Report: Bush's $80K phone bill

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27. Part of the problem is that the life expectancy for ex-presidents has sky-rocketed

Teddy Roosevelt lived not quite 10 years after leaving office.
William Howard Taft lived another 17 years.
Woodrow Wilson lived less than 3 years.
Warren Harding died in office.
Calvin Coolidge lived less than 4 years

Herbert Hoover lived another 31 years.
Franklin Roosevelt died in office.
Harry Truman lived not quite 20 years.
Dwight Eisenhower lived another 8 years.
John Kennedy died in office
Lyndon Johnson lived another 4 years.

Richard Nixon lived almost 20 years.
Gerald Ford lived almost another 30 years
Jimmy Carter is at 31 years and still going
Ronald Reagan lived another 15 years.
George H.W. Bush is at 19 years and still going
Bill Clinton is still going
George W. Bush is still going.

I remember that between 1961 and 1964, it was taken as something special that there were three living ex-presidents. (I still have a newspaper clipping around somewhere showing them all at Kennedy's inauguration.) Except for a few weeks in early 1969, that wouldn't happen again until 1981.

But when Reagan left office in 1989, it went up to four. It briefly went up to five in 1993-94, after George H.W. Bush left office and before Nixon died. And it's been either four or five ever since.

Ex-presidents are getting to be like space junk. They no longer serve much public purpose, but they stay up there in orbit, getting in the way and making everyone's life more difficult.