- Life After the Power of the Presidency.

This week on "Firing Line."

- The idea of an ex-president, it's a feature of a democracy, not a bug.

- [Margaret] After leaving the Oval Office, George W. Bush stayed away from politics and focused on painting.

As an ex-president, John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives where he became a staunch opponent of slavery.

Jimmy Carter transformed the post-presidency into a platform for global peace efforts.

These are examples from Jared Cohen's new book, looking at the unique roles held by former presidents in American life.

Also on Cohen's list, Herbert Hoover.

- Donald "Herbert Hoover" Trump.

[audience laughs] - But he says politicians today are getting it wrong.

- And what people don't realize about Hoover is, he does recover his name in his lifetime.

It just gets tarnished again posthumously.

- [Margaret] And Grover Cleveland, the only former president to do what Donald Trump is attempting.

- [Jared] It might feel or seem nice to get the job you once had back, but it is rarely as sweet the second time.

- [Margaret] What does best-selling author Jared Cohen say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by, Robert Granieri.

Vanessa and Henry Cornell.

The Fairweather Foundation.

The Tepper Foundation.

Peter and Mary Kalikow.

the Asness Family Foundation.

The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation.

The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab.

And by the Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library.

The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation.

Damon Button.

Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

Roger and Susan Hertog.

Cheryl Cohen Effron and Blair Effron.

Al and Kathy Hubbard.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. And by Pfizer Inc. - Jared Cohen, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you, Margaret.

- Your new book, "Life After Power," examines the post presidencies of seven US presidents.

As you write in the book, "The post-presidency is not an official office.

Former presidents have no formal power, but they have a status in American life that never goes away."

What was worth examining about the American post-presidency?

- Well, presidents are these sort of seemingly unrelatable figures, but they fall hard, and they come back down to earth, and they all of a sudden become relatable.

We just skip that part in the really kind of thousand-page biographies.

And to me, it's fascinating.

The Founding Fathers didn't know what to do with ex-presidents.

One of my favorite you know, stories about this is Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, you know sort of asked the question, is it a good idea to have half a dozen men wandering around the Republic like disenchanted ghosts?

And they never quite resolved it.

And here we are 200 years later, more than 200 years later, and we still kind of don't know what to do with our ex-presidents.

- You call the post-presidency, "Essential to America's form of government."

Why?

- Well, former presidencies are a remarkable feature of a democracy, right?

There's a lot of authoritarian systems around the world that don't subscribe to the idea of a former president, or if they do, that former president is behind bars or you know, suffers a worse fate.

And so my view is that the idea of an ex-president, it's a feature of a democracy, not a bug.

It's something to be celebrated.

It's something to be understood.

It's something to learn from.

And look, ex-presidents, they, you know, they can either be their successor's greatest ally, or they can be their successor's greatest adversary, and everything in between.

- So you focus on President Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, disclaimer later, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush.

Is there a common experience in the loss of power?

As you said, "They fall hard, fast."

A grieving that accompanies the experience of all post presidents?

- If I look at the post-presidency, I would say that there's a separation challenge that they all encounter, particularly in those early years.

It's very hard to watch the person who comes in after you, whether you were voted out of office or you termed out.

There's some element of dismantling your legacy in real time while you're still alive.

It's a very difficult thing for ex-presidents to encounter.

And then just by nature, as an ex-president, you're more muzzled than you are as president, right.

You're constrained by not having the power and the platform.

And so there's a real transition in watching all of them grapple with it, and kind of getting in the heads of these former presidents as they kind of figured out how to make sense of this new chapter.

All of them go through some kind of a struggle.

So if I look at the seven presidents that I focus on, you know, Thomas Jefferson was a serial founder.

He always knew that he wanted to found a great university.

You know, John Quincy Adams, you know, had no idea what he was gonna do next.

And in a much lower station, he found a much higher calling as a abolitionist, you know, ex-president in the House of Representatives.

George W. Bush never knew that he was gonna, you know, become so passionate about painting that it would, you know, he'd be a painter longer than he was a politician.

- John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, the second president, is the only former president who went on to serve in the House of Representatives.

He served nine terms, almost two decades.

Explain the circumstances of Adam's trajectory.

