GETTING
A LIFE
What's an ex-President to do?
Edward
Heath, Britain's prime minister from 1970 to 1974, recently announced
that he intended to retire from the House of Commons after serving
continuously there for fifty years. Heath has been around so long
that he's in the lyric of a Beatles song, yet no one in Britain
considered it unusual that he should remain a leading voice in
his Conservative party so many years after relinquishing his country's
helm. Such lingering is unheard of these days in the United States,
and no doubt the departure of William Jefferson Clinton from the
White House—not to mention his ghostly political presence
as the spouse of the new Senator Clinton—will evoke continuing
editorial lamentations about how we, as a nation, tend to squander
the experience and sagacity of our ex-presidents (as well as lamentations
from the other side about any political involvement he does maintain).
The fact is, though, that men who have run the greatest power
in the world like to be in charge, not merely whispering advice.
No, in recent years the accepted procedure for former Presidents
has been to retire to the almost uniformly ugly, functional archives
their friends, admirers, and the American taxpayers help them
construct, and there compose memoirs justifying what they have
done in office. We can expect Bill Clinton to do the same—provided,
of course, that he escapes indictment.
Presidents
writing their memoirs is a relatively new habit. For a Chief Executive
to defend himself was long considered unseemly, much like campaigning
for the presidency in the first place. The first president who
tried it was James Buchanan, who in 1866 published Mr. Buchanan's
Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion, an attempt to excuse
the unholy mess he had helped make of the nation at that moment.
The most outstanding presidential memoirs are those of Ulysses
S. Grant, who wrote them while he was dying of throat cancer.
It was a last, courageous act from a courageous man, designed
to leave his family with some money after he had been swindled
by an unscrupulous business partner. Even while giving orders
during the Civil War, Grant displayed a talent for clear, succinct
prose—a virtue in generals and writers alike. It also helped
that Grant's editor and collaborator was Mark Twain. Few presidents
have been so fortunate. In more recent years, the ghostwriting
of presidential memoirs has become both more bland and more overbearing—so
much so that Harpers' magazine editor Lewis Lapham, when
asked for his critique of Ronald Reagan's effort, exclaimed “But
he didn't write it. He probably didn't read it.”
Of
course, many presidents have found things to do in their retirement
besides explaining themselves. Back in the days when being president
was supposed to be an act of selfless public service, several
early chief executives spent their last years fighting off bankruptcy.
Thomas Jefferson, for one, left the White House in 1809 some $24,000
in debt—a staggering sum for the time. He was able to recoup
for a while by selling his 6,500-volume book collection to the
nation for nearly that whole amount, thereby forming the core
of the new Library of Congress. But the incorrigibly public-minded
Jefferson soon returned to philanthropic—and uncompensated—endeavors,
founding the University of Virginia a few miles from his estate
at Monticello. He not only designed and supervised the construction
of the university's buildings and campus—one of the most
beautiful in America—but also set the curriculum, selected
the faculty, and served for a time as rector.
Unfortunately,
this relapse into civic-spiritedness left Jefferson on the brink
of having to sell off Monticello. He even explored the idea of
starting a lottery to save it. He did manage to stave off the
debt-collectors until his death, on July 4, 1826, but his estate
was some $107,274 in hock, forcing his surviving daughter, Martha,
to finally put Monticello up for sale.
Jefferson's
death, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,
coincided with that of John Adams, hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts.
When the messengers bearing the news subsequently met in front
of Philadelphia's Independence Hall, many Americans took this
as a sign of the divinely ordained role they saw for their country.
But Jefferson and Adams were not the only ex-presidents and founding
fathers to expire on the Fourth. Exactly five years later, our
fifth president, James Monroe, died in a house that still stands
on Prince Street in New York City, where Monroe, a Virginian,
had been hounded by creditors, all the while remonstrating with
Congress to compensate him for some of the $75,000 in debts he
had run up on official business during a forty-year career in
public service. Congress eventually begrudged him some of the
money Monroe felt he was owed, but not before he was forced to
give up his plantation and go live in a few modest rooms where
his end was almost certainly made more difficult by the cacophony
of a Manhattan Fourth of July celebration.
Not
all ex-presidents have limited their later years to staving off
the bailiff or writing their apologias, of course. Jimmy Carter
has led a notably worthwhile existence after the Oval Office,
building housing for the homeless and mediating political disputes
around the world—activities that have earned him considerably
better poll numbers from his countrymen than when he was in office.
Herbert Hoover, after producing a particularly sad and obsessive
memoir of his own, returned to the remarkable career of private
service he had begun before his presidency, eventually helping
alleviate hunger in a war-devastated Europe, just as he had thirty
years earlier. William Howard Taft went back to his first love,
the judiciary, becoming the only man to serve as both president
and Chief Justice of the United States. Martin Van Buren, Millard
Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt all made concerted
efforts, under one banner or another, to regain the White House.
