Who Did It Best?

BRIAN: One of the questions that comes up a lot these days is, what are presidents going to do after the presidency? I want to have a little competition here, and here’s the game. When did the post-presidency become a thing?

JOANNE: OK, a thing.

NATHAN: Gosh.

JOANNE: I mean, I can throw a pitch in to the game.

BRIAN: Of course.

JOANNE: I don’t know if I want to argue that John Quincy Adams makes it a thing, but he’s the first president that has a really prominent post-president career.

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: John Quincy Adams, he and John Adams are the only one-termers. And then he basically isn’t done with public life. There’s things he still wants to do. He ends up– I don’t think this was his plan, but he ends up being elected not to the Senate, but to the House

NATHAN: Right.

JOANNE: And being an ex-president and the descendant of a founder in the House of Representatives, you–

BRIAN: Yeah, how did that work?

JOANNE: Yeah, you become a really powerful guy.

NATHAN: Right, right.

JOANNE: That means something if you’re going to go up against John Quincy Adams. So that gave him some added clout.

NATHAN: Yeah. I think the Adams case in particular was one where you, I think, would say you see the real power symbolically of the president to do things in other realms of political life. So not simply about retiring to one’s estate, but still having platform, credibility.

John Quincy Adams becomes a very verbal anti-slavery advocate in a way that is easier as a congressman than even as a president. He’s not abolishing slavery during the time that he’s President of the United States, but he’s advocating for an end of slavery by the time he gets to the House.

And so I think there is a way that you can look at the Quincy Adams moment as one in which at least the symbolic power of the president gets converted into some kind of political capital to continue to be about the governing of the country.

BRIAN: OK, well, maybe it’s the bureaucrat in me. But when I think of a thing, I think of a thing that’s kind of going to continue, or at least happen more often than not, or maybe just more than one. So my problem with– and we haven’t said who’s judging this competition– but my problem with Quincy Adams thing is–

JOANNE: It’s not a thing.

BRIAN: I don’t see what happens with the next president, Andrew Jackson.

JOANNE: Right. Right, no.

NATHAN: Right, right, right.

JOANNE: It is not a thing with Andrew Jackson.

NATHAN: Right. And there are a lot of extenuating circumstances about life expectancy and what people are willing to do, how public people actually are. Even the notion of a celebrity is still very much in the making in the 19th century, in an American sense.

This is certainly the case that people have made for Ulysses S. Grant. It is Grant, by many accounts, who is seen as being probably the first really prominent post-president helping to create a public persona that is different from simply the fact of him having been president.

BRIAN: But isn’t he a one-off also?

NATHAN: I wouldn’t say in the same way. Because if you think about a kind of long 20th century, there are many ways in which the memoiring president becomes a real feature of what becomes the office and what it–

BRIAN: Interesting.

NATHAN: –means going forward.

BRIAN: Interesting.

NATHAN: Now, you get to the point where, of course, it’s presumed that every president will have a memoir after they leave office, and that has a lot to do with the genre really being inaugurated by Grant.

BRIAN: That’s really cool. So you’re saying that Grant created that template of securing one’s legacy by writing– well, in Grant’s case, a really brilliant memoir.

JOANNE: So I’ll toss in, though, that what we’re talking about with grant is a public-minded persona. That if you go all the way back– I mean, Washington doesn’t live very long. But if you’re looking at Adams, and Jefferson, and Madison, they spend years after their presidency organizing their papers very carefully–

NATHAN: That’s true. That’s true.

JOANNE: So that they’re presenting themselves to posterity. It’s just in a sense, a different kind of memoir.

BRIAN: Well, I’m going to make a case for doing, not just writing or organizing. And I’m putting my money as a thing on the Teddy Roosevelt-Taft combo, right?

JOANNE: Oh, the combo.

BRIAN: The combo.

[LAUGHTER]

Right? It’s a thing because there’s more than one of them.

NATHAN: OK, great.

BRIAN: But you’ve got a very dynamic president in Teddy Roosevelt. Many scholars would say he created or began to create the modern presidency, certainly the 20th century presidency, active president, believed in executive authority, et cetera, et cetera.

