Read it. Interesting book. I’d recommend it.
[quote=“glowacks”]
… and I was surprised to hear that Quincy Adams is actually the only case of a President returning to Congress. I knew he had done it because of a movie (Amistad?) where he’s portrayed as a Congressman well after his term ended…[/quote]
I doubt that’s the reason. He would have had no idea they would make that movie someday.
Someone else would have followed Teddy Roosevelt. I don’t think he was that consequential as a President. He was fine as Chief Justice. The book about Roosevelt and Taft is fascinating.
For that matter, do disgraced/fired CEOs go back to being mere managers at other companies? Do managers who get fired go back to being worker bees? Do astronauts go back to being fighter pilots?
Like just about everything human, there’s a hierarchy, and it’s extremely uncommon to move down the hierarchy. In fact, whether or not potential candidates have had the job title in question is a common gatekeeping type move.
Once you’re President, you’re at the top of the Great Ziggurat of Politics (with apologies to Tom Wolfe), and you’re not going back down. You retire, and do other stuff. Similary with senators- they tend to either get elected President, or retire.
Not sure about that. Only three senators have gone directly from the Senate to the White House. Pop quiz: name the three!
Seventeen senators in total have become president; 14 of them only after some other position, like V-P Biden.
Obama is the only recent one I can think of. The other two must have been 19th century POTUSs.
Nope. All three were in the 20th century.
That’s why the 2008 election was so unusual: two Democratic Senators vying for the nomination, and then going head to head with a Republican Senator in the general.
One of the others is JFK. I cheated and looked up the third one; I had mistakenly thought he held a different office before being elected.
Harding was the other, I think.
Nitpick: Chief Justice of the United States.
I stand corrected on the proper title. 
I don’t know off-hand of any cases where a CEO left one company and was hired at another company as a low-level manager (or as just a regular employee), but there are almost certainly cases where that has happened. The CEO may look at the financial state of the company and decide that it’s not in good shape. He decides that the company will either shrink or just go out of business. He knows that the shareholders will decide that he was at least partially responsible for the poor financial state, so he will soon be fired. He also knows that it’s very unlikely that the company will want him to stay on in a lower-level position. He then resigns as CEO. He interviews at other similar companies and is hired for a low-level position, since his career at the company he was CEO of was very good before he became the CEO.
I’m pretty sure that there have been examples of the following: A CEO has done a great job of improving the financial state of a small company. A large company in a similar field interviews him. He gets hired as a vice-president of that large company with a larger salary than the one he got as the CEO of the small company. It’s even possible that there are cases where the CEO of a small company got hired as the president of a large company, since the shareholders think that he can improve the financial state of the large company just as he improved the financial state of the small one.
Correcto!
What I’m getting at is not that it’s some kind of ironclad rule, but that in general, people don’t move downward in hierarchies like that, and Presidents are at the top of their particular pyramid, so there’s not anything to do but retire. There aren’t even lateral moves, like there are for Senators (cabinet members, for example).
And yeah, it can get weird in that the relative size of organizations can make the titles/hierarchies kind of wonky. I mean, I’ve known a few “CTOs” at smaller companies who had less actual budget and power than mid-level managers at larger organizations. So it wouldn’t be exactly unreasonable to expect that small-fry CTO to come into one of the larger organizations with a lesser title, but commensurate responsibility and pay. I’d argue that it’s pretty uncommon though; it’s far more likely that the small-fry CTO would look for other CTO positions at slightly larger organizations than settle for a mid-level manager position at a large organization.
That might be true for CTO, because I’m guessing a company has to be a certain size to even have a CTO. But there’s a bank in my neighborhood with only one branch. I don’t mean one branch in my neighborhood, I mean one branch total . I’d be surprised if they had a CTO (rather than using some sort of consultant) but nobody from that bank is going to a larger bank, not even one with ten branches with the same title - not the president or any of the vice-presidents. The tellers can- if they have tellers and don’t call them the “vice-president of customer relations” or something.
I was thinking more like cities/states/counties, and that say… the director of the Hillsboro, TX water department is probably more along the lines of a mid-level IT manager in Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas in terms of budget, people, etc…
But that water department director isn’t likely going to go from Hillsboro to a middle management position in San Antonio or Dallas, he’ll move up to a slightly bigger city like Granbury or Bellmead and continue to be a director.
It’s fairly common for executives to move from one organization to another when they have done well in the first organization. What their title will be there is hard to tell. Assuming that they have done well in their previous organization, they will almost always be getting paid better. Here’s a couple of websites about moving from one organization to another just as a standard part of one’s career:
Do you really know any high-level executives? I think you’re wrong about what people with plans for eventually becoming a CEO of a high-level organization do. I think that they do move around a fair amount. One famous example of someone moving from one company to another is Lee Iococca:
My point isn’t that they don’t move around, but that they don’t move down the totem pole, so to speak. Lee Iacocca was always a VP/CEO type after a certain point in his career, regardless of whether he was at Ford, Chrysler, or Chrysler the second time around.
And yeah, I have more or less known one high-powered international firm exec type, being pretty good friends with his daughter. And after a certain point in his career, he was always a president/CEO type, regardless of whatever airline he was at. Even after he quit the airline business, he ran his own company and was on a whole shit-ton of boards of directors of local Fortune 500 companies.
Same thing- he never went down the totem pole. That just doesn’t happen; people may fail to get promoted, but they’re rarely demoted. It’s kind of a sort of corollary/precondition for the Peter Principle.
I fully understand this. The issue is that there is no higher office than President, and there are term limits. If you want to continue serving the country, you would have to do so from a different position. Very few people have gone down that route.
I did think of another thing that might explain it somewhat: the reason that there wasn’t a 3 term president before FDR was mainly that pretty much every 2 term President failed to be nominated for another term by their party. The closest anyone had come to a third term was Teddy Roosevelt’s 2nd place while running for a 3rd party. Thus, it stands to reason that pretty much all Presidents were somewhat on the fringe of their party by the time they got done with 8 years in office. If you look at the time since the passage of the two term limit, it’s somewhat similar up until rather recently, where former Presidents still popular in their party have been able to make a lot of money, and potentially do more good if so inclined with their patronage, compared to returning to Congress.
U.S. Grant took a stab at a third term, too, but didn’t get far with it.