When a president leaves office, they may go on to do great things. Maybe they’ll serve on the Supreme Court, like William Howard Taft. Maybe they’ll save the world from the Guinea worm like Jimmy Carter. Maybe they’ll get a Netflix deal, like Barack Obama.
Or maybe they’ll find that their life after the presidency is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
James K. Polk Immediately Shit Himself to Death
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Polk was one of just a handful of presidents to win their election and then not go on to run for a second term. He said he’d add Texas and Oregon to the United States and then not run for reelection, and that’s exactly what he did.
Polk Museum
He was 53 years old when he left the White House. He and his wife now went on a “victory tour” of the South, running into a bunch of loving supporters. He did note a danger of travel: A lot of the places he visited seemed to be suffering from a particular disease. As he wrote in his diary one day, “During the prevalence of cholera, I deem it prudent to remain as much as possible at my own house.”
The guy did catch cholera, which was a miserable disease, characterized by lots of painful diarrhea. The main treatment at the time involved laxatives, which is not, in fact, good for you when your body is already purging itself so hard that dehydration will kill you before the germ does.
Polk died from cholera just three months after leaving office. He would ultimately be buried at his home (the house he’d bought two years ago and had been waiting to get to move into), but at first, they chucked him in a special cemetery for cholera victims, because the body was too infectious to keep anywhere else.
John Tyler Was Elected His Neighborhood’s Overseer of Roads
Polk’s immediate predecessor, Tyler, was never elected president. He was vice president to William Henry Harrison, who died after just 32 days in office, and when Tyler succeeded him, plenty of people weren’t clear on whether the former VP truly was now president. By the end of Tyler’s term, no party supported him, so he created a new one, which failed to win him the election.
He now moved to Virginia, where his neighbors appointed him to a position called “Overseer of Roads.” As you can guess from the name, this wasn’t a job appropriate for a former president, and they gave it to him to mock him. They assumed he’d refuse to take it, a move that meant he had to pay a fine.
Instead, Tyler accepted the role. He enthusiastically took on the job of fixing the area’s roads. While the job involved very little glory, it also involved very little actual labor but mostly consisted of summoning out his neighbors’ slaves and making them obey him.
BakedintheHole/Wiki Commons
Yeah — Tyler was quite into slavery. As the Civil War approached, he sided with the Confederates, and when he finally started vomiting one day and died, he happened to be part of the new Confederate House of Representatives. Jefferson Davis buried him draped in a Confederate Flag, and Tyler was the only U.S. president whose death went officially unacknowledged by the United States.
Andrew Johnson Ran for Congress and Lost
Johnson, like Tyler, was never elected president, having instead been vice president to a president who died. Also like Tyler, Johnson wanted to run for reelection after his first term but failed to get his party’s nomination. With Johnson, though, the funny part isn’t what he was elected to afterward. It’s what he wasn’t elected to.
Johnson sought to become a senator from Tennessee, after having already been president. That sounds like one hell of a step down, but he actually lost this election, 54 to 51 (senators were elected by legislators in those days, not by the public). In 1872, he now tried to become a representative from Tennessee. Joining the House sounds like a step down for even a senator, let alone a president, and once again, he lost. In fact, he came in third place — neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted him, so he launched a failed third-party run.
Thomas Nast
In 1875, Johnson finally did win an election and became a senator. People treated this as a major comeback, after those last couple defeats. He left no great mark as senator because just four months after getting sworn in, he had a stroke and died.
Franklin Pierce Drank Himself to Death
Pierce didn’t show up to the 1852 convention that nominated him. No one had any idea the Democrats were going to nominate him, and when news later reached him that he was the nominee, he didn’t believe it, and his wife fainted. After this, he didn’t campaign at all. Still, when the election came, he won every state but four.
Library of Congress
He went on to be one of the worst presidents in history — or, as fans prefer to call him, the handsomest president in history. He didn’t appear to have high expectations of what his life would be after leaving office. “After the White House,” he said, “what is there to do but drink?”
Sure enough, he didn’t do much. His party actually wanted him to run for president again (in a last-ditch attempt to beat this new “Lincoln” guy), but he refused. He ended up dying at the age of 64 from cirrhosis, due to all his drinking.
Harry S. Truman Spent All His Time Talking About How Poor He Was
After Truman left office in 1953, he contacted a bunch of people in Congress about setting up some sort of presidential pension because he was broke. “If I hadn’t inherited some property that finally paid things through, I’d be on relief right now,” he told the American public in a televised interview. Congress heeded his pleas and created the system of post-presidential benefits. At the time, this affected only him and the one other living ex-president, Herbert Hoover, who didn’t need the money but said he accepted it to avoid embarrassing Truman.
National Archives
“Yes. To avoid embarrassing you. That’s my only motive.”
That was the story people told each other for decades — the president, who’d won World War II and rebuilt the world afterward, ended life so humbly that he needed welfare to support him. Only thing was, the story wasn’t true.
The part we told you was true. He really did lobby for a pension, and he really did say he was poor. But the guy was rich. While president, he’d earned an annual salary of $1.3 million in today’s money, which is over three times what the president earns today. When he left the White House, he had the equivalent of $6.6 million, and if you really want to know how much richer that was compared to the average person, you have to take more into account than just inflation. Consider that in those days, having $125,000 in today’s money put you in the top 1 percent, while in 2024, you’d need 100 times that amount because people have a lot more real wealth now.
He went on to write a memoir that earned him $7 million more (again, in today’s dollars). Then he asked for a pension, falsely claiming poverty. Some might say a president forced to beg has hit rock bottom. But we’d have to say that a president ending his life by grifting the government out of money he doesn’t even need is as low as it gets.
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