A brief history of the title of 'Oldest Living President'

Thank you, Jimmy Carter, your shift is finally over here.

For quite a while no one ever gave much thought to who was the oldest living president. We expected presdients to be older than most people, but we did not expect them to ever get so old. Because not a lot of us get to be 100 years old. But, it’s become more common.

Here’s how the Oldest Living President title has evolved.

1. George Washington (April 30, 1789 - December 14, 1799) - Washington literally had no competition in this category during his lifetime. The only other president in his lifetime was John Adams and he was three years younger. Despite Washington being considered an elder statesman in the Early Republic, he was just 67 years old when he passed away from what is now likely considered to be an inflammation of his epiglottis. This can be treated with antibiotics today. Washington was treated by bloodletting, which didn’t help matters.

2. John Adams (December 14, 1799 - July 4, 1826) - John Adams may have been unpopular as the second president, but he got to outlive most of his political opponents. This also included Thomas Jefferson, with whom he had reconciled, and outlived by a few hours.

3. James Madison (July 4, 1826 - June 28, 1836) - James Madison never left Virginia after leaving the Presidency. Politically, he didn’t have much influence after leaving office, but he pretty much put together the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so his legacy is secure.

4. Andrew Jackson (June 28, 1836 - March 4, 1841) - Jackson was the oldest person to be inaugurated president when took office in 1829. But he was just 61, and looked even older because he’d been through a lot in life already and his wife had passed away shortly before his inauguration. His time as oldest living president was not all in one stretch of time.

5. William Henry Harrison (March 4, 1841- April 4, 1841) - William Henry Harrison was 68 when he took office, the oldest for any president until 1981. It was commonly believed that he died of pneumonia contracted by giving a long inaugural address in the rain while not wearing a hat. This is generally not considered to be Harrison’s cause of death. He likely contracted cholera caused by a contaminated water source near the White House.

6. Andrew Jackson (April 4, 1841 - June 8, 1845) - Many people thought Andrew Jackson was going to die several times. He got shot at a lot. He got hit a few times. He eventually died of tuberculosis and heart failure at age 78. And he lives on in paper money (which he strongly opposed) that we get from ATMs and that no one ever has enough change to break.

7. John Quincy Adams (June 8, 1845 - February 23, 1848) - Adams was just three months younger than Jackson. Adams had a long career in the House after leaving the Presidency. He suffered a stroke while giving a speech on the House floor (his second stroke) and died in the Capitol a couple days later.

8. Martin Van Buren (February 23, 1848 - July 24, 1862) - Van Buren was still slightly older than the fairly old Zachary Taylor when the latter was inaugurated in 1849. And it all became a moot point when Taylor died in 1850. Because of cholera.

9. James Buchanan (July 24, 1862 - June 1, 1868) - I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think Abraham Lincoln was hitting up elder statesman James Buchanan for advice. Maybe he had to ask Buchanan for the White House Wi-Fi password. Buchanan said it was “IHeartJeffersonDavis1861.”

10. Millard Fillmore (June 1, 1868 - March 8, 1874) - One of the least deserving people to become president, Fillmore made the most of his post-Presidential career. He toured Europe. He held himself out as an elder statesman. He joined the Union Army with a bunch of older guys whose job it was to defend Buffalo from attack. Not many people cared.

11. Andrew Johnson (March 8, 1874 - July 31, 1875) - Despite being impeached and nearly convicted in 1868, Johnson came back as a senator from Tennessee in 1875, but died a few months after being sworn in, so he could not cause more trouble than he already had when he was president.

12. Ulysses Grant (July 31, 1875 - July 23, 1885) - Grant became the oldest living president first because he was the ONLY living President at the time, the first President since John Adams to hold that distinction. Grant was also the first President to die from cancer. And he still is the only president to die primarily from cancer.¹

13. Rutherford Hayes (July 23, 1885 - January 17, 1893) - Hayes was six months younger than Grant and outlived him by eight years before dying of heart disease.

14. Benjamin Harrison (January 17, 1893 - March 13, 1901) - Harrison’s wife passed away shortly before he lost his reelection bid to Grover Cleveland. He remarried in 1896 to a much younger woman and his children refused to attend the wedding.

15. Grover Cleveland (March 13, 1901 - June 24, 1908) - Cleveland had survived a secret operation to cut out a cancerous tumor from his palate early in his second term. In the end, he died of a heart attack at age 71.

