Our second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, political rivals, then friends, both died on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
As Jefferson lay weak and dying in his home in Montecello on the evening of July 3, he whispered, "Is this the Fourth?" To quiet the former president, his young lawyer-friend, Nicholas Trist, answered, "Yes." Jefferson fell asleep with a smile. His heart continued to beat until the bells and fireworks of the Fourth rang out and exploded the next day.
At dawn of that same day, Adams was dying in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. A servant asked the fading Adams, "Do you know what day it is?" "Oh yes," responded the lion in winter. "It is the glorious Fourth of July." He then lapsed into a stupor but awakened in the afternoon and sighed feebly, "Thomas Jefferson survives." He ceased to breathe around sunset, about six hours after Jefferson.
If your answer is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, you're not quite correct. Kennedy was, at the age of forty-three, the youngest man ever to have been elected president, but Theodore Roosevelt became president at forty-two, when William McKinley was assassinated. When TR's second term was over, he was still only fifty years old, making him the youngest ex-president.
The average age at which America's presidents have taken office is fifty-four. Ronald Reagan became president at sixty-nine, older than anyone else, and left office at seventy-eight. Before Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower had been the only president to reach the age of seventy while in office. William Henry Harrison attained the office at the age of sixty-eight but died only a month later.
When Ronald Reagan died at the age of 93 years and 120 days, he was our longest-lived president. But, on November 12, 2006, Gerald Ford surpassed that record and lived another month and a half. Amazingly, our third longest-lived president is John Adams, who was born in 1735 and who lived for 90 years and 8 months, followed by Herbert Hoover, 90 years and 2 months.
Yes, eight of them. Martin Van Buren, our eighth president, entered the earthly stage on December 5, 1782, making him the first president born after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Eight presidents were born before 1776 as British subjects -- George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and, after Van Buren, William Henry Harrison.
On October 1, 1924, Jimmy Carter became the first president born in a hospital. All previous presidents were born at home.
© Richard Lederer
You may think that you know the answer to that old question, which Groucho Marx popularized on his quiz show, "You Bet Your Life," to ensure that each contestant won at least fifty dollars. But even visitors who are standing inside the magnificent monument often answer the riddle incorrectly. In a remote corner of bustling New York City, on a quiet bluff along the Hudson River far from Times Square and Broadway, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Dent, lie in a stately marble mausoleum. The monument was dedicated on the president's seventy-fifth birthday, April 27, 1897, almost twelve years after he had died. Five years later, his wife passed and was put to rest next to him. So you might think the answer to Groucho's question, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" would be "President and Mrs. Grant." Wrong again. The actual answer to the famous poser is that nobody is buried in Grant's Tomb. The Grants are entombed therein, not buried.
In 1912, President William Howard Taft ran as a Republican for re-election against the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson. Former president Theodore Roosevelt said of Taft, "Taft meant well, but he meant well feebly," so Roosevelt also entered the fray as a candidate for the Bull Moose party.
Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, and Wilson won handily. Taft placed third with an abysmal 23 percent of the popular vote, the lowest ever for an incumbent president. Unremittingly good-humored, Taft sighed, "I have one consolation. No one candidate was ever elected ex-president by such a large majority."
When William Howard Taft was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court eight years after his presidency, he became the only man ever to have headed both the executive and judicial branches of our government. At their inaugurations, Taft swore in both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
Richard Nixon resigned from the White House on August 9, 1974, the only president to do so. Spiro Agnew, his vice president, had resigned earlier. As a result of these actions, Gerald Ford, was for two years, the only man who served as both vice president (replacing Agnew) and president (replacing Nixon) without having been elected to either office. The only elected office Ford ever held was a Western Michigan congressional seat. Ford's vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, was also never elected to any national office.
No American president has remained an only child. All have had at least one full sibling, except for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton, who grew up with half siblings. Twenty-three of our presidents have been first-born males, while six have been the youngest child in their family.
