The Excerpt Podcast: After being President of the United States, what comes next?
On this episode (first released on February 14, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast:
Ascension to the role of President of the United States, arguably the most powerful job in the world, has to be a heady experience. But what happens when the term runs out? Stepping down from the American presidency is clearly a sizable career pivot. How do these leaders decide what’s next and what can we learn about identity and self-fulfillment from the choices they made? Bestselling author Jared Cohen joins The Excerpt to talk about “Life After Power," his new book about how seven presidents moved into the final chapter of their lives.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, February 14th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.
Ascension to the role of President of the United States, arguably the most powerful role in the world has got to be a heady experience. But what happens when the term runs out? Stepping down from one of the most powerful jobs in the world is clearly a sizable career pivot. How do these leaders decide what's next and what can we learn about identity and self-fulfillment from the choices they made?
Our guest today is bestselling author Jared Cohen. His new book, Life After Power, focuses on how seven presidents moved into the final chapter of their lives.
Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Jared.
Jared Cohen:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
One of the things that surprised me most in your book was the number of presidents who tried to stage a comeback. What we're seeing with Donald Trump's 2024 run is nothing new. With someone like former President Grover Cleveland you describe a man driven by a desire to govern. Is that atypical when a defeated president decides to run again?
Jared Cohen:
Grover Cleveland managed to stage a comeback in 1892 and recapture the presidency. Now, when he lost in 1888, it's very important to understand Grover Cleveland never lost the popular vote. He remained popular with the American people. He lost the electoral college because he stood on principle and he basically engaged in a political suicide mission to stand firm against the hike in the tariff, and he'd never been happier than when he threw away the presidency.
When you start writing a book, you never know how it's going to tie to the news cycle. And books take a long time to write, and this is a thick one. So it took a number of years. But it seems likely that in 2024, we're going to experience the only presidential rematch since 1892 between two presidents who are the nominees of the two major parties.
Dana Taylor:
Well, you wrote about Thomas Jefferson's belief that for the country to succeed, there would have to be a continuous process of rebuilding, reinventing, and refounding. Was that the yardstick he used to measure his personal success as well?
Jared Cohen:
So Thomas Jefferson had three things etched on his tombstone. Two of them he accomplished before being president, the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. And the third he accomplished at the age of 82, which was the founding of the University of Virginia. And professionally speaking, he thought of his life as a trilogy. And the founding of a great university that could train the next generation to iterate on the flaws left behind by Thomas Jefferson and his co-founders of the republic, he believed as essential to make sure that the republic survive for generation after generation.
One of the things I sort of tackle in the book is the contradictions and the complexity over Thomas Jefferson's personal legacy. Obviously a slave owner. This is one of the things that we have to grapple with with some of these founding fathers is their legacies are mixed, right? Their personal shortcomings and the personal stains on their record are not just something to be resurrected and evaluated, but they contradict the very things that we've revered about them, all men are created equal.
Dana Taylor:
Of the seven presidents you highlighted in your book, which one was most concerned about their legacy, and did any of them leave office feeling they'd done enough or did they all feel that they still had more work to do?
Jared Cohen:
What's interesting about each of the seven presidents that I focus on, they each had something that they felt very strongly about in terms of their principles.
John Quincy Adams felt very strongly about the need to preserve free speech, and it turns him into a leader of an abolitionist movement that at the time was seen as kind of radical and fringe. Grover Cleveland felt principled about standing up against imperialism, protecting the economy from cheap money, winning out over sound money. Herbert Hoover felt principled about great humanitarian acts and so forth.
And by each of these presidents doubling down on something that was a firmly held belief, it led them into their next act and it led them into something meaningful in the twilight years of their life.
Dana Taylor:
Well, for many, when we think of service post-presidency, the first name that comes to mind is Jimmy Carter. Became a champion for housing the unhoused with Habitat for Humanity. I would argue that he made the transition to a life of service look easy. Was it?
Jared Cohen:
So Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 72 asked a very interesting question, which is, does it serve the stability and the benefit of the republic to basically have half a dozen men who'd been elevated to the presidency wandering around the rest of us like discontented ghosts? And more than 200 years later, we get an answer to Alexander Hamilton's question. And I think Jimmy Carter kind of exudes both sides of it, which is former presidents can either be tremendous partners to their successor or formidable adversaries and nuisances to their successor.
And Jimmy Carter made a very important decision immediately after losing his bid for reelection in 1980, which is he decides there's no path back to the presidency, and he decides to basically become a former president for life. And he builds a whole presidential administration around it. And he says, "My faith commands me to do whatever I can wherever I can for however long I can." And he did a number of extraordinary things in his active post-presidency. He basically eradicated Guinea worm from Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the most amazing global health achievements. He modernized and scaled this idea of election monitoring and human rights. He really becomes a major champion for it.
But he did some things that were really annoying to his successors as well. In 1994, when Bill Clinton sends him to North Korea as a messenger, he makes it very clear, "President Carter, your job is not to make policy. You're not authorized to make policy. You convey a message to the great leader." And he turns on CNN, and Jimmy Carter's negotiated an entire new framework for nuclear non-proliferation much to the consternation of Bill Clinton.
Dana Taylor:
Transitioning from one phase of life to another requires adapting to change. What role did fear of the unknown play when you found a reluctance to relinquish power?
Jared Cohen:
So fear manifests itself in a very interesting way when you're transitioning from a period of power. So what are some of the things that they fear? I mean, look, it can range from very mundane things. A lot of those early presidents were slaveholders and large landowners. They left office in complete financial ruin.
George Washington spends his final years basically chasing down people who owe him money. He has to start a whiskey business, not because he's passionate about being a whiskey entrepreneur, but he's completely broke and it's the only thing that he hasn't tried yet. Thomas Jefferson is constantly broke. The only reason he manages to survive financially is the country just thinks it's a bad look to have somebody like him be completely broke and impecunious.
