What is the only the president can serve for more than eight years?

Term of Office

The Constitution of the United States specifies a four-year presidential term. It originally said nothing about how many terms a president could serve. But the precedent established by George Washington limited his successors to two terms. Succession by a vice president after a president's death provided the opportunity to serve more than eight years without strictly violating the two-term rule. No president tried to serve more than eight years in office until Republican Theodore Roosevelt. After filling out three-and-a-half years of the term of President William McKinley following McKinley's assassination in 1901 and then serving four years in his own right (1905-1909), Roosevelt ran unsuccessfully in 1912 for another four years.

The need for steady leadership during World War II (1939-1945) made it possible for Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to break the tradition by winning four successive elections between 1932 and 1944. In a reaction against Franklin Roosevelt's extended presidency, in 1951 Congress and state legislatures approved the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which limits a president to two elected terms. The amendment also prohibits a person from running for election a second time if he or she has already served more than two years of a term to which someone else had been elected.