Jan. 14, 2025, 5:45 p.m.
President Biden takes one more turn in the bully pulpit Wednesday night, one last chance to do what he has struggled to do for four years—persuade the country to accept his version of his administration’s past and his prescriptions for America’s future. Speaking to the nation from the Oval Office for the final time, he will deliver his farewell address, hoping he can succeed in that exercise where almost all of his predecessors have failed.
He is the 15th president to give such a formal address at the end of his time in office and the 13th since World War II and the advent of television. Almost certainly, he will find it a tough sell to get the nation to pay attention when its gaze is set on a new president set to be inaugurated only five days later, with his own agenda and priorities at odds with Biden’s.
In history, only three farewell addresses have had an impact. None was more important than the first one, published by President George Washington on Sept. 19, 1796, in Philadelphia's American Daily Advertiser. More than two centuries later, it still is read aloud in the Senate every year on Washington’s birthday. It mattered because it featured Washington's announcement that he would not run for a third term and would instead retire to Mount Vernon. It signaled to the fledgling nation that there could be a peaceful transition from one president to another.
“There was a lot of uncertainty about whether the nation and the presidency would work without him at the helm,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian who is executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. “It set the precedent that we shouldn’t have presidents for life, and more broadly, it reintroduced the concept that people can walk away from power, at a time when Napoleon was on the rise.”
He also used the address, written by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, to give vigorous endorsements for the still-new Constitution and the notion of a strong union at a time when some states still preferred a loose federation, and he warned of the dangers of “permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.”
Decades later, President Andrew Jackson followed Washington’s example in issuing a farewell address, which he also used to endorse a strong union. More troubling to modern readers, he included a brutal section celebrating his forced removal of Native American tribes from their lands, stating that he had “saved” “this unhappy race” from “that degradation and destruction to which they were rapidly hastening while they remained in the States.”
For the next 116 years, no president gave a farewell address until Harry Truman, who took advantage of the new medium of television to revive the practice in 1953. Since then, every president—with the obvious exception of John F. Kennedy—gave one. Only one is remembered by history. That was a remarkable speech by Dwight Eisenhower. In 1961, the former Supreme Commander of allied forces in World War II and five-star general used his address to warn of a postwar development that troubled him.
President Eisenhower is shown just before his farewell television address to the nation made from the White House in January 1961. (AP Photo/Bill Allen)
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“In the councils of government,” he said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
It is the last quote anyone remembers from a farewell address, though 10 more presidents have tried to squeeze their takes into history. Biden will be the 11th since Ike to make the effort. Like many of the others, he starts with at least one strike against him—he is deeply unpopular, having been thwarted in his effort to run for a second term and having watched his chosen successor go down to defeat in a repudiation of his record.
Biden’s approval, as measured by Gallup, sits at 39 percent, the 6th worst at the time of any of the last 13 farewell addresses. Lower were Richard Nixon (24 percent); Truman (32 percent); and Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump (each at 34 percent). Most popular at their exits were Bill Clinton at 66 percent, followed by Ronald Reagan at 63 percent, Eisenhower and Barack Obama at 59 percent, George H.W. Bush at 56 percent, and Lyndon Johnson at 49 percent.
“Most presidents when they leave office are not very popular because the American people get grouchy with them and don’t really want to hear what they have to say,” Chervinsky said. “In a lot of ways, farewell addresses have become an exercise of ego and a self-congratulatory attempt to shape one’s legacy.”
Even popularity did not guarantee anyone would heed a presidential farewell address. Jeff Shesol, who wrote Clinton’s, can attest to that. “As someone who wrote one of these things ... I don’t put much stock in them,” said Shesol, an author and co-founder and executive director of West Wing Writers.
“Nobody is really going to be particularly inclined to do what Biden says,” he said. “They weren’t particularly inclined to do what Clinton had to say, and his approval ratings were off the charts at that point.”
Clinton’s speech reflected his concern that what he viewed as his greatest accomplishment—balancing the federal budget, eliminating the deficit, and beginning to pay off the national debt—was at risk, with both his Republican successor and a Democratic Congress eager to cut taxes. He pleaded for “fiscal responsibility,” boasting that the country was “on track to be debt-free by the end of the decade for the first time since 1835.” Shesol recalled, “All he could do was essentially plead with his successors, not only in the Republican Party, but in the Democratic Party, his own party, to act with some degree of fiscal discipline.”
They did not listen. Tax cuts were passed in each of the next three years, resulting in a 10-year revenue loss of $2.9 trillion, plus $606 billion in interest costs, for a combined loss of $3.5 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
On Wednesday, Biden may also be ignored. But the president still can take solace in the fact that no matter how poorly received his speech will be, it will be far better than the indignity that Trump endured in his farewell in 2021. In the wake of the violence of Jan. 6, Trump’s staff did not trust him to make a live address, fearing he would stray from the carefully prepared text and say something to put himself in more hot water with the nation and, more importantly, with a Congress that just six days earlier had impeached him for “incitement of insurrection” by a 232-197 vote in the House.
Instead of going on TV, Trump released a video statement he had taped earlier in the Blue Room. In the only memorable statement in the video, Trump said, “All Americans were horrified by the assault on our Capitol. Political violence is an attack on everything we cherish as Americans. It can never be tolerated.”
As Chervinsky observed, “He said that when the Senate was deciding whether or not to convict him on impeachment.”
She suggested he will not repeat that sentiment at his inauguration: “He’s not under that same pressure now.”
