will there never be a time when a President does not have at least one ex-President to confide in?
Well, maybe not.
I am not a political forecaster, but currently Joe Biden and Donald Trump (gulp!) are the frontrunners for the 2024 nomination. Let’s assume that one of those two wins (double gulp!) and that they serve their full term.
That brings us to 2028. Either Biden or Trump will be term limited, assuming that one won in 2024. Let’s further assume that the other will not win in 2028. That implies that 2028 brings in a new face. Let’s further assume that this new President serves a full two terms. That means that the President will serve until January of 2037.
Let’s look at how old the current ex-Presidents will be then:
- Jimmy Carter – 112
- Joe Biden – 94
- Donald Trump – 90
- George W Bush – 90
- Bill Clinton – 90
- Barack Obama – 75
Now, I realize that we all think that Jimmy Carter is an immortal vampire, but even so 112 seems to be a stretch. Four of the Presidents will be in their nineties. The only outlier is the much younger Barack Obama. Now, different sites have different statistics, but the average life span of a black male is somewhere around seventy. Now, obviously, Obama’s wealth and prestige eliminates many of the risk factors for the more typical black male, so a 75 year old Obama is a very distinct possibility.
Whoever is President, if they want to consult with someone that truly understands the job, had better hope that Barack Obama stays in relative good health because, right now, it looks like it might come down to him,
dorkenstein 