The Longest Post-Presidency

Recently on NPR I heard it mentioned that Jimmy Carter has had the longest post-presidency of any of our nation’s chief executives. So I decided to look into this.

President Carter left the White House on 20 January 1981. So as of 15 July 2015 he has been out of office for 12,594 days or 34 years, 5 months, 25 days.

I examined the amount of time spent in post-presidency by all presidents who lived to be a patriotic 76 or older. There are 15 of them. It soon became clear that Carter had zoomed past his nearest competitor more than a thousand days ago.

After Carter, here are the five presidents who have had the longest post-presidencies:
• Herbert Hoover. He left office on 04 Mar 1933 and died on 20 October 1964. (11,553 days)
• Gerald Ford — Carter’s friend and contemporary. Ford left office on 20 January 1977 and died on 26 December 2006. (10,932 days)
• John Adams. Our second president left office on 04 March 1801 and died on 04 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. (9,253 days)
• George H.W. Bush. The senior Bush left office on 20 January 1993 and as of 15 July 2015 he has been out of office 8,211 days.
• Martin Van Buren. The first president born after independence (1782) left office on 04 March 1841 and died on 24 July 1862. (7,812 days)*

The 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner is well placed to set an additional record. He stands a good chance of becoming the president with the longest lifespan. That record is currently held by Gerald Ford who lived 93 years and 165 days. Carter, who will turn 91 in October, has the vigor of someone a dozen years younger. And the former president seems to have inherited some very good DNA. All three of his siblings died of pancreatic cancer at ages 51, 54, and 63 respectively. Jimmy Carter himself has been free of any serious health problems though last spring he had to cut short a trip to Guyana because of what he called “a bad cold”.

The quality of Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency also deserves a quick mention. The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia has monitored 100 elections in 38 countries since 1989. The Center has also been at the forefront of eradicating several preventable diseases in developing countries. Largely through the Center’s efforts, the number of Guinea Worm cases in Africa has plummeted from 3.5 million in 1986 to just 126 in 2014.

* Date calculations from Time and Date.