- Well, first of all, it's worth noting, so John Quincy Adams, who gets his first job appointed by George Washington in his administration, dies in his ninth term in the House of Representatives as an ex-president in 1848, serving alongside Abraham Lincoln, a freshman congressman from Illinois.

So talk about- - And he dies at his desk in capitol.

- So the story of John Adams is a story of somebody who had a great second act.

He leaves office in 1829 after being defeated in a very humiliating way by Andrew Jackson and doesn't know what to do.

And so he takes a much lower station, and in that much lower station, a much higher cause ends up finding him.

He'd always been opposed to slavery, but he becomes this champion of a cause that at the time was seen quite fringy, which is abolition.

And the reaction from the slave-ocracy in the House of Representatives really outrages him because people didn't talk about slavery in the House.

It was just the norm not to.

And it ends up basically being him against everybody.

And he's just so much smarter than all of these mediocre men in the House of Representatives.

And so it's a story of an ex-president with just an outsized brain who was able to deploy that brain in service of the abolitionist cause in the House of Representatives.

And he as an ex-president in the House, he became bigger than the House.

He became bigger than the presidency.

And I really do not believe that Abraham Lincoln would've been inspired in the way that he was, had it not been for John Quincy Adams.

John Quincy Adams mainstream the movement.

He stepped into it.

He did it by accident.

He resisted it at different stages, and the movement was served by that because by the time he embraced it, which really comes when he defends a group of slaves in the famous Amistad case before the Supreme Court, the movement is ready to be mainstreamed.

- Grover Cleveland is another president who returns to elected office.

He didn't do so well in the post-presidency, so he returned to the presidency.

But the country had changed in the intervening four years.

And the piece that stood out to me most about that chapter is that the downside of being reelected to the presidency is you are elected as a lame duck.

Is that a cautionary tale?

- So, Grover Cleveland is the story of a comeback, right?

And you know, he didn't lose the popular vote.

You know, he won the popular vote, and he lost the electoral college.

And so he left office feeling popular, and his wife wants to go back to the White House.

You know, she tells the White House butler, "I'll be back in four years."

And she was.

She planted a big kiss on her husband's cheek for the first time at an inauguration.

And the crowd you know, cheers when he comes back in 1892.

The problem is during those four years, the country changed.

So by the time he becomes president, through no fault of his own, he inherits the worst economic depression in the country's history.

And unlike his first presidency where he left popular and happy and in love, and excited about the post-presidency, he really never fully regains his happiness, and he leaves less popular.

And so, Grover Cleveland story of a comeback is a reminder that it might feel or seem nice to get the job you once had back, but it is rarely as sweet the second time.

- Is it a cautionary tale?

- I think it's absolutely a cautionary tale.

- Obviously the subtext here, right.

We have a former president who is seeking the nomination of his party, who has a very good chance of getting it.

What are the other parallels?

- So by the way, this is likely gonna be only the second time in history that you have two presidents running against each other as the nominees of the two major parties.

The fact that this has only happened once in history tells you how far off script we've gone.

And so it's hard to look at this situation where they're both less popular than they were four years ago.

They're both older than they were four years ago.

The country's gotten more complicated than it was four years ago.

And look at this situation, and ask the question, maybe we have two presidents that just don't want to give up power, right.

It's kind of a good time to ask what to do with ex-presidents.

- So what should we do with a post-presidency?

- So I think there's no one monolithic model for what to do with ex-presidents.

What's interesting is over time, what we've done is we've given them some things to do that are kind of obligations in those early years, right?

They have to write the memoir.

They have to give the paid speeches.

They have to sort of set up their library and their foundation, and that kind of helps them transition.

So we've given them kind of an exit package, for lack of a better way of putting it.

The question is, what do they do with the rest of their lives?

I don't think we want them wandering around like the disenchanted ghosts that Hamilton worried about.

I don't think we want them to be a nuisance to their successors, but I also think we don't want them to fade away and be invisible.

There's something magical about the post-presidency, because again, you know, authoritarian systems don't have it.

We have more ex-presidents alive today than we have at any other time in history.

It's an incredible opportunity to show national unity.

Bipartisanship is something that feels like it's in recession right now.

We have presidents of both parties who are alive.

Everybody loves the image of you know, when Bush and Obama get together.

