Films! Novels! Springsteen! The Obamas and Clintons seem to be having the time of their lives.
Karen Heller, The Washington Post
March 5, 2021
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Former presidents long slipped into a life soaked in sepia. They farmed on bucolic homesteads with graceful names. They golfed. Eventually, inking memoirs became standard post-presidency practice, sometimes because they needed money, odd as that seems today.
"There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president," said John Quincy Adams, who went on to serve in the U.S. House for almost two decades after the White House.
"After the White House, what is there to do but drink?" asked Franklin Pierce, who did, prodigiously.