The Curse
Beginning with the election of William Henry Harrison in 1840 through the election of John Kennedy in 1960, no president elected in a year ending in zero lived to the end of his term of office. Many explanations have been offered for this unusual occurrence. They range from a random coincidence with no plausible explanation, to a curse placed on Harrison following the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.
At Tippecanoe, troops led by Harrison defeated Native Americans led by Shawnee Chief Tecumseh.
Tecumseh is said to have cursed Harrison and future presidents for the role Harrison played in that battle. There are also those who believe that the curse was placed by Tecumseh’s half-brother Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee medicine man known as The Prophet. Other possible explanations include the aligning of certain planets, moon phases, and some relationship between the first letters of the presidents’ first and last names.
Regardless of how or why, the reality is clear. With the death of Harrison on April 4, 1841, just one month after his inauguration, the pattern continued until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In all, seven presidents were elected in a year ending in a zero between 1940 and 1960. Harrison took ill immediately after the inauguration and died in the White House of what was then diagnosed as pneumonia. (Recent research and a review of the symptoms Harrison displayed have led some to conclude that he may have died of typhoid fever.)
Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was the first president slain by an assassin. Lincoln died on the morning of April 15, 1865, at the beginning of his second term of office. John Wilkes Booth shot him the previous evening at Ford’s Theater in Washington. James Garfield, elected in 1880, and William McKinley, elected twenty years later in 1900 were also victims of assassins. Garfield was shot in the train station in Washington on July 2, 1881. He lingered for more than two months, dying as a result of poor medical treatment on September 19, 1881. McKinley was shot while attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901. He did receive prompt medical treatment and appeared to rally briefly, but he succumbed to his wounds eight days later and died on September 14, 1901.
Warren Harding was elected in 1920. His cause of death has never been positively determined, but credible evidence supports the claim that he suffered a sudden heart attack. The immediate cause of death was released as a stroke, but upon closer examination of Harding’s health issues and other evidence, a heart attack seems more likely. Interestingly, at the time of Harding’s death and for some years after, there was a rumor that his wife may have poisoned him for marital infidelity. However, there is no substantiated evidence to support this assertion.
Franklin Roosevelt, the only president elected to more than two terms, was elected for this third term in 1940. Had he not chosen to run for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, the twenty-year cycle would have been broken, since he did not die until April of 1945, more than a month into his fourth term. Roosevelt died as a result of a massive cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia.
The last president in the tragic cycle was John Kennedy who died on November 22, 1963, the victim of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy was shot during a political visit to Texas.
Following the death of President Kennedy, the next president elected on the twenty-year cycle was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was elected in 1980, inaugurated in January of 1981, and on March 30th of his first year in office, he was shot while exiting a Washington hotel. Reagan recovered, completed his first term and won re-election in 1984. The last president to be elected in a year ending in a zero was George W. Bush. Bush was first elected in 2000 and won his bid for a second term in 2004.
Since 1840, only one other president has died in office. That was the 12th president, Zachary Taylor. Taylor was elected in 1848 and he died of a stomach ailment in 1850. After attending 4th of July festivities in Washington, he returned to the White House where he consumed large qualities of fresh fruits and cold milk. He soon became very ill with severe stomach pains. He was diagnosed with cholera and died five days later on July 9, 1850.
At the time and for many years after his death, it was speculated that southern politicians had poisoned Taylor. They strongly opposed some of the President’s stands against the expansion of slavery. For example he supported the admission of California as a free state. In 1991 his body was exhumed to determine if intentional poisoning was the cause of death. Although traces of arsenic were found in hair and tissue samples examined, the levels did not in any way suggest intentional poisoning. Had the tests confirmed intentional poisoning, Taylor would have been the first president to be assassinated, not Lincoln.