There's things that symbolically would've been counterintuitive when they were in office that you can bring alive in the post-presidency.

But they also make incredible elder statesmen.

And the world's complicated right now.

I mean, this is the most difficult geopolitical period we've had in more than two plus decades.

You know, tensions with China, war in the Middle East, war in Europe.

we're likely to see more conflicts, not less.

The ability to utilize ex-presidents as statesmen, and deploy them around the world.

It's both a great symbol of democracy.

It's also a way to make them pretty useful.

- I want to get to Jimmy Carter because he's been a model of what you've just articulated and described, but some may question your addition of Herbert Hoover to this group of ex-presidents that you've studied.

Of course, I would not question that.

And frankly appreciated that you recognized that Herbert Hoover had 50 years in public life, four of which were president.

As a disclosure, you reached out to me at the beginning of your research process, and I was able to connect you to the Hoover Presidential Library, Hoover's biographer, and even a living ex secretary, ex research assistant of President Hoover's from his post-presidency.

What inclined you towards Hoover?

- So look, as I was looking at different presidents, and which ones to write about, there's an obvious question about Herbert Hoover, which is there's people in life who their reputation will end up in tatters, they'll leave office, you know, having sort of this perception of failure lingering around them.

And so I was really interested in a story of recovery.

And as I dug into Herbert Hoover, I came to appreciate that a man who lived to be 90 years old is basically defined by three and a half years.

You know, the time that the Great Depression happened through the balance of his presidency.

Ad he's as much of a marketing tragedy as anything else where you know, his name has just sort of sustained as political fodder.

And if you look at Herbert Hoover before the presidency, he had one of the greatest pre-presidential lives of any of the men who've risen to this office.

He was first of all, an orphan from Iowa, rose to become a self-made millionaire, became, you know, respected, and iconic in business, traveled all over the world, upstanding character.

You know, he was the great humanitarian who after World War I, you know basically fed all of Europe.

The world would've been very different if he didn't do that and even domestically.

After the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Herbert Hoover was the one who steps in to provide relief to the largely African American community that suffers.

So when he gets elected president in 1928, Hoover waltz's into the White House, and rarely have you had such a lopsided election, and such a foregone conclusion.

And in four years, it all disappears.

And he doesn't understand how quickly the American people can forget all of these things that he did.

And so he embarks on what I think is one of the most fascinating, and honestly, seemingly relatable stories of recovery, right?

The recovery of his name, and the recovery of that path to service that so enjoyed before being president.

I think he probably regretted being president because he had lost all of that.

And you know, in his lifetime, by the time he dies at 90 years old, he once again becomes the great humanitarian.

He's resurrected by Harry Truman to feed the world again.

This time after World War II.

The world gets to remember him as a great businessman, an executive, because both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower bring him in to reorganize the executive branch of government through not one, but two Hoover commissions, and then his final act as a kind of statesman, and man of service is in 1960, Joe Kennedy, John f Kennedy's father asked him to bring JFK, and the defeated Richard Nixon together to show national unity.

And what people don't realize about Hoover is, he does recover his name in his lifetime.

It just gets tarnished again, posthumously.

- You know, it has been 90 years since Herbert Hoover left office, but recently, former President Trump, and President Biden have traded barbs invoking Herbert Hoover as a synonym for economic hard times.

Look at this.

- When there's a crash, I hope it's gonna be during this next 12 months, because I don't wanna be Herbert Hoover.

The one president, I just don't want to be Herbert Hoover.

- He's already Herbert Hoover.

He's the only president other than Herbert Hoover who lost jobs when he was president.

- Have you encountered any ex-president whose name has been so enduringly diminished?

- It's really, it's preposterous to me.

- But is it unique?

- With Hoover, it's totally unique, and you look at some of the ex-presidential disasters.

I mean, John Tyler defects from the Union as an ex-president.

The only president to ever literally be a traitor to the Union when he dies.

Lincoln doesn't give him a state funeral.

Franklin Pierce, who's you know, a Democrat from New Hampshire, ends up becoming a correspondent of Jefferson Davis and a Confederate sympathizer.

Why don't we tarnish their names?

You know, think about how many slave-owning presidents that we had.

And Hoover, you know, it's the power of marketing.

- Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover have some similarities.

They were quite young when they ascended to the presidency.