16. Theodore Roosevelt (June 24, 1908 - March 4, 1909) - Not only was Teddy Roosevelt the youngest President ever when taking office, (42 years old), but he is the Youngest Oldest Living President. He was just 48 at the time. But there were no other living presidents. He only lived to be 60 and that was pretty lucky. His health (physical and mental) after leaving office was precarious.

17. William Howard Taft (March 4, 1909 - March 4, 1913) - Taft was older than Roosevelt, so he was the oldest for his entire term.

18. Woodrow Wilson (March 4, 1913 - February 3, 1924) - Wilson was already older than Taft and kept on being the oldest despite suffering a massive stroke in 1919 that effectively made him unable to govern. Despite all that, Wilson outlived his successor, Warren Harding.

19. William Howard Taft (February 3, 1924 - March 8, 1930) - After Wilson’s death, Taft reclaimed the title of Oldest Living President. He passed away at age 72, shortly after resigning as Chief Justice because of ill health.

20. Calvin Coolidge (March 8, 1930 - January 5, 1933) - Coolidge was older than his successor Herbert Hoover, but was still just 60 when he passed away. He was a popular former President and was not eager to see what Franklin Roosevelt would do. Coolidge is also believed to have suffered from severe clinical depression after the death of one of his sons during his Administration.

21. Herbert Hoover (January 5, 1933 - October 20, 1964) - Herbert Hoover’s one term in the White House may have been suboptimal, but he certainly didn’t let it affect his health. Hoover kept up a fairly active post-Presidency², even appearing (on a TV screen) at the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco. No one has been the Oldest Living President longer than Hoover.

    

    Herbert Hoover at age 90. Photo from the National Archives. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/12170924

22. Harry Truman (October 20, 1964 - December 26, 1972) - Harry Truman became president when he was 60 and was out of office at age 68. He famously drove himself from Washington back to Missouri. He hung around and got to see the beginnings of the Watergate scandal. He was the first President whose passing I remember.

23. Lyndon Johnson (December 26, 1972 - January 22, 1973) - LBJ was plagued by heart attacks throughout his life and chose not to run for another term in 1968 in part because he knew he would have a good chance of dying during that term. He ended up dying two days after that term would have ended. His 28 day stretch as the Oldest Living President is the shortest of anyone provided that Joe Biden lives another month.

24. Richard Nixon (January 22, 1973 - January 20, 1981) - For most of 1973 and until August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon was the only living President. Boy, that was a time. I had such an idyllic childhood.

25. Ronald Reagan (January 20, 1981 - June 5, 2004) - Ronald Reagan was the oldest man to be inaugurated president for the first time in 1981. When that happened, Nixon became the second oldest living president. Reagan would hold on to the title for a while, although his final years were spent with Alzheimer’s Disease, the first known case of that among Presidents.

26. Gerald Ford (June 5, 2004 - December 6, 2006) - Gerald Ford was two months younger than Richard Nixon, which surprised me as I thought he was older. But eight year olds are not the best judge of ages of men in their late 50s. They’re not really the best judge of a lot of things. Gerald Ford didn’t become the oldest living president until he was 90.

    

    Jimmy Carter at age 90. Photo by Randy von Liski from Flickr accessed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/myoldpostcards/15390819977

27. Jimmy Carter (December 6, 2006 - December 29, 2024) Jimmy Carter was a relatively spry 82 years old when he became the oldest living president. And with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams, no other ex-President has ever accomplished as much after leaving the White House. Carter is the only President to win a Nobel Peace Prize after leaving office. (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama won while in office.) Carter won in 2002 for “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development” Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were married for over 77 years, the longest marriage of any couple that includes a President.³

28. Joe Biden (December 29, 2024 - present) - Biden is the first sitting President since Reagan to also be the Oldest Living President. That age was a big setback in Reagan’s reelection bid as he only won 58.8% of the vote and 49 states. Such margins are very unlikely to be seen again in the nation’s current political climate. Biden’s age and aging ended up being the undoing of his Presidency. Biden, like Carter, took over the title of Oldest Living President at age 82.

1. Grover Cleveland, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter had non-fatal cancers. Carter’s official cause of death has not been announced, but he was 100, so it could be a lot of things.

2. I don’t know if he kept playing “Hooverball” after his death, which was a volleyball type game played with a medicine ball.

3. George H.W. and Barbara Bush are second longest at 73 years. Theodore Roosevelt’s first marriage to Alice Hathaway in 1880 lasted just four years.