David M. Shribman
Joe Biden was 26 then, fresh out of law school with the Delaware bar exam behind him, and a Michel Legrand song began playing on the radio of his Corvette Stingray roadster. It was called “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and even for a young man with a capacious ambition, he couldn’t have imagined the course his life would take.
There were, as the 1969 song projected, tomorrows waiting deep in his eyes: summer (marriages to two remarkable women), winter (three tragic family deaths), spring (election to the Senate and, eventually, to the White House), and fall (the disastrous June debate that led to his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign). It is a lovely ballad, particularly appropriate for a country that has seen all the seasons and the times of Biden’s days, especially for us journalists who, for a half-century, have seen his “face in every kind of light/In fields of gold and forests of the night.”
But as the music is about to stop — as Biden prepares to leave the presidency and to depart public life at age 82, a dozen years beyond the biblical allotment he would have encountered in religious study at Archmere Academy — it is well to remember that “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” didn’t win the best original song Academy Award. It was aced out by another song evocative of the Biden years: “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
Even so, the question of what Biden will be doing the rest of his life almost certainly is weighing upon him. He’s been in public office, with a short interregnum between the vice presidency and the presidency, since winning a seat on the New Castle County Council in 1970. (Top song that year: “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” which I suspect Biden might be happy to have as his epitaph.)
But Monday’s certification of the election of Donald Trump and Thursday’s funeral for Jimmy Carter, who arguably had the best post-presidency in American history, surely has focused the 46th president on what comes next. Biden is, to be sure, a full quarter-century older than Carter was when he left the White House. He may be about to be retired, but he isn’t the retiring sort.
Perhaps on his night table rests the estimable volume “Life After Power” by Jared Cohen. It was published almost exactly a year ago — in fact, three weeks before the New Hampshire primary, when, almost everyone now agrees, Biden should have stood down and made way for a fresh Democratic presidential nominee.
Though Biden’s term is about to expire, the book endures in hardcover, and if he is of a thrifty state of mind, it is discounted to $16.99 on Amazon.com right now. In its pages, Biden will discover that at his age, Thomas Jefferson greeted the first class of the University of Virginia, which he had founded and which was so important to him that it was listed on his tombstone. (The fact that he was a two-term president was not mentioned.) At Biden’s age, Herbert Hoover was still greeting diplomats visiting New York for sessions at the United Nations and working 12 hours a day.
“There is no joy to be had from retirement except from some kind of productive work,” Hoover told a young woman when he was precisely Biden’s age. “Otherwise, you degenerate into talking to everybody about your pains and pills and income tax.”
Biden might take note that at an age two years older than he is today, Hoover, who likely finishes second in the competition as best former president, published a book, “The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson,” and followed it with seven more volumes.
“America’s presidents can sometimes accomplish more after the White House than in it,” Cohen wrote. “Former presidents can take on new identities and find new purposes. They allow us to rethink about how the post-presidency — an institution with no formal structure that is almost as old as the United States — has, like the presidency itself, expanded in scope and possibility.”
It was during the flight to the funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that a friendship between Carter, who defeated Gerald Ford, and his onetime rival was created. (Irony: The ice was broken by Richard Nixon, who said in his first inaugural address, “The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”) Together, Carter and Ford worked for human rights and monitored elections across the globe.
More recent presidents had longer runways after their last Air Force One flight.
Bill Clinton, far younger than Biden when he left office at age 54, has had an active retirement, working to create scholarships for the children of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, playing host to several events at the Clinton Presidential Center and working in the two presidential campaigns of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
George W. Bush was 62 when he left the White House for a relatively quiet retirement that included appearances at sporting events, giving motivational speeches, developing a pastime as a painter and selecting a handful of issues to advocate, including relief and recovery efforts in Haiti and throughout the United States, often along with Barack Obama.
Obama, who was 55 when he left office, formed a film-production company with his wife and has been a prominent spokesman on racial and cultural issues. He and Bruce Springsteen produced an eight-episode podcast called “Renegades: Born in the USA” in 2021.
In his farewell address as president, Obama riffed off his campaign slogan and concluded, “Yes We Can. Yes We Did.” But for him, and for many other former presidents, there was more left to do.
“By leaving behind the title ‘President of the United States’ and returning to life as citizens, they’ve continued a democratic tradition,” Cohen wrote. “They’ve also had to answer the question of what you do when there is nowhere higher to climb, and have to decide for yourself, ‘What’s next?’”
Biden won’t be facing many press inquiries in his new role as former president. But in his next life, “What’s next?” will be the question he has to address, for, as the song says, he now must decide what he is doing for the rest of his life.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