And then the other thing is, it's very hard to watch your successor come in, whether they're someone you like or someone you don't like, and slowly dismantle elements of your legacy and erase you from the spotlight.
And I think these are torturous experiences, right? You take these seemingly unrelatable figures, these presidents of the United States, and you take them out of the most powerful job in the world, and all of a sudden they seem very relatable, right? They're dealing with ego and vanity and broken relationships and boredom and their knees giving out and concerns and lack of agency.
And I think that's one of the things that's really remarkable about this story is we look at CEO examples, we look at athletes, we look at business leaders. We don't really look at presidents of the United States as we sort of ponder what we do next.
Dana Taylor:
Well, for many of us, a third phase in life represents the opportunity to pass on what we've learned. How important was the sharing of knowledge, and I would include a smooth transition of power in that to the presidencies you focused on here?
Jared Cohen:
I think the idea of a smooth transfer of power is incredibly important, right? I mean, as I mentioned before, the founding fathers, they left kind of an open-ended question about what to do with ex-presidents. They worried about it, but they had other things that they worried about more. And so they left the question unanswered.
George Washington sets a precedent for the peaceful transfer of power after stepping down, following his two terms. It's not codified until you have the 22nd amendment that limits the president to two terms following FDR's fourth election. And so what you conclude from that is that when it came to presidential transitions and when it came to the peaceful transfer of power, we kind of winged it.
And I think what it tells you is that the American democratic system for all of its early flaws, all of its imperfections that we've iterated on over the years and over the decades and over the last couple centuries has one thing at its core that has sort of rung true at every chapter, which is this idea of the peaceful transfer of power, which is why when you reflect back to the horrible events that happened on January 6th, I think this is what was so rattling, that it can't be the case. Without a constitutional amendment and without it necessarily written into law we got this right, so many times throughout the course of the Republic, obviously the Civil War being an exception, and in 2020, that's when we have such a significant hiccup. And so it just felt like a major, major throwback to a chapter of history that we thought we were sort of centuries past.
Dana Taylor:
Letting go of one rule may open the door to another like many former presidents, and you mentioned this with John Quincy Adams. He didn't transition to retirement or a third act when he left office. You wrote that for a second act he came back and ran for Congress. Is there a lesson here for people who don't dream about retirement?
Jared Cohen:
You have so many people who they have their shortlist of things that they want to do before they die, or they have their list of causes that they want to champion. John Quincy Adams didn't know what his was, and in his nine terms, elected to the House of Representatives as an ex-president, the abolitionist cause finds him. He doesn't find it. Slavery was not a big sort of publicly debated issue during the time that he was president and even the time before. That's hard for us to imagine today, and it wouldn't have been in the 1830s because there was a norm that you didn't talk about it in Congress.
And once the idea that you didn't talk about slavery threatened the right to petition, that's when he really began this sort of voracious movement to defend the right to petition. And the more he defended the right to petition, the more abolitionists sent in his petitions. The more of those petitions he read in Congress, the more agitated the slavocracy got. The more agitated the slavocracy got, the more this kind of came to a head in a series of conflagrations that basically moved us 10 years into the future and took a movement that frankly I don't think would've mainstream for another decade, I don't think would've inspired Abraham Lincoln at that moment had it not been for John Quincy Adams just being so much smarter than everybody else.
Dana Taylor:
I want to talk about a trait that all of them possessed, and that's ambition. Did any of them actually quiet that quality after leaving office? And is it possible for a former president to pivot from a public life to an almost entirely private life?
Jared Cohen:
So of the 45 men who've served as president 46 times, because we had Grover Cleveland twice, there's only one president who I believe has been able to successfully completely separate from politics and the presidency. And that's George W. Bush. And when I looked at the active living presidents, there was only one of them whose popularity had surged more than 50%, and that was Bush 43. And yet he's done less to invest in his legacy than any of his active contemporaries. And so I thought that was worthy of study and trying to understand.
I spent two days with him up in Kennebunkport during Covid in 2020, really kind of digging into his post-presidency. He's kind of a chapter guy. He views his life as chapters and they have a beginning and end. And from his perspective, when he looks at his political career, when it's over, it's over and he genuinely doesn't miss it. He's not introspective about it. I think that probably drives certain critics crazy, but that's who he is. I interviewed a lot of his friends as well. It's a common thread about Bush and the post-presidency, which is they all describe him as a man just at utter peace.
Dana Taylor:
You've already mentioned that former presidents are often not seen as relatable. Why do you think it's worthwhile to look to these seven men for life lessons regarding power? What do you hope people take away from your book?
Jared Cohen:
I went through a journey as I was researching each of these presidents and digging into their post-presidency that we're all going to ask the question, what's next so many different times in our lives. What I learned from looking at the seven together, there's no blueprint for it, right? Again, each one of them was successful because they understood what they were principled about, and they found a way to get rid of all the noise and double down on those principles.
So if you view yourself as a serial entrepreneur or serial founder, Thomas Jefferson will feel relatable. If you want to have a whole second act, John Quincy Adams is your guy. If you want to make a comeback to the job that you had before, Grover Cleveland.
If you feel like you've had a big fall and you want to recover what you once had, Herbert Hoover's a great and inspiring story. There was a dream job you wanted, and the timing wasn't right, or the circumstances weren't right, look at William Howard Taft, who finally got his dream job in his last 10 years of life as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Jimmy Carter is for people who want to be a former version of themselves, and George W. Bush is for people who want to detach from what was perhaps their greatest act or just their last act, and close that chapter and move on.
Dana Taylor:
Jared, thanks so much for joining me.
Jared Cohen:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Marie Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcast@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.