Which Presidents Took the Longest Vacations?

Jesse Jackson Jr. today claimed that President Bush was coming of a record long vacation. Once again, a Democrat is either dumb, or just lying.

For example, look at James Madison. By the end of his term in office, the War of 1812 was over and he was tired of serving the country and eager to get away from it all. So he packed his bags and slipped out of Washington in June of 1816 and didn’t return until October, and didn’t do a lick of presidential work the whole time he was gone—a four-month vacation that earns him top honors for having taken the longest vacation of any president. Second prize goes to John Adams, a founding father who is believed to have made greater sacrifices on behalf of the revolution than most of his contemporaries. In David McCullough’s biography of Adams, the author notes that Thomas Jefferson skipped town and went home during a particularly critical moment for the Continental Congress while Adams remained to fight the good fight. His wife Abigail put up with long absences for most of the revolution. But in the summer of 1798, Abigail fell ill and Adams raced home to be with her, right at the height of our undeclared war with France. He stayed at home in Massachusetts with his wife for seven months, while his enemies scoffed and joked that perhaps he had abdicated. It wasn’t a vacation, per se, but no other president in history stayed away from the capital as long as Adams. Adams is closely followed by his third-place rival, Thomas Jefferson, who never liked to be away from Monticello if he could help it, president or not. In 1805 he decided that he had had enough of being away from home, so he left the capital in mid-July and did not return until October. Jefferson had practiced well for this long vacation, because as vice president, in 1799, he had remained away from the capitol for ten months.
John O. Benton III