We all have opinions about the best and worst presidents in U.S. history.
But with the exception of the eight who died in office, America’s commanders-in-chief did many good things and sometimes bad things after the White House.
So who were the best and worst former presidents?
Let’s start at the bottom of the barrel.
John Tyler may take the cake for this, an ironic fact considering he was never intended to be president in the first place.
Tyler, who served from 1841 to 1845, was America’s first accidental president.
As vice president, he assumed the top job after his boss, William Henry Harrison, died 31 days into his term.
During Tyler’s term, his detractors, who thought he should not have been president, called him “his accident,” most of his cabinet resigned, and the Whigs expelled him from the party.
But if Tyler’s presidency was a failure, his post-presidency was even worse.
In 1861, with the Civil War looming, former President John Tyler, a slaveholder from Virginia, defected from the Union Army and won a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives.
He died a traitor in January 1862.
President Lincoln denied his predecessor a state funeral. Instead, Tyler was honored in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital.
The Civil War couldn’t bring out a better angel than some of America’s former presidents. Franklin Pierce, who served as president from 1853 to 1857, sensed that the country was about to divide.
He was a Northerner who supported popular sovereignty, the idea that in a democracy, the people, rather than the federal government, could decide whether to allow slavery in their area.
In 1861, he tried to rally living former presidents to resolve the Civil War before it became bloody.
However, his efforts were shot down by former President Martin Van Buren.
Pierce was a vocal critic of Lincoln, a Southern sympathizer, and a confidant of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
The third post-presidential failure of the Civil War era was Andrew Johnson, who was Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and became president after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.
After surviving America’s first impeachment trial, Johnson left the White House in disgrace. He then failed to win a Senate seat in 1868 and failed to secure a House seat in 1872.
He returned to public service in 1875, five months before his death.
Even those whose presidencies we admire can fail post-presidency.
Theodore Roosevelt ran again in 1912 as a third-party Bull Moose candidate, supporting his successors, Republican William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
He came in second, but his post-presidential run split the Republican Party that year, handing the White House to Wilson, whom he despised.
Roosevelt ran again in 1920 and had a chance of winning, but he suddenly died.
He had been suffering for years from a strain of malaria he contracted in the Amazon and from a broken heart after his son Quentin was killed in action during World War I.
Of course, there’s a reason we don’t try to rank post-presidential jobs.
Without the Oval Office of the White House, former presidents no longer have the power they once did.
They cannot send troops into battle and cannot appoint allies throughout the executive branch.
But they have the power to change history, and we’ve seen it happen for the past 200 years.
We know who did the wrong thing.
But who correctly earned the post-presidential position?
7 men got the highest score
There are many candidates, but seven from the founding of the United States to today may earn the highest marks.
After the White House, Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia.
John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives and became a leading abolitionist.
Grover Cleveland ran for president again and won.
William Howard Taft becomes Chief Justice of the United States.
Herbert Hoover led humanitarian relief efforts after World War II and served as a trusted advisor to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
Jimmy Carter, the longest-serving president in American history, helped eradicate disease and promoted democracy, but taunted his successor in everything from the Middle East to domestic surveillance programs. there were.
And George W. Bush, who had largely disappeared from the spotlight, experienced a resurgence in reputation as many Americans turned away from politics and came to admire the man who became an example of good character after his White House. .
The post-presidential office is one of the least studied yet most complex institutions in American life. There were ups and downs.
But Americans had better watch out for the former president.
Today, one person is running for president.
And they’re all living longer than ever before.
So maybe we just have to pay attention to them.
Excerpt from “Life After Power: Seven Presidents and the Quest for Purpose Beyond the White House.” © copyright Jared Cohen (Simon & Schuster, February 2024), by special arrangement. All rights reserved.