They each had four year terms from which they were precipitously dismissed from their office.

As Hoover always said, "Democracy is a harsh employer."

Jimmy Carter, you write, "Turned the post-presidency into a lifetime appointment with power of its own."

How did Carter approach the role differently?

- Well, first of all, Jimmy Carter's successful ex-presidency, in my opinion, does not exist without Herbert Hoover's successful ex-presidency.

Herbert Hoover did a lot of the things that Carter did as a former president.

He became a statesman.

He became a prolific author.

He criticized, you know, people in both parties.

He became a voice of principle.

And what Carter does in the post-presidency is he basically creates a post-presidential administration.

And it's Jimmy Carter who really invents the idea of the former presidency being a platform in and of itself.

He's able to do that because he lives for a long time.

But he also makes a decision very early on that he's done running for office.

He's not done with politics.

He weighs in on everything, and to the great agony of his successors on both sides.

But he separates and moves on from political elected life, and that allows him to really focus.

And I think as a man of tremendous faith, his faith guided him, and that kind of really, you know, shapes the way that he lives his post-presidency.

- Doesn't the success of his post-presidency also hinge on the generosity of his successors?

It's George H.W.

Bush who deploys him to Panama.

It's the utility of a former president is really at the behest of the current president.

- What's interesting is you know, a lot of presidents utilize Carter over the years, and sometimes he plays a constructive role, which he did in Panama during the election where Noriega was trying to put his drug trafficking successor in place.

And he behaves valiantly and nobly and consistently with the administration.

But there's lots of instances where he doesn't, right.

You know, Bill Clinton sends him to North Korea to meet with the Great Leader and instructs him, "Look, you're a messenger.

You're not to make policy.

You're just there as a messenger."

And then Carter behind closed doors negotiates a whole deal, and Clinton finds out about it because Carter goes on CNN talking about the breakthrough deal that he's negotiated.

And so of course, the Clinton people are furious.

And so Carter represents an ex-president.

And the risk, by the way, of an ex-president who is allowed to be out there.

- Going rogue.

Going totally rogue.

And by the way, you know, you compare and contrast Carter with Herbert Hoover.

When Herbert Hoover was utilized by ex-presidents, even when he disagreed with them, he stuck with the mission.

He saved his disagreements and his agitation for his books, and his speeches.

- You interviewed George W. Bush and his post-presidency.

How much of George W. Bush's post-presidency do you think is informed by his father who was a president, and also had his own post-presidency?

- So, I spent two days with President Bush in 2020.

And what I wanted to understand was the following, which is if you look at the active living presidents, there's only one whose popularity has doubled since he left office, and it's George W. Bush.

And it's kind of an interesting question of how he's managed to accomplish that when he's invested so much less, at least actively speaking in his legacy than presidents like Bill Clinton and Obama and others, - Is the obvious question that he has been implicitly compared with his Republican presidential successor?

- I think it's more complicated than that.

So I think let's start with where we should give George W. Bush credit, which is he's done something that no other ex-president has done, which is he has completely separated.

The chapter is called Moving On, because a lot of presidents talk about this idea of one president at a time, and revering the Washington principle, but they can't resist the urge to occasionally weigh in, occasionally hit the campaign trail, use the name of their successors.

George W. Bush doesn't do that.

He's never once wavered from it.

When I sat down to interview him, before I even asked a question, he looked at me, he kind of leans in, and this kind of Texas accent, and he says, "You know, when it's over, it's over.

I don't miss it."

And I looked at him and I said, "You know what?

I think I actually believe him."

He's a total chapter guy, right?

I mean, he sort of lives his life in chapters, and the chapter of politics was over, and he just kind of moved on.

And by the way, that that agitates people who want him to be introspective about his presidency, who disagreed with his policies, it's just not who the guy is.

And so he's managed to do something that no other president has done.

It's aged very well in the era of Donald Trump, because there's a juxtaposition of one Republican president adhering to the George Washington principal, and the quiet ex-president, and one who let's just say has not been.

So I think that's a second part of it.

I think a third is his, the lesson from his father was very instructive for him.

I think he watched the way his father's legacy got beaten up and the way his father, you know, responded to that in a dignified way as a real gentleman, and I think that that really inspired him to kind of mimic that lesson that his father taught him.

