The Office Before the Oval

If we learn anything about what U.S. presidents were doing before entering the White House, it usually has to do with their political careers. Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Joe Biden was a long-time senator, then vice president. And George H.W. Bush was Ronald Reagan’s vice president before being voted into office himself.

However, many presidents have led fascinating lives before entering politics that we don’t often hear about. Here are the stories of what some of these political leaders were before they entered the political scene — the list includes athletes, teachers, farmers, actors, and even the Rail Splitter.

Abraham Lincoln

Flatboat builder and operator, postmaster, wood chopper, Rail Splitter

It might be easier to list the jobs that Abraham Lincoln didn’t try before becoming president. The nation’s 16th president has one of the most eccentric backgrounds of any president. One of Lincoln’s first jobs outside of his family’s land was to navigate a flatboat full of cargo down the Mississippi River. Lincoln later worked as a store clerk, and when the Black Hawk War began, he served as a volunteer captain, though he was never involved in combat. Over the course of his life, he would also work as a postmaster and wood chopper.

Abraham Lincoln eventually became a lawyer, which is certainly not an unusual profession for future politicians. But what is unusual about Lincoln’s story is how he became a lawyer — he did so without ever attending law school or studying with others in the profession. It wasn’t uncommon at the time for aspiring lawyers to forego law school, but those who weren’t enrolled in formal schooling usually studied with licensed lawyers who could pass on their knowledge to their pupils. Lincoln didn’t have the opportunity to do this; he was completely self-taught. Yet he still passed the bar exam and went on to have a long and successful legal career before running for president in 1860, a testament to the work ethic of the man who once said you should “leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”

James Garfield

Teacher

Tragically, James Garfield was assassinated just months into his presidency, leaving him without much time to build a legacy in the White House. Garfield began his teaching career with a part-time job in a rural Ohio school. He would later go on to teach a wide variety of subjects at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a school where he had studied. It didn’t take long for Garfield to work his way up to president of the Eclectic Institute; he assumed the role at just 25 years old. Garfield’s recognition of the importance of education followed him to the White House. In his inaugural address, he summed up his view on education: “It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors, and fit them, by intelligence and virtue for the inheritance which awaits them.”

Herbert Hoover

Mining engineer and consultant

Herbert Hoover may be best known as the president in office during the horrific 1929 stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. But before he was struggling to manage the worst economic crisis in U.S. history, he was a young man trying to make it in the world of business. Hoover had a difficult childhood — both of his parents died before he turned 10. But he would overcome these obstacles to study to be a mining engineer at Stanford, after which he was hired to work in a gold mine in California. Hoover worked excruciatingly long hours in the mine, but he was eventually promoted to an office job. He would then go on to build an enormously successful career as a mining engineer and consultant, a job that took him to China, Australia, and the U.K., among other places. By the time Hoover ran for president in 1928, he was a millionaire. He was the first president to not accept a salary for his time in the White House, choosing instead to donate all of his earnings to charity.

Harry Truman

Bank clerk, farmer

One of Harry Truman’s first jobs was as a bank clerk in Kansas City, but he would eventually leave the city to work on his family’s Missouri farm, which grew wheat and corn. The Truman Library describes how the future president was involved in a variety of tasks on the farm, including “crop rotation, soil conservation, hog vaccination, and record keeping.” Truman disliked farming, but still, he took his work on the family farm seriously and records show that the farm did well during the time he was in charge. And even though he didn’t fall in love with the work, he acknowledged the importance of farming, once remarking that “prosperous farmers make for a prosperous nation.”

Gerald Ford

College football MVP, assistant football coach

Gerald Ford was a standout college football player for the University of Michigan. He played center, winning two national championships and being named the team’s Most Valuable Player his senior year. And his involvement in the sport didn’t stop there. Ford took a job as an assistant football coach at Yale, where he would enroll in law school soon after. It was his coaching abilities that allowed him to afford to attend the prestigious law school.

Reflecting on his sports career for Brian Kilmeade’s book The Games Do Count, Ford commented on how his involvement with football helped him develop the skills he needed to succeed in politics. He said, “I think that sports, particularly football, gave me an opportunity to be out front, to be a leader, which helped me later on when I got into politics.”

Jimmy Carter

U.S. Navy sailor and submariner, peanut farmer

Jimmy Carter attended the United States Naval Academy and began to serve in the Navy after graduation. After his first two years of service, Carter entered a training program to operate submarines. He would then go on to serve on diesel-powered submarines and would also take part in the Navy’s program to develop nuclear-powered submarines.

After his father died in 1953, Carter was honorably discharged from the Navy, and he went back to Plains, Georgia, to take over the family’s peanut farm. Carter and his wife had some lean years managing the farm, but by the late 1950’s, Carter had expanded the business and the farm was doing well. Carter’s life as a farmer taught him the importance of environmental conservation. In 2019, he wrote to the Georgia Conservancy, “Growing up on a farm, I understood the protection of the earth was the individuals’ responsibility and that we must carefully manage and enhance nature rather than degrade or waste it.”

Ronald Reagan

Actor, president of the Screen Actors Guild

Before becoming the governor of California and later president of the United States, Ronald Reagan was an actor. His first part was the lead role in the 1937 film Love is On the Air, in which he plays a crime reporter whose work puts him in a dangerous situation. Reagan’s acting career continued until the mid-1960s and included roles in dramas, westerns, and TV shows — IMDb lists 81 acting credits. He is perhaps best remembered for portraying George Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne All American, in which his character, dying of an infection, implores the Notre Dame football team to “go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.” The “Gipper” nickname would follow him as he transitioned from the entertainment industry to politics. Reagan also served as President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960.

Barack Obama

Community organizer

Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago from 1985 to 1988, in between graduating from college and attending Harvard Law School. His primary task was to help people who had lost their jobs due to the closure of a local steel mill, and he was involved in other efforts to revitalize the community. He set out to achieve these goals by interviewing people in that community, fostering connections with church leaders, and organizing political activism. Some of his biggest accomplishments as an organizer were getting the municipal government to open an employment and training office in the neighborhood and successfully organizing a campaign to have asbestos removed from apartment buildings.

At a University of Chicago event Obama attended shortly after leaving the White House in 2017, he reflected on his time as a community organizer and how it impacted his life, saying “this community gave me a lot more than I was able to give in return, because this community taught me that ordinary people, when working together, can do extraordinary things.”