SUMMARY: Can an ex-President have fun? Atlantic writer Barbara Bradley Hagerty examined the lives of modern Presidents to see how they fared in the real world after leaving office in middle age. As part of a collaboration with The Atlantic, Hagerty tells Judy Woodruff that Jimmy Carter was the trailblazer, Bill Clinton the moneymaker, George W. Bush the laid-back painter. So what's next for Barack Obama?
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, The Atlantic: Well, generally, Presidents — and let's refer throughout history — unless Presidents were wealthy, they generally had to work.
So, George Washington became the largest whiskey distiller. And, you know, William Howard Taft became the Supreme Court chief justice. So, they had to work.
But, more recently, what I was interested in seeing is that Presidents are living so long now. And when a President leaves in midlife, at the peak of his game, what does he do then? What does he do for an encore?
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): So, over time, the idea of what to do and the amount of time has changed. Take us back to modern Presidents. I mean, you looked at Jimmy Carter.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY:Jimmy Carter, he had a rough landing after his Presidency, which is not atypical.
So, Jimmy Carter loses to — in a landslide — to Ronald Reagan, and he comes home to Plains, Georgia, and there he finds that his business, his peanut business, is a million dollars in debt, that his house is in need of repair, and, literally, the forest has come right up to his back step, their back step.
And it was kind of this metaphor for Jimmy Carter's life. How does he navigate through the thicket? How does he have meaning in his life, after he was a one-term, relatively unpopular President? And so that was his challenge.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And he was in his mid-50s.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: He was. He was 56.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, how did he go about figuring out what he would do?
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY:When you look at Carter, what you saw was a man who was — his personality, he was very smart, very ambitious, and he had a kind of biblical ethos.
In fact, Walter Mondale told me that Jimmy Carter said, “You know, when this is all over, I want to be a missionary.”
So there's that. And then there was his Presidency. And what you saw in the Presidency, it was a rough Presidency, but he had this one defining area, right, Camp David, peace between Israel and Egypt.
SUMMARY: President Obama will deliver a farewell address to the nation in Chicago on Tuesday evening. Why do presidents give goodbye remarks? Judy Woodruff gets historical context on past speeches and the shaping of political legacy from presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard University Law School.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): President Obama will deliver his farewell address to the nation this evening before a room full of supporters in Chicago.
We discuss a little of the Obama legacy and look ahead to tonight's speech with two historians, NewsHour regular Michael Beschloss, and Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard University.
And we welcome both of you back to the NewsHour.
Michael, let me start with you.
How often do Presidents give farewell addresses?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian:Well, George Washington began the tradition, but it's really been more a thing of modern times begun by Harry Truman, who did one from the Oval Office when he retired in 1953.
But they don't always work. The ones that really work are when you have the sense that the President is sort of leveling with you in a way that perhaps he wasn't able to during his four or eight years in office. So, he's saying something that you haven't heard before with new candor.
And the other thing is that when he says something that sounds as if it's a lesson he's learned that perhaps he didn't know before. The best example of this, Eisenhower in 1961, said, worry about the military industrial complex.
It was something that he had been increasingly worried about for a long time, but this was the first time he said it to the public.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Annette Gordon-Reed, of course, it's speculation, but why do you think President Obama wants to do this?
ANNETTE GORDON-REED, Harvard University Law School: Well, he's in an interesting position.
The election didn't turn out the way he probably thought it was going to turn out. This is a chance to cement his legacy and talk about the kinds of things that he wanted to do as President. And he is facing a situation where people might try to undo a good amount of that.
So, I think this is a good way for him to sort of lay a template, perhaps, for historians later on, even though that's almost an impossible thing to do. But I think it's a way for him to talk about his legacy, to sort of say to the American people what was important to him, what he thinks he accomplished as President.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Michael, there is some reporting over the last few days that the president may be rethinking how he wants to spend his post-presidency, given the outcome of the election. Could this be part of that?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Might very well be. He might spend a lot more time replying and criticizing things that Donald Trump may be doing as President.
And if that's true, he's got to have some kind of foreshadowing of that in this speech tonight. One thing everyone will be wondering is, what is his current thinking about Trump? Right after the election, he seemed quite moderate about it, hoping perhaps to coax Donald Trump to make more moderate appointments and more moderate policies than he was expecting to.
But that's all over now. So, if Barack Obama gets through this speech and there's not some, you know, genuine statement from him saying, you know, the country has to worry a little bit about what the new President is doing and, you know, perhaps think about a different direction, then I think we may not feel that he's really leveling with us in the way that other Presidents have.
SUMMARY: President Obama has commuted the sentences of more federal prisoners than any other president, and he's on track to leave far fewer federal inmates in federal prison since the 1960s. Hari Sreenivasan offers a look through the life of a former prisoner. Then William Brangham gets an assessment from Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post and former Florida attorney general Bill McCullum.
SUMMARY: President Obama is passionate, and vocal, about combating climate change. As his tenure draws to a close, science correspondent Miles O'Brien reviews the administration's environmental policy -- from the 2009 “cap-and-trade” climate bill, to the 2015 Paris Accord, to executive orders on greenhouse gas emissions -- in assessing the President's legacy.
SUMMARY: What is President Obama's economic legacy? Did his efforts to turn the country around after the 2008 financial crisis constitute a robust recovery, or too little, too late? Economics correspondent Paul Solman assembled a panel of economic experts to discuss employment across racial groups, the types of jobs created and the obstacles the President faced in enacting his economic agenda.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): Michael Bloomberg left office a few days ago after serving twelve years as the mayor of New York City and people are already trying to assess his legacy. Some pointed to the city’s plunging crime rate, others to its soaring real estate prices, and income inequality. Still, others to the mayor’s health initiatives. When I spoke with Reporter Katherine Bagley, of Inside Climate News, she said it was something else altogether. I began by asking her why she considers the mayor’s efforts to address climate change to be so significant.
KATHERINE BAGLEY, Inside Climate News: So, he has been working for the past six years on sustainability and climate change initiatives, and it is something that gets very little attention in the public and by the media, and yet what he has done is both a physical transformation of the city. And also something that a lot of people do not see; things like reducing emissions and reducing harmful pollutants in the air – things that have public health dangers.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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