Death and the Presidency
by Kevin Nance
OCTOBER 14, 2008 TAGS:
Since April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth stepped into a box at Ford’s Theatre with a gun in his hand, the presidency has unfolded in the shadow of death.
In the wake of the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — and the nearly successful attempts on the lives of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan — Americans have become resigned to a certain unease whenever we see our chief executive on television glad-handing his way through a rope line or making speeches to crowds. The dark-suited Secret Service men orbiting him, trying so unsuccessfully to blend into the background, make us feel better, but not much. Anything can happen, we tell ourselves. It has before.
In 2008, this undercurrent of dread is more powerful than ever. In the nearly two years of this unusually protracted presidential campaign, it has ebbed and flowed, and not only because of persistent fears that Barack Obama, potentially the first African American president, might be assassinated. National polls have consistently shown that large numbers of voters are concerned about the health of Obama’s opponent, John McCain, a four-time cancer survivor who at 72 would be the oldest president on Inauguration Day — a worry seems to have been amplified by McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. At this month’s vice presidential debate, the chill in the room — and perhaps all over America — was conspicuous when moderator Gwen Ifill noted that the vice president is “a heartbeat away” from the Oval Office.
Palin has been connected to this campaign’s underlying theme of death in another way. Last week, the candidate’s political rallies began to take on a widely reported ugly turn, in which angry supporters responded to Palin’s verbal attacks on Obama by yelling “Kill him!” and “Get him!”
These outbursts only confirmed long-held suspicions of African Americans, many of whom have been quoted in newspaper accounts as being concerned for Obama’s safety, before and after the election. Nearly two-thirds of blacks believe the Illinois senator is facing far greater risks than white candidates are, according to a recent Gallup poll. Especially early in the campaign, many blacks were concerned that to vote for Obama was to put him in harm’s way. As a young black woman told the New York Times this year just before the South Carolina primary, “Look what they did to Martin Luther King.”
It isn’t just blacks who think that as president Obama is likely to be targeted by racist gunmen. Figures from across the political spectrum — from the leftist Nobel laureate Doris Lessing to Ray Larsen, International Imperial Wizard of the Indiana-based National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — have baldly predicted Obama’s demise, and in strikingly similar language. Larsen: “If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.” Lessing: Obama “would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him.”
Of course, to discuss the topic openly is to violate a taboo — as Sen. Hillary Clinton discovered in May when, defending her decision to prolong her campaign after it appeared she would lose to Obama, she noted that Bill Clinton hadn’t secured his own nomination until June of 1992. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” she said. The Obama campaign responded with outrage, and Clinton quickly apologized.
Obama’s anger can be seen as disingenuous, however, in that he knows better than anyone the exact nature of the threats on his life that led to his being assigned Secret Service protection earlier than any presidential candidate in history. He and his campaign also know that three men were arrested and questioned about a possible conspiracy to assassinate him during his nomination acceptance speech at Denver’s open-air football stadium as part of the Democratic National Convention.
In a vehicle driven by one of the men, police found high-powered rifles (including one with telescopic sights and another with a threaded barrel so it could be fitted with a silencer), along with a bullet-proof vest, a high-magnification spotting scope, radios, wigs and three fake IDs. One of the other men — who jumped from a sixth-story window to avoid arrest — was wearing a ring with a swastika. The third man told a Denver TV station that his pals couldn’t stand the thought of Obama in the White House: “Blacks don’t belong in political office.”
Ultimately, the FBI found insufficient evidence that the men were a credible threat to Obama and chose not to charge them with conspiracy to commit murder. But the disturbing episode made for additional fodder for the public’s ongoing concern and perhaps lurid fascination with the candidate’s safety; today, the search phrase “assassinate Obama” generates more than 2.8 million Google hits.
There are, of course, various scenarios for a president’s death in office that don’t involve assassination. In 1841, William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia after barely a month in the White House; less than a decade later, Zachary Taylor expired, of an undetermined stomach ailment, after less than two years in power. Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack, Franklin D. Roosevelt of a cerebral hemorrhage — the latter death all the more jolting in that it came during World War II, putting the reins of the nation into the hands of a little-known politician named Harry Truman, then only three months into his term.
Which brings us back to McCain and Palin — who raised eyebrows when, accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, she compared herself to Truman. Some took this as an oblique invitation to consider that she might become president the way Truman did, and a tacit acknowledgement that her running mate is, as he has joked on occasion, chronologically challenged.
It’s a valid point. This month, longevity researcher S. Jay Olshansky told the Chicago Tribune that a president who began his term at 72 would be about seven times likelier to die in office than a 47-year-old such as Obama. On the other hand, the Tribune reported, the fact that McCain has already lived past 70 suggests that he’s healthy enough to survive the illnesses that kill people before they reach that age.
