About exPOTUS.com

What is this site about?

This site is about the lives of ex-Presidents of the United States.

But why?

The first death of a president that I can remember was Lyndon Johnson’s. In retrospect, it seems odd that I wasn’t aware of Truman dying only a few weeks earlier, but I was young and I did not regularly watch the news. When I saw the reports of Johnson’s funeral, I didn’t know who he was. When I asked about it, I was told he had been the president before Nixon. The idea that there could be a living ex-president intrigued me. I knew that Nixon was the current president, and I knew about other presidents who were long dead, but it had never occured to me that there could be a living person who had been president. However, at the point in time when I came to that realization, there was no longer any living ex-president.

At the time, I wondered if it was unusual for there to be no living ex-president. As if in answer to that question, the number of living ex-presidents steadily increased as I grew older, and I started to wonder if there had ever been as many living ex-presidents. I also remember being fascinated when I learned that John Quincy Adams served in congress after being president. What other notable things did ex-presidents do?

I built this site in order to explore and answer my childhood questions about ex-presidents. I now know that I experienced one of the few times in history when there were no living ex-presidents, and I then watched that number grow to five, a number reached only once before, and never exceeded. (Okay, it’s happened a couple more times since I first wrote that…)

What is an exPOTUS?

An exPOTUS is a living ex-President of the United States. This site limits the definition to living ex-presidents, because it is about the lives of ex-presidents. It follows, then, that a president who dies while in office is never an exPOTUS. A president becomes an exPOTUS upon leaving office, and ceases to be an exPOTUS upon death.

What happens if an exPOTUS becomes president again?

An exPOTUS who becomes president again ceases to be an exPOTUS while in office.

What happens if two exPOTUSes die on the same day?

It complicates the data model and supporting logic.