If he moves on, he will become only the fourth president to boycott his successor’s regularly scheduled inauguration and the first in more than 150 years to do so.
Two other presidents lost the regular oaths of their successors, Martin Van Buren and Woodrow Wilson. The reason for Van Buren’s absence is unknown, but it is not seen as malicious by historians, whereas Wilson’s was for health reasons.
CNN reached out to several presidential historians to put this unusual occurrence in context.
- John Adams did not attend the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801.
- John Quincy Adams did not attend the inauguration of Andrew Jackson in 1829.
- Andrew Johnson did not attend the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant in 1869.
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, told CNN that the refusal to attend the inauguration of a successor was an “unfortunate precedent set by Adams, not copied again until his son did in 1829”.
For John Quincy Adams and Andrew Johnson, the political landscape was defined by an “unusual amount of enmity” between the parties, according to Elaine Kamarck, senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program.
Other outgoing presidents are known to have lost part or all of their successors’ attacks.
Van Buren did not attend the inauguration of William Henry Harrison in 1841. Balcerski told CNN that some reports show that Van Buren was traveling in a separate carriage behind Harrison to the Capitol and historians do not know why Van Buren missed the event. Richard Mentor Johnson, Van Buren’s vice president, attended.
In 1921, outgoing President Wilson, who was suffering from the effects of a stroke, rode with his successor, Warren G. Harding, but did not stay for the event.
Andrew Phillips, curator and director of operations for the museum at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, told CNN that Wilson informed his successor that he would not attend because the stairs to the platform were too steep for him. “He made a joke about it, saying, ‘The Senate took me down before, and I don’t want to fall now,'” Phillips told CNN, a reference to the Senate’s defeat of the League of Nations plan and the Versailles Treaty.
Phillips added that the Washington Herald reported at the time that “for the first time in a century the outgoing president has not witnessed the new executive’s inauguration.”
After Nixon resigned, he left Washington about an hour before Ford took the White House oath of office.
Perry told CNN that although Nixon was not at the inauguration ceremony, Ford’s farewell to him illustrated the “symbolism of a peaceful transfer of power, even under the worst circumstances”, the resignation of a president.