Still, there are questions about McCain’s health that transcend his age — for example, the fact that he has had melanoma, a potentially fatal skin cancer, four times. The questions have been persistent throughout the campaign, in part because of the suspicious way the candidate has addressed them. In May, McCain allowed 20 reporters to examine his physical health records. They found insufficient evidence to develop a clear judgment on McCain’s cancer, but the constrictions placed on the journalists were curious. They were given only three hours to pore through 1,173 pages; they were not allowed to photocopy the records; and the pages were not numbered, raising the possibility of omissions.
“At least in Watergate,” cracked the New York Times’ Frank Rich, “we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.”
--
Also by Kevin Nance
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Even if you don’t know the music of rock ’n’ roll legend Bo Diddley, who died last week at the age of 79, you almost certainly recognize his name. He made sure of it.
In the wake of the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — and the nearly successful attempts on the lives of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan — Americans have become resigned to a certain unease whenever we see our chief executive on television glad-handing his way through a rope line or making speeches to crowds. The dark-suited Secret Service men orbiting him, trying so unsuccessfully to blend into the background, make us feel better, but not much. Anything can happen, we tell ourselves. It has before.
In 2008, this undercurrent of dread is more powerful than ever. In the nearly two years of this unusually protracted presidential campaign, it has ebbed and flowed, and not only because of persistent fears that Barack Obama, potentially the first African American president, might be assassinated. National polls have consistently shown that large numbers of voters are concerned about the health of Obama’s opponent, John McCain, a four-time cancer survivor who at 72 would be the oldest president on Inauguration Day — a worry seems to have been amplified by McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. At this month’s vice presidential debate, the chill in the room — and perhaps all over America — was conspicuous when moderator Gwen Ifill noted that the vice president is “a heartbeat away” from the Oval Office.Palin has been connected to this campaign’s underlying theme of death in another way. Last week, the candidate’s political rallies began to take on a widely reported ugly turn, in which angry supporters responded to Palin’s verbal attacks on Obama by yelling “Kill him!” and “Get him!”
These outbursts only confirmed long-held suspicions of African Americans, many of whom have been quoted in newspaper accounts as being concerned for Obama’s safety, before and after the election. Nearly two-thirds of blacks believe the Illinois senator is facing far greater risks than white candidates are, according to a recent Gallup poll. Especially early in the campaign, many blacks were concerned that to vote for Obama was to put him in harm’s way. As a young black woman told the New York Times this year just before the South Carolina primary, “Look what they did to Martin Luther King.”
It isn’t just blacks who think that as president Obama is likely to be targeted by racist gunmen. Figures from across the political spectrum — from the leftist Nobel laureate Doris Lessing to Ray Larsen, International Imperial Wizard of the Indiana-based National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — have baldly predicted Obama’s demise, and in strikingly similar language. Larsen: “If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.” Lessing: Obama “would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him.”
Of course, to discuss the topic openly is to violate a taboo — as Sen. Hillary Clinton discovered in May when, defending her decision to prolong her campaign after it appeared she would lose to Obama, she noted that Bill Clinton hadn’t secured his own nomination until June of 1992. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” she said. The Obama campaign responded with outrage, and Clinton quickly apologized.Obama’s anger can be seen as disingenuous, however, in that he knows better than anyone the exact nature of the threats on his life that led to his being assigned Secret Service protection earlier than any presidential candidate in history. He and his campaign also know that three men were arrested and questioned about a possible conspiracy to assassinate him during his nomination acceptance speech at Denver’s open-air football stadium as part of the Democratic National Convention.
In a vehicle driven by one of the men, police found high-powered rifles (including one with telescopic sights and another with a threaded barrel so it could be fitted with a silencer), along with a bullet-proof vest, a high-magnification spotting scope, radios, wigs and three fake IDs. One of the other men — who jumped from a sixth-story window to avoid arrest — was wearing a ring with a swastika. The third man told a Denver TV station that his pals couldn’t stand the thought of Obama in the White House: “Blacks don’t belong in political office.”
Ultimately, the FBI found insufficient evidence that the men were a credible threat to Obama and chose not to charge them with conspiracy to commit murder. But the disturbing episode made for additional fodder for the public’s ongoing concern and perhaps lurid fascination with the candidate’s safety; today, the search phrase “assassinate Obama” generates more than 2.8 million Google hits.
There are, of course, various scenarios for a president’s death in office that don’t involve assassination. In 1841, William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia after barely a month in the White House; less than a decade later, Zachary Taylor expired, of an undetermined stomach ailment, after less than two years in power. Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack, Franklin D. Roosevelt of a cerebral hemorrhage — the latter death all the more jolting in that it came during World War II, putting the reins of the nation into the hands of a little-known politician named Harry Truman, then only three months into his term.
Which brings us back to McCain and Palin — who raised eyebrows when, accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, she compared herself to Truman. Some took this as an oblique invitation to consider that she might become president the way Truman did, and a tacit acknowledgement that her running mate is, as he has joