Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House

“This scholarship, written as a clear, engaging narrative, inspires the reader to take the ideas presented in Life After Power to look at other post-presidency lives.”

Eight United States presidents did not live to the end of their respective terms to know what life was like after no longer being the most powerful person in the country or the world. Other chief executives did not live long enough to have an afterword, including James K. Polk, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan. There were no former presidents six times in American history, but that will not happen again. In modern times, as many as five of these former chief executives have been living at once.

“The Former Presidents Club rarely gets together,” however. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe famously formed a political partnership before, in, and out of office. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush spend time together. Friends, then enemies, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were correspondents in their last years. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, and Barack Obama remained celebrity politicians, elder statesmen whose advice and influence were sought. 

Presidential families have not intermarried to a real degree, although three presidents had close relations who became presidents. Almost all presidents are cousins to at least one other president. America’s royalty class is built on celebrity or circumstantial wealth, not right of birth.

Presidential historian Jared Cohen examines life after the White House in the cases of Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush in Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House. Other presidents are part of these seven stories.

These seven men were specifically chosen because they decided what they would do with the rest of their lives “and how they made history in the process.” They each also did something important after leaving office, sometimes more important than anything done in office.

Cohen writes that the biographies often neglect the years after the most important job these men would ever hold. Presidential historians “often treat their subjects’ final decades as little more than denouncements at best and as slow marches to the grave at worst.”

Explaining the significance of the post-presidency requires the author to explain their time in office as chief executive. The chapters on each of these men make mini-books, almost full biographies.

Life After Power begins with one of the worst days in the life of Thomas Jefferson when an incident at the new University of Virginia appeared to symbolize how his work and that of his two successors seemed to have come undone. His fears proved unfounded; his university and his legacy survived intact.

The other former presidents also had last acts of note, as told in engrossing tales, sometimes more interesting than their respective terms in office. John Quincy Adams went from president to election to Congress and national attention in the drama of the Amistad. Grover “Cleveland made history, even if history has forgotten him.” Even today, explaining this great anomaly in the White House proves complicated. He was the only president who retired from that office twice!

Of the 20th century presidents in Life After Power, Howard K. Taft eventually received the appointment to the Supreme Court he had wanted for years after his tumultuous time in the White House. Herbert Hoover’s career in government was epic in an amazing life that, after his presidency, was capped by his work to save the Europeans after World War II.

Jimmy Carter has earned more respect, however, for his work after his time in office than any other ex-president. He has had the longest post-presidency in American history, but he is celebrated for many traits that made his presidency a failure. George W. Bush, however, simply moved on with his life, although the Bush Center helps veterans of the Global War on Terror.

Cohen believes that these once-powerful leaders can teach all of us much. Being an ex-president is not a position, although “former presidents have always had powerful platforms, even if they are not official.” “They found that leaving power was never easy.” The bigger lesson in this book is the importance of planning an inevitable final act.

This large and well-written book will surprise many readers as it displaces some common assumptions and recovers much-forgotten history. Life After Power is a fast, easy, and entertaining read because each president’s story is compartmentalized. This scholarship, written as a clear, engaging narrative, inspires the reader to take the ideas presented in Life After Power to look at other post-presidency lives, such as those of John Tyler, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson.

This work has images, annotation, and a bibliography.