Only Cleveland succeeded.
Yet
American politicians have rarely even considered returning to
daily politics in our national legislature, á la Mr. Heath.
Andrew Johnson did manage to make it back into the U.S. Senate,
albeit mostly to give one final, vindictive speech against the
forces that had nearly driven him from the presidency. John Tyler
won election to Congress some 16 years after leaving the presidency—the
Confederate congress, that is, an accomplishment that probably
marks the nadir of ex-presidential behavior. But then there is
John Quincy Adams, the man who surely put together the most worthy
post-presidency of all. Few midlife career turns could have seemed
less likely.
After
he was trounced by Andrew Jackson in their 1828 electoral rematch,
one might have expected Adams to return happily to his diverse
interests outside politics. These included fine wines, domesticating
wild plants, writing poetry and history, shooting pool, and taking
vigorous nude swims in the Potomac. Instead, within two years
he got himself elected to the House of Representatives from his
old hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts. Relieved of any greater
duty than serving his conscience and his constituents, he would
again and again establish himself as what Thoreau would call “a
majority of one.”
In
no area did Adams give more brilliant meaning to this phrase than
in his tireless campaign against slavery. Moviegoers may be familiar
with his successful argument before the Supreme Court to win freedom
for the slaves who had seized the ship Amistad. Yet still more
dramatic in its way—and occasionally hilarious—was his
years-long fight against the “gag rule.”
In
early 1836, Southerners in Congress, increasingly agitated by
constant petitions for the outlawing or at least limitation of
slavery, pushed through a House rule that automatically tabled
any such appeals. Confronted with this refutation of a basic tenet
of our democratic system, Adams responded by reading out as many
of the anti-slavery petitions as his constituents—or anyone
else from the North—would send him. As a result, he began
receiving a dozen death threats a month, many of them quite grisly.
These terrified his wife and troubled Adams himself, but he pressed
on.
On
February 6, 1836, well into another tumultuous debate about the
gag rule, Adams announced that he had a petition purporting to
be from twenty-two slaves. Was it within the House rules, he asked
the Speaker, to present such a petition? This was too much. One
after another, the Southern representatives rose to demand that
he be punished, and a representative from South Carolina named
Waddy Thompson put forward a motion to censure him before the
House, on the grounds that “by extending to slaves a privilege
only belonging to freemen, [Adams] directly incites the slave
population to insurrection.” Adams patiently let the debate
build before rising to make his defense. He easily deflected the
charge that he had permitted a petition from slaves to be presented;
rather, he had quite plainly asked if it could be presented. Then
he added, “If the House should choose to read the petition
[they would find it] the reverse from that which the resolution
states it to be. My crime has been for attemtpting to introduce
the petition of slaves that slavery should not be abolished.
Pandemonium!
It turned out he had received the petition from a Virginia slaveholder
seeking to embarrass him. Now the Southern representatives put
together a new motion of censure against Adams, for having “trifled
with the House.” Waddy Thompson, leading the Southerners
in that move, proclaimed, “Does the gentleman know that there
are laws in all the slave states and here, for the punishment
of those who incite insurrection? I can tell him that there are
such things as grand juries . . . he may yet be made amenable
to another tribunal, and we may yet see an incendiary brought
to condign punishment.”
On
February 9, Adams rose to make his reply to this argument. “If
that, sir, is the law of South Carolina,” he said, “I
thank God I am not a citizen of South Carolina!” More seriously
he added, “Let that gentleman, let every member of this House,
ask his own heart with what confidence, with what boldness, with
what freedom, with what firmness, he would give utterance to his
opinions on this floor, if, for every word, for a mere question
asked of the Speaker, invoking a question belonging to human freedom,
to the rights of man, he was liable to be tried as a felon or
an incendiary, and sent to the penitentiary!”
He
countered his attackers' censure with a defiance bordering on
contempt: “Did the gentleman think he could frighten me from
my purpose by the threat of a Grand Jury? If that was his object,
let me tell him he mistook his man. I am not to be frightened
from the discharge of a duty by the indignation of the gentleman
from South Carolina, not by all the Grand Juries in the universe."
All
remaining attempts to censure Adams quickly collapsed. His speech
was reported throughout the nation, and the Southerners found
to their chagrin that the very issues they had been trying so
assiduously to suppress were now being more widely debated than
ever. Adams, nearly seventy, had struck a blow for American liberty
unequaled even in his own long and brilliant career. He would
continue his campaign against the gag rule until it was finally
repealed in 1844, and he himself would go on until on February
23, 1848, when he suffered a massive stroke and collapsed over
his House desk.
Carried
into the Speaker's room, his right side paralyzed, Adams murmured
“I am composed," or perhaps “I am content." Either was
perfectly appropriate. Maintaining his composure all his life
under the harshest pressures, he could rest content in the service
he had done his country. One can only hope that Bill Clinton,
or any ex-President, can ever again find a way to be so effective.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