It has been 56 years since that happened - 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon defeated Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman. That was also the last year that a presidential nomination went to convention.
Seven presidents elected in years that end with a zero (intervals of 20 years) died in office --William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, Abraham Lincoln (1860), James A. Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren G. Harding (1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940), and John F. Kennedy (1960).
First noted in a Ripley's Believe It or Not book published in 1934, this string of untimely presidential deaths is variously known as the curse of Tippecanoe, the zero-year curse, the 20-year curse, and Tecumseh's curse, Tecumseh being the Native American chief defeated by William Henry Harrison at the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 and shot by John Hinckley, Jr., almost continued the deadly sequence but survived and broke the curse. Reagan was the only sitting president to survive a bullet wound.
From a single marriage William Henry Harrison was the father of 10 children - four girls and six boys, one of whom became the father of another president, Benjamin Harrison. William Henry Harrison's vice president, John Tyler, was the most fatherly of presidents. He had three sons and five daughters with his first wife and five sons and two daughters with his second, for a total of 15 offspring.
Richard M. Nixon ran successfully as a Republican candidate for the office of vice president in 1952 and 1956, unsuccessfully for president in 1960 and successfully for president in 1968 and 1972. Total: five.
Franklin D. Roosevelt ran unsuccessfully as a Democratic candidate for the office of vice president in 1920 and successfully for president in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. Total: five.
Fourteen presidents have served as vice presidents -- John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush.
You'd think, then, that the conventional way to become president would be for a president and vice president to finish their terms naturally and for the vice president to run and win election as the next president.
In 1988, George H. W. Bush did just that, succeeding Ronald Reagan. But you have to go back more than 150 years to find a vice president who became president immediately after his president completed a term or two terms naturally. That man was Martin Van Buren. In 1836 Van Buren was elected president immediately following his term as vice president, under Andrew Jackson.
The only other vice-president/president who fits this pattern is John Adams, who succeeded George Washington. All three of these vice presidents who turned president immediately after they completed their vice presidency - Adams, Van Buren, and Bush - lost their bids of re-election as president for a second term.
© Richard Lederer
© Richard Lederer
An anagram is the re-arrangement of all letters in a name or word to generate a meaningful statement. Richard Lederer jumbled up, for example, yields RIDDLER REACHER. Here are anagrams of the full names of our major presidential candidates:
Barack Hussein Obama ABRAHAM IS BACK. ONE U.S.!
John Sidney McCain NICE DYNAMICS, JOHN
With the recent vetting of Sarah Palin, a number of readers have written to ask about the verb vet in its meaning "to examine a person's credentials." Here the noun veterinarian has been clipped and made into a verb on the analogy of a veterinarian examining an animal to assess its health and identify defects.
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The "lipstick" variation is relatively new -- not surprising, since the word lipstick itself dates only to 1880. The exact wording of "putting lipstick on a pig [or hog]" doesn't show up until fairly recently. In 1985, the Washington Post quoted San Francisco radio host Ron Lyons on plans for renovating Candlestick Park (instead of building a new downtown stadium for the Giants) quipped: "That would be like putting lipstick on a pig."
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More famously, we have Sally Ride the astronaut, Larry Speakes the White House spokesperson, Margaret Court the tennis star, William Wordsworth the poet, Jim Kiick the football player, and Lorena Bobbitt ("bob it") the you-know-what-er.
Now we have a shiny new aptronym - the Olympic 100-meter and 200-meter gold-medal champion, Usain Bolt, who bolted to the finish line in both events in world-record time.
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envelope: Say EN-vuh-lohp, not AHN-vuh-lohp.
foyer: Say FOY-ur, not fo-YAY or fwah-YAY.
homage: Say HAHM-ij, not oh-MAJH.
niche: Say NICH, not NEESH.
penchant: Say PEN-chint, not paw(n)-SHAW(N).
© Richard Lederer
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