Presidential Second Term Mishaps

Only two years into his second term, President Bush squandered his post-inauguration bounce on a failed Social Security initiative; his administration was scorned for ineptitude in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; his vice president’s former chief of staff has been indicted; his party lost control of Congress; he had to withdraw a Supreme Court nominee; his first veto — regarding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research — was hugely unpopular; and the Iraq war has been losing popularity with the American people and politicians for months.

But Bush’s second-term blues are nothing new.

Virtually every president has had a much more difficult, scandal-ridden or disappointing second term compared to his first. Two presidents were even assassinated during their second terms, less than a year after being reelected: Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and William McKinley in 1901.

In the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson’s second term was marred by his endorsement of the Embargo Act of 1807, which severed all U.S. exportation to prevent going to war with or siding with France or Britain; the law ruined the economy and Jefferson’s reputation as a statesman. Ulysses S. Grant filled many government positions with army buddies, relatives of his wife and party cronies, which resulted in several scandals — the Credit Mobilier Scandal, the Whisky Ring Scandal and the Indian Frauds, to name a few — which were exposed in his second term. Despite not profiting from or participating in these scandals, they tarnished Grant’s legacy when he left office in 1877.

Woodrow Wilson narrowly won re-election in 1916, and his presidency went downhill from there. The former president of Princeton banked his entire international legacy on the success of the United States’ ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and entry into the League of Nations; neither of which happened. After spending months suffering from severe, paralyzing strokes, he left office in 1921 with his Democratic Party losing the presidential race the year before by a huge landslide. Another Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, squandered his tremendous popularity at the start of his second term in 1937 when he proposed packing the Supreme Court with additional judges to counterbalance the conservative bloc, which had repeatedly struck down New Deal legislation as unconstitutional. Although only a chief executive as admired as FDR could’ve been so brazen to propose something so unwise and unstatesmanlike, Congress and the American people didn’t support the plan. Roosevelt would be elected to two more terms in the White House, but the court-packing plan damaged his political creditability and galvanized a Republican Party which had been blamed for the Depression.

In the midst of the Cold War, Harry Truman stunned the nation by defeating New York Gov. Thomas Dewey in 1948, but in a short four years China fell to the Communists, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb and North Korea invaded its southern neighbor. Truman was sharply criticized for his operation of the war, and the Supreme Court ruled that he overstepped his authority as president by using the Army to seize coal mines during a labor strike. When he left office in 1953, Truman “couldn’t have been elected dogcatcher in his hometown of Independence” in Missouri, in the words of one historian. Like Roosevelt in the 1930s, Dwight Eisenhower was immensely popular during his presidency but after defeating Illinois Sen. Adlai Stevenson for the White House a second time in 1956, the former Allied supreme commander hit some speed bumps. Firstly, Eisenhower suffered a stroke. Then his humble, grandfatherly image took a beating when he didn’t act forcefully enough to enforce integration in the South and other civil rights matters. On the Cold War front, the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and an American U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Also that year, the last of Eisenhower’s presidency, his vice president, Richard Nixon, lost a close election to Sen. John F. Kennedy in part because of Eisenhower’s reluctance to actively endorse Nixon and because of a nationwide economic recession.

Speaking of Nixon, his second term was probably the most devastating professionally of any president. Not only did evidence of illicit wiretappings, abuse of presidential power, a presidential “enemies list” and covert military operations overseas taint the Nixon White House, but the Watergate scandal and subsequent cover-up doomed Nixon’s presidency. Under threat of impeachment, in 1974 he became the first president to resign.

In the last generation, sour second terms have remained consistent but the presidents’ esteem remained intact. Ronald Reagan’s second term was preoccupied by the Iran-Contra Affair and although Reagan was never fully implicated, other administration and military officials were indicted or associated with the scandal. Reams of scandals plagued Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the Monica Lewinsky affair eventually led to his impeachment. But both Reagan and Clinton left office with considerable popularity, leaving history to fully judge the scandals which occurred during their tenures in the White House.

Why such a collapse? Why can’t presidents, who are usually reelected with landslide margins, maintain their leadership credentials and statesmanship value? Lame-duckness is one cause: there’s less urgency without the specter of reelection looming. Also, after several years in power, a president loses his novelty and political capital and his party traditionally loses seats in Congress during midterm elections. Alienated political and social minorities gain ground when the public loses interest or patience for a president’s platforms, rhetoric or character; Americans do have short attention spans, after all. The chief executive may also become more daring, arrogant and sloppy when it comes to managing the business of the nation, and scandal and misadministration becomes much more likely with the president’s staff, advisers and Cabinet if not the president himself.

After eight years in the Oval Office, the rope begins to unravel, and it’s ultimately up to history — and the American people who lived through and study that president and his administration — to determine if a chief executive deserves to be revered or reviled.