And then the other thing that's amazing about you know, George W. Bush is his painting, right.

His painting is not a hobby.

He spends six, seven hours some days, you know, doing it.

He has studios in every one of the places that he lives.

And what's interesting with the painting is he's discovered a post-presidential voice that allows him to continue advocating for policies that he cares about without undermining his successors.

And I think this is also part of why Bush has had a little bit of a resurrection.

One, I think the idea of a former president painting, it's kind of endearing, but I think the other is the subjects that he's painting, veterans and American immigrants.

These are subjects that, you know, make people remember and feel fondly about some of the lighter sides of George W. Bush.

- After leaving office, President Ronald Reagan appeared on the original "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley, Jr.

In 1990 to discuss his memoir, "Part of the exit package," as you say, "An American Life."

Here's how Buckley described the 700-page book.

Take a look.

- It is the closest we are likely to get to the history of the 1980s in America, and the closest we will ever get to a portrait of someone who feels it unnatural to draw open the curtain on his private life, and yet succeeds in illuminating that life by giving his reactions to public situations to give him pain and pleasure.

- Reagan reportedly signed a $5 million contract with Simon and Schuster for his memoir.

Many presidents have had multimillion dollar book deals, and big speaking fees around the world.

What is your analysis of the commoditization of the post-presidency?

- So it's gotten normalized over time, right.

I think the idea of presidents getting big book advances, we expect that the idea of presidents getting you know, big speaking fees, we expect that, And I think ex-presidents are a treasure of the Republic.

They're symbolic of you know, kind of transitions that make a democracy a democracy.

I think that if they want to make a lot of money, great.

But I think that there is not a Founder's obligation like Thomas Jefferson, but I think there is a former leader of the free world obligation to use that station to do something to advance the cause of democracy.

And I think as long as ex-presidents embark on something, purposeful, something that the American people look at and say, "That's what's supposed to happen in a democracy."

I think they care very little about the other things.

- The feature of an ex-presidency is an important aspect of our democracy because it reflects, as you say, "The peaceful transition of power."

You referenced Hamilton, and the Federalist Papers.

What did Hamilton and the Founders write about those who may be afraid or unwilling to step away peacefully from power?

- Look, the Founders worried tremendously about the peaceful transfer of power.

They didn't take it for granted.

They you know, monarchy was not just in the rear view mirror.

It was something they lived through.

You know, they had so many issues to contend with in terms of the founding of the Republic.

And frankly, they had to do the whole thing in haste.

They just never got around to answering the question of what to do with ex-presidents.

- Do you think it's worth also codifying a formal role for post-presidents?

- So look, this is something, this is something that the founders debated.

Again, it was not high on their list given all this circumstances, - It's never high on the list until somebody breaks a precedent.

- Yeah.

- Donald Trump is really agitated with breaking this peaceful transition of power precedent.

What if he had a formal role as a post precedent?

- So I think part of the challenge is to really have a proper enforceable, formal role for ex-presidents.

You would need a constitutional amendment, and the threshold for getting a constitutional amendment passed for anything, by the way, you could have a hard time getting a constitutional amendment reaffirming that the sky is blue right now.

And so I'm skeptical that we'll ever get there.

If you look at the living active ex-presidents, they have almost nothing in common.

I mean, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, they're all getting after it in totally different ways.

Some more constructively than others.

Some less constructively than others.

And so it feels like we've actually, we had sort of gained some consistency in the post-presidency, beginning with Hoover, and formalizing it with Carter, and you know, sequentially after that.

And it feels like all that consistency is now blown up.

- Jared Cohen, the book is excellent.

Thank you for your contribution, and thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

- Thank you, Margaret.

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by, Robert Granieri.

Vanessa and Henry Cornell.

The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation.

Peter and Mary Kalikow,.

The Asness Family Foundation.

The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation.

The McKenna Family Foundation.

Charles R. Schwab.

And by, the Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library.

the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation.

Damon Button.

Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

Roger and Susan Hertog.

Cheryl Cohen Effron and Blair Effron, Al and Kathy Hubbard.

Corporate funding is provided by, Stephens Inc. And by Pfizer Inc. [upbeat instrumental music] [logo chimes] [upbeat instrumental music] - [Narrator] You are watching PBS.