With news this Presidents’ Day weekend that Jimmy Carter is entering hospice care, it brings into sharp focus the remarkable number of presidents who like Carter have served and returned to long private lives during these past few decades.
Carter has lived longer than 46 other presidents in more than 230 years.
At 98 years old, Carter, the 39th president, has outlived George H.W. Bush by just under four years – something that seemed unlikely in 2015, when Carter announced that cancer had spread to his brain.
Carter has rarely ruminated about his longevity; he’s the oldest living president and the president who has lived longest after his term in office. His seemingly most important milestone arrived in 2020, when he celebrated his 75th wedding anniversary with Rosalynn Carter, which made the Carters the longest-married presidential couple in history.
“The best thing I ever did was marry Rosalynn,” Carter said in a C-SPAN interview at The Carter Center in 2015. “That’s the pinnacle of my life.”
Still, the onetime peanut farmer’s and decades-long philanthropist’s longevity marks a pivotal moment in post-presidential history.
Before 2004, only two presidents lived past 90, including the nation’s second president, John Adams, who died July 4, 1826 – the same day as Thomas Jefferson, who was seven years his junior.
Considering the average American man’s life expectancy hovered around 40 in Adams’ lifetime, it’s little surprise that his longevity was an outlier among the early presidents.
Most presidents’ natural lives, though, have been longer than the average American man’s. Since 2004, every former U.S. president has lived into his 90s, while the average man’s life expectancy has been in the mid-70s.
The byproduct: A lot of living former presidents.
As early as 1861, there were five living ex-presidents, but that was the exception, rather than what Americans have come to expect in the past couple of decades.
For four brief periods since 1993, Carter has been among an evolving group of five former presidents.
And when they appeared together at various historic junctures, their images offered momentary distractions from the growing partisanship in Washington.
Assuming partisan discord doesn’t make these images a thing of the past, presidential photographers might need wider lenses on their cameras before long.
All the other former presidents today are 76 or younger. Barack Obama turns 62 this summer.
It’s interesting to note that President Joe Biden, the oldest elected U.S. president at 80, has already outlived more than 70% of past presidents.
Of the four other living former presidents, Bill Clinton, Obama and George W. Bush also have good chances of surpassing Carter with the longest lives after their presidencies. Of course, whether their post-presidency contributions match Carter’s will be for historians to debate.
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