Is There A Second-Term Curse?

IS THERE A SECOND-TERM CURSE?

President Barack Obama

            Watching the coverage of President Barack Obama’s second oath of office this morning on CNN, I was engrossed by the discussion among several noted historians and political insiders on what is called “the second-term curse.”  As the theory goes, United States presidents who are fortunate enough to win a second term in office often discover the hard way that what appears to be a blessing by the American people is actually a curse in disguise! Most interesting to me was the comparison of those presidents who have had second terms, and the question of which of these men have succeeded and which have failed.  Needless to say, it got me thinking about a potential blog post—just in time for the 2013 inaugural ceremonies!

In two hundred and twenty-four years, only seventeen presidents have been elected to second terms, and that second term has frequently been wracked with overwhelming disappointment.  The problem seems to be that the American people expect their chief executive to perform as good as, or better than he did in the first term, and this is simply an impossible expectation.  The world is almost never the same place that it was when the president first took office.  And because the demands on the office change with every situation, the incumbent does not always live up to the expectations.  Consider the failure of George W. Bush’s greatest second-term initiative, the revamping of social security.  President Bush interpreted his reelection as a sweeping endorsement of all of his proposed policies, when in fact the people elected him to see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through to honorable victory and keep the country secure at home.  Thus his plans for social security were resoundingly rejected by Democrats and Republicans, and the perception that the wars were unending led to the transfer of political power in Congress in the mid-term elections.  In the end, the second term presidents often find themselves trying to live up to their own self images—established during their first term—and, as one historian so eloquently stated on this morning’s talk shows, “sequels are almost never as good as the first!”  

George Washington

So then, which of the second-term presidents was most successful?  One historian today quickly blurted out his opinion, which should come as no surprise to anyone searching for a safe and simple answer: “why, George Washington, of course!”  But is this an accurate assessment?  Was Washington, for instance, really as successful of a president as Americans have come to believe?  It is certainly true that, when we rank our presidents from best to worst, Washington traditionally gets high marks.  For instance, in a 2006 ranking by Atlantic Magazine of the most influential Americans of all time he came in second only to Abraham Lincoln.

But I suspect that the Washington we place on so high a pedestal is not the real Washington!  As historian Marcus Cunliffe suggested in George Washington: Man and Monument (1958), Washington and his contemporaries—as well as his apologists during the nineteenth century—purposefully shielded from us the first president’s shortcomings in order to leave for posterity a god-like monument devoid of any wrongdoing; a perfect American hero for all ages.  Despite recent attempts by scholars to reverse the damage of the last two hundred years, it does not seem to have worked!  The legendary Washington endured.  For an example, lets look back at that historian who claimed this morning that he was the most successful second-term president in history.  When asked for his reasoning, he listed two “successes” in Washington’s second term—the bringing together of various political factions within the New Republic, and the president’s decision to relinquish power after eight years in office rather than become an elected monarch.  Because he relinquished power where others would have coveted it, Washington rightly deserves to be praised as the greatest man of all time (a title bestowed upon him by none other than his old adversary, King George III), but I am more concerned with that first example—that he unified the country’s divided political factions.  

It is true that Washington was reelected unanimously to a second term in 1792, but this was not because of political unity.  On the contrary, the country was almost as deeply divided then as it is today!  The Federalist Party (led by Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton) and the emerging Democratic-Republicans (led by Congressman James Madison and, less visibly, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson) offered up very different ideas about domestic and foreign policy, and had no problem criticizing Washington when he did not adhere to their points of view.  For example, in 1793 when news arrived in America that French Jacobins had executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and that Great Britain had declared war against France, Washington was called a traitor to the revolution by the Democratic-Republicans for issuing an act of neutrality.  The charge was again revived in 1795 when Washington signed the Jay Treaty, securing Britain’s recognition of American neutrality in return for America’s favoritism of Britain in matters of trade.  Furthermore, in 1794 the Democratic-Republicans labeled Washington a tyrant and a bully for nationalizing the Pennsylvania militia to quell a rebellion of grain farmers on the frontier who had opposed Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax.  Although some historians say that he feared setting a precedent by holding the presidency until he died in office, it is likely that the culmination of these hurtful charges from people who just four years earlier had so warmly embraced him as their national hero helped to compell Washington to forego a third term in office.  Clearly, then, despite what some historians have suggested, Washington was not only the first man to be president of the United States, but also the first president to suffer from the “second-term curse!”

Thomas Jefferson

            So, if Washington was not the best second-term president, who was?  When Thomas Jefferson was reelected by a landslide in 1804 the nation was at peace with all foreign nations, its size had doubled the year before with the Louisiana Purchase, it was well on its way to becoming a continental power, all federal taxes had been repealed, and the national debt had been cut in half!  But, in 1807 Britain and France once more went to war, and both sought to use the United States as a wedge against the other.  The United States nearly came to blows with Great Britain when the HMS Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake, wounding and killing dozens of sailors and taking four men prisoner for being supposed deserters of the British navy.  And because Jefferson did not have a strong enough military to fight off Great Britain, he instead issued an embargo of British goods in an attempt to wound that nation economically that completely backfired, leading to a recession in the last year of his term.  

