I’ve been reading the book Founding Brother’s recently, so I’ve been thinking a lot about presidents – what’s changed, what’s stayed the same – and it dawned on me that since people are living longer and longer, the coming century will see more an more former presidents living though their successors terms.
Right now, we have three former presidents still alive, two of whom are quite old. Soon, we’ll have another one to add.
Here are my two questions:
Traditionally, what was the role of a former president? Did all former presidents remain in the public sphere? Did they go to the farm and live out the rest of their days? I know not all presidents are the same, but I’d be interested in knowing what president’s normally did after their terms were up.
What could decades of former presidents mean for the US? Could this bring about any significant changes in political procedure and precedent? Is it significant at all?
I don’t think it changes anything. I was pretty sure that we had 5 former presidents alive at the same time at one point in time and a bit of googling shows me that I was correct..
Jimmy Carter seems to be doing pretty good as a goodwill ambasador, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Clinton as an ambassador to the world in the Obama administration to try to patch things up with the world as he is still widely respected outside of the U.S. Bush senior is fairly invisible and I hope Bush Jr. retires to his ranch and ceases to embarrass us and terrorize the rest of the planet.
Chances are all our currently living exes will be alive for next year’s inauguration, so as the OP points out, we’d be up to 4 ex-Presidents: Carter, Bush Sr. (who would both be 84 on 1/20/09), Clinton, and GWB.
As the info at Darryl Lict’s link says, we’ve had 5 living ex-Presidents on three occasions: first, on Lincoln’s inauguration, when the following five Presidents were still living:
Apparently, that didn’t happen again until Clinton’s inauguration, when Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. were all living.
Then Nixon died during Clinton’s term, but Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton were all alive for Dubya’s inauguration.
Anyhow, having five living ex-Presidents on a couple of relatively recent occasions didn’t change anything. The ex-Presidency is what you make of it, as Carter and Nixon, in particular, have demonstrated, but most don’t make a hell of a lot of it.
We probably won’t have five living ex-Presidents again very soon unless either the next President is a one-termer, or both Carter and Bush Sr. beat the odds and live another eight years and 7.2 months.
On the other side of the coin: the last time there were no ex-presidents living was 1973/1974, Truman dying at the end of 1972, and Johnson a few weeks later.
Would the current POTUS(Not specifically Bush but anyone) ever discretly seek the advice of exPresidents on particulary sticky problems or areas where they’d have indepth personal knowledge,say on how a foreign leader thinks and negotiates?
Over here apparently the Queen does that for our Primeministers as she has met virtually all significant world leaders past and present and from briefings from previous P.Ms she can offer informed advice on a whole host of diplomatic/economic/national problems though whether or not they follow her advice is a different kettle of fish.
Whether the President consults anyone depends purely on their personality. Former Presidents have no particular status. They do sometimes get put on commissions.