Affected Individuals
The amendment specifically did not apply to the sitting president (Harry S. Truman) at the time it was proposed by Congress. Truman, who had served nearly all of Franklin D. Roosevelt's unexpired fourth term and who had been elected to a full term in 1948, withdrew as a candidate for re-election in 1952 after losing the New Hampshire primary.
Since the amendment's ratification, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been elected president twice. The only president who could have served more than eight years was Lyndon B. Johnson. He became President in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, served the final 14 months (less than two years) of Kennedy's term, was elected president in 1964, and could have been re-elected in 1968 but chose to withdraw from the race. Gerald Ford became president on August 9, 1974, and served the final 29 months (more than two years) of Richard Nixon's unexpired term. Ford, who lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976 would have been eligible to be elected in his own right only once.
Read more about this topic: Twenty-second Amendment To The United States Constitution
Famous quotes containing the words affected and/or individuals:
“I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)