Jefferson’s successors, James Madison and James Monroe, faired little better.  By the end of Madison’s second term in office, the nation’s debt had ballooned from an ill-conceived war with Great Britain that left much of the government’s public buildings in smoldering ruins, and that had increasingly alienated the Native American tribes on the frontier.  The one consolation for Madison was the fact that his political opposition—the Federalists—fared little better.  Their party ultimately dissolved within the next four years, leaving James Monroe to rule over a one-party government in a time known as “the Era of Good Feelings.”  But, alas, those feelings were short-lived, for by the end his second term Monroe was confronted with a growing sectional division between North and South over slavery and the Missouri Compromise.  As well, by 1824 the political parties had reappeared with a vengeance (whereas Monroe ran unopposed for his second term, his predecessor was chosen from a list of no less than four different candidates)!  Thus, when Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe left office, it could be rightly said that they too had become victims of the “second-term curse!”

Abraham Lincoln

As nineteenth-century presidents go, few seemed to avoid the curse.  Although he gave us by far the best second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated one month into his second term; Ulysses S. Grant’s second term was riled in political corruption (the result of a couple of embezzlers in his cabinet that took advantage of the General’s good reputation); and William McKinley followed in Lincoln’s footsteps by also being assassinated early into his fifth year in office.  The one exception to this was Andrew Jackson, who not only managed to build a political coalition (the Democratic Party) that dominated federal policy for the better part of the next thirty years, but also broke the will of the national bank and returned federal tax revenues to state management, paid off the national debt, and—with the help of a couple of surrogates—successfully coerced Congress into expunging an earlier censure of his personal honor from the congressional record!  And while his policies did ultimately result in the collapse of the economy in 1837, Jackson successfully avoided attaching his legacy to this albatross (which eventually brought down his successor, Martin Van Buren).  

When it comes to twentieth-century presidents, the record of second-term successes is also fairly scarce!  Woodrow Wilson, for instance, was elected on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War!”  But only one month into his second term, the United States found itself bogged down in the quagmire that was World War I.  That conflict eventually cost the lives of over 100,000 American men.  Even worse, Wilson’s most important global initiatives—the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, and the establishment of the League of Nations—were dismal failures at home, and after a grueling national campaign in support of these measures he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him a recluse for the remainder of his term.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Although he was one of the greatest politicians of the twentieth century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt also suffered from the “second-term curse.”  Following the greatest landslide victory in American history (he won 523 out of 531 electoral votes, and every state except Vermont and Maine), he completely misinterpreted the mandate from the American people and undertook the greatest power grab in American political history by seeking to pack the Supreme Court with additional judges friendly to his New Deal policies.  As a result of this alarming measure, the people lost a great deal of confidence in their chief executive, and the Congress ceased to cooperate in further progressive legislation, pushing the nation back into recession by 1937.  Perhaps the greatest consequence of FDR’s second-term blunders was the smallest electoral victory of his political career in 1940, when he won a third term by a comfortable 449 electoral votes, but also lost more states than in either of his first two campaigns.

Richard M. Nixon

The trend of second term blunders continued through the rest of the twentieth century.  Dwight Eisenhower’s second term was wracked by the rising tensions between America and the Soviet Union, in which both nations sought to outdo the other in development of weapons of mass destruction.  It was also during Ike’s second term that the Soviets achieved a victory over the Americans in the space race by successfully launching their satellite Sputnik into orbit.   Despite his success at opening relations with China, and ending the hugely unpopular Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s second term lasted only two years, as members of Congress and the media hounded the 37^th president from all sides for his alleged involvement in the cover up of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972 by employees of the Committee to Re-elect the President.  As a result, Nixon might possibly win the prize for worst second term in all history, as he was eventually compelled to resign his office in August 1974.

Ronald Reagan

The last of the “second-termers” of the twentieth century fared little better.  President Ronald Reagan, for instance, ranks with FDR as one of the most successful politicians of the century, but although he managed to break the curse of presidents assassinated every twenty years, he was less successful at shielding his administration from the “second-term curse.”  In 1986, about the time that the president won reelection, the first news of the “Iran-Contra Affair” broke, in which the American government traded arms to Iran with the hopes that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow intelligence agencies to fund rebels in Nicaragua--involving America in a foreign rebellion and clearly violating U.S. law.  And while Reagan emphatically denied having any knowledge of these dealings, he later divulged to the American people in a televised address in March 1987 that, “my heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”  And while he resided over the most successful economy in sixty years, President Bill Clinton’s personal life interfered with his ability to govern effectively, and his failure to tell the truth under oath resulted in impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives (the first since the Watergate scandal, and only the second in history to indict the president).  

Andrew Jackson

           Ultimately, then, it appears that few presidents have lived up to the successes of their first terms.  To be fair, both Reagan and Clinton managed to overcome the political controversies that surrounded their last years in office, and today both are held extremely high in the esteem of the American people.  But that does not absolve them of the “second-term curse.” And so, to return to the question which second-term president was most successful, the verdict must be…Andrew Jackson!  While he is not devoid of controversy (just ask any Native American how they feel about Jackson), when it comes to accomplishments in the second term, no other president has come close to achieving his level of success!  And while I certainly wish President Obama the best, with a divided Congress and a polarized nation still recovering from the effects of the deepest recession since the 1930s, I am nonetheless realistic in my expectations.  If he does succeeded at beating the odds, he will be one of the very few American presidents to avoid the “second-term curse.”