James K. Polk promised to serve a single term. He kept his word. And that one term destroyed him.
Few presidents ever reshaped the country faster. In four years Polk provoked and won a war with Mexico, took California and the Southwest, settled the Oregon boundary, and pushed the United States all the way to the Pacific. It was the largest expansion of American territory since Jefferson bought Louisiana.
He did it by burning himself to the wick. Polk ran the government almost single-handedly. He refused to delegate, rarely left Washington, and worked ten and twelve hour days for four straight years. By the time he handed the office to Zachary Taylor on March 4, 1849, he was fifty-three years old and physically broken.
He never recovered. One hundred and three days later, on June 15, he was dead, the shortest retirement of any president in history.
Some men leave the White House and get decades. Polk got barely three months.
He poured everything he had into the job, and there was nothing left when he set it down.