Special to The Washington Post · Ronald G. Shafer
Among former U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter was in a league of his own.
George Washington operated a whiskey distillery at Mount Vernon after leaving the presidency. William Howard Taft became chief justice of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt went on a wild expedition in the Amazon that made his Rough Rider days look like a walk in the park.
Carter, who died Sunday at 100, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nobody had been a living former president longer than Carter, who left the White House nearly 44 years before his death. No ex-president piled up more achievements. “To many people, Jimmy Carter has provided Americans with an ideal model of postpresidential life. In fact, some consider him to be the greatest former President,” the Miller Center at the University of Virginia stated in 2013. No matter that U-Va. was itself founded by a former president, Thomas Jefferson, in 1819.
Other presidential epilogues have run the gamut and made their own kinds of history – right up to Donald Trump’s.
Distilleries and plantations
As the first president, Washington set the precedent for life after the presidency. In 1797, after stepping down voluntarily after two terms, he started a commercial distillery at the urging of his Scottish farm manager, according to his Mount Vernon estate. In 1799, the distillery produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey, making it one of the nation’s largest and most profitable distilleries.
“Two hundred gallons of Whiskey will be ready this day for your call,” Washington wrote his nephew in October 1799, “and the sooner it is taken the better, as the demand for this article is brisk.” But Washington’s distillery success proved short-lived: He died that December, less than three years after he left office.
Washington’s four immediate successors – John Adams, Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe – all returned to farming. But in contrast to the four Virginians who oversaw plantations, “Never in my life did I own a slave,” Adams, of Massachusetts, wrote in a letter to abolitionists.
Joining Congress and the Supreme Court
Adams’s abolitionist son John Quincy Adams is the only former president to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was elected to represent Massachusetts in 1830, the year after he left the presidency, and served for nearly 17 years. In 1841, he successfully argued at the Supreme Court for freeing enslaved Africans who had been captured after violently taking over the Spanish slave ship Amistad. In Congress, he was revered as the “Father of the House.”
On the morning of Feb. 21, 1848, Adams voted “No” on a measure related to the Mexican-American War. He rose and tried to speak “but uttered only an inarticulate sound” and collapsed, one newspaper reported, according to House archives. He was carried on a large sofa to the speaker’s office and died two days later, at age 80. His “remains were laid out in the room of the House Committee on Post Office and Post Roads,” the New York Evening Post reported, “where a continual throng of visitors is circulating.”
The only ex-president to become a U.S. senator was Andrew Johnson, who was appointed by the Tennessee legislature in 1875. Johnson, the vice president who had succeeded slain president Abraham Lincoln, was the first president to be impeached. As senator, he vowed to take revenge on his political enemies, but he died just four months after taking office.
In 1921, Taft became the only person ever to hold the offices of president and chief justice when President Warren G. Harding appointed him to the Supreme Court. Taft, who was president from 1909 to 1913, devoted himself as chief justice for more than twice that long, serving until a month before his death in 1930 at 72. “I don’t remember that I was ever president,” he once said.
Former president John Tyler sought to stay in government, too – by joining the Confederate one during the Civil War. He was awaiting the start of session in the Confederate House of Representatives when he died at a Richmond hotel on Jan. 18, 1862. (Tyler, who was born in 1790, still has a living grandson.)
Best-selling authors
Many former presidents, starting with John Adams, have written autobiographies. One of the most successful was Ulysses S. Grant, who left office in 1877. In 1885, the former Union general, destitute and dying of cancer, signed a contract to have his memoirs published by a new publishing house, formed by his friend Mark Twain the previous year to publish his novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
“Grant began writing as the cancer ravaged his body,” historian Lina Mann wrote for the White House Historical Association. When Twain visited the former president that June, “Grant could barely speak, and the two men communicated by slips of paper as they went over page proofs together,” Mann wrote. Grant finished the book shortly before dying, on July 23, 1885. The two-volume “Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant” raked in royalties of $450,000, or close to $15 million today, for Grant’s widow, Julia.
Even “Silent Cal,” Calvin Coolidge, wrote an autobiography after leaving office in 1929. He also briefly wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “Thinking Things Over With Calvin Coolidge.” In November 1930, he wrote, “The main duty of the citizen is to accept cheerfully the result of an election, support the laws and constitution as they stand at the time, and loyally cooperate with the government.”
Books by former presidents Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama reached No. 1 in sales. Some other presidential books were ghostwritten. After former president Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, “An American Life,” was published in 1990, Reagan joked, “One of these days I’m going to read it myself.”
Forays to the White House and the Amazon
A few ex-presidents have tried to win back the White House, including Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt – who started the ill-fated “Bull Moose Party” – and now Donald Trump, who is also the only former president to be convicted of a crime. Only Trump and Grover Cleveland, who won a second, nonconsecutive term in 1892, have succeeded.
Roosevelt was only 50 when he left office in 1909, with plenty of vigor for more adventures. In 1913, he and his son Kermit, with others, explored the River of Doubt, an uncharted tributary of the Amazon River in the jungles of Brazil. “For 48 days we saw no human beings” outside of the exploration party, Roosevelt wrote in his book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness.”
On the trip, one man was murdered and two others died. Roosevelt caught malaria, became delirious with high fever and suffered a serious infection after a riverbank surgery on his injured leg. A doctor on the trip reported Roosevelt also was suffering from ulcers “caused by a native Brazilian tick, which creeps deep under the skin” and dies. When Roosevelt’s party emerged in April 1914, he wrote a letter to Brazilian officials reporting “a hard and somewhat dangerous but very successful trip.” He died five years later.
Today, the River of Doubt is known as the Roosevelt River.
Post-presidency lives of service
Herbert Hoover spent much of his three decades after he left office, in 1933, trying to rehabilitate his image as the Great Depression president. He led wartime and postwar food-relief efforts in Europe, headed two Hoover Commissions on government reorganization, and promoted charitable programs. He wrote many books, including “Fishing For Fun and to Wash Your Soul.” When Hoover died in 1964, at age 90, he was widely praised as an elder statesman.
Carter also left the White House under a cloud, with high inflation and the humiliation of Iran waiting to free American hostages until Reagan’s Inauguration Day. In 1982 Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn, started the Carter Center in Atlanta; since then, it has advanced human rights, disease prevention and democracy worldwide. He helped Habitat for Humanity build homes for the needy. He has written more than two dozen books. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Although the presidency “was obviously the pinnacle of political success,” Carter said at a 2015 news conference, “my life since the White House has been personally more gratifying.”
– – –
Ronald G. Shafer is the author of “Breaking News All Over Again,” a collection of his Washington Post Retropolis columns.