NO MONITOR EMAILS WERE BLOCKED YESTERDAY.

19 February—A breaking-news email from The Hill arrived with the subject line: “Jimmy Carter to . . .” So I naturally assumed the 98-year-old one-term POTUS #39 was going to announce his candidacy for the job again as #47, after Joe Biden’s retirement. Then I actually read the breaking news. Sadly, Carter has begun receiving home-hospice care. We wish him the best in the circumstance.

At the start of National Engineers Week, then, you’ll want to know that Jimmy Carter is one of only two presidents who had been engineers before going political. He earned an engineering degree at Annapolis, eventually becoming a nuclear engineer in the U.S.Navy.

Herbert Hoover, POTUS #31, one of the first graduates of Stanford and the only other presidential engineer, had been a very successful mining engineer before descending into politics. But, like Carter, he isn’t considered to have been a particularly successful president. No, it has nothing to do with his engineering background. Probably.

A dozen presidents had been Army general officers, carrying from one to five stars. (Okay, George Washington was awarded a sixth star in 1976. But it was posthumous, so he probably didn’t know about it.) No presidents had been Marine generals or even Marines. No presidents had been Navy or Coast Guard admirals, though six had held Navy commissions, including Jimmy Carter. None had served in the Coast Guard.

Sixteen presidents never saw military service. Donald Trump bullied his way through a military school before dodging the draft.

No surprise that 27 presidents—more than half—practiced law at one time or another.

Depending upon your definition of the opprobrious term, many presidents have been career politicians.

No physician has ever been president. That may have something to do with the “First do no harm” thing . . .