Leaves the presidency after those two terms, but then comes back and runs in 1912 in one of the most exciting elections in American history. He doesn’t win, but Roosevelt was very active after he was president. In fact, a lot of people thought that he had a good chance of becoming president again in 1912.

Now, Taft, he leaves the presidency and then becomes Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a pretty important position.

And so I’m arguing that the combination of the rise of the modern president, especially being very important in ongoing foreign relations with these two guys back to back who either run for a very important position, the president again, or hold a very important position, that kind of shapes notions of the possibility of these very important guys doing pretty important things even after they’re president. That’s it. I got nothing else.

JOANNE: But that makes sense, right?

NATHAN: It does. It does.

JOANNE: Because the office itself changes. That’s part of what you’re saying here, which is totally true. But the 20th century presidency is a very different thing from the 19th century presidency.

NATHAN: Yes, yes.

JOANNE: And so they take that persona and that authority with them, which as you’re suggesting, they can then deploy in a conscious kind of a way that maybe their predecessors couldn’t.

I do have a question, though, that relates to this. And part of maybe a switch on the thing that we’re looking for would be not just presidents with post-presidency careers, but presidents who are better as post-presidents, right?

BRIAN: And that’s a great question. I got my candidate. I’ve got my candidate. But I–

JOANNE: I want to hear.

BRIAN: –wanna hear from you guys. No, I want to hear from you guys first.

NATHAN: You’re such a brown-noser, Brian. Oh my god.

BRIAN: I am. I am. But I want to hear from you guys first. I want to hear from you guys first just so I can trump you.

JOANNE: I mean, it’s a one-off. It’s a one-off.

BRIAN: And Trump is not my candidate, by the way.

JOANNE: No. John Quincy Adams was, but he’s, like, by himself there as a guy who was much better in Congress than he was as president.

NATHAN: Right. Well, I mean, this one, this is kind of a give me. So forgive me, Brian, if I end up stealing your answer, but it’s got to be Jimmy Carter.

BRIAN: Yes, yes. Two to one. Two to one, the 20th century–

JOANNE: No, even I was going to say that’s the first thing that comes to mind. But as a not 20th century person, I figured that I could jump in with Jimmy Carter.

BRIAN: OK, so Nathan, why are we right?

NATHAN: OK, OK. So obviously, Carter had a lot of problems as a one-term president, and it had a lot to do with–

BRIAN: Right, so being really bad is one of the keys here as president.

NATHAN: As president, it helps. It also helps that Jimmy Carter is, again, very long-lived. We’re lucky to still have him as someone who is also very vocal and really overt in his declarations about human rights. He is a very avid opinion maker in the realm of foreign policy.

And one last necessary plug, I think, for Carter as the greatest post-president president, I guess I would say, is that it really has changed the game for all of his subsequent post-presidents in so far as he has the Carter Center, which becomes this amazing philanthropic organization. You can think about in the mid-1980s when it’s established. It goes after eradicating Guinea worm and succeeds in saving the lives of millions of people.

You think about Bush and Clinton aligning themselves, Bush one and Clinton aligning themselves to fundraise on behalf of anti-poverty measures. You think about the way that presidents are basically making very prominent appearances together in public to fundraise for hurricanes across the world. Again, it’s just one more example, earthquakes and the like. And all of this is done through these various philanthropies.

And so again, I think it’s a combination of the dismantling of certain kinds of social services making philanthropy more necessary and these nonprofits more necessary. But that presidents themselves rise to that shift in the political culture and begin to imagine themselves as spokespeople of these various foundations.

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JOANNE: That’s going to do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about American history. You’ll find us at BackStoryRadio.org, or send an email to BackStory at Virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at BackStory Radio. And if you like the show, feel free to review it in Apple Podcasts. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

BRIAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher.

Additional help came from [INAUDIBLE], Sequoia Carillo, Courtney [? Sponya ?] and Aaron Teeling. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza, Podington Bear, and [? Jazaar. ?] And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

NATHAN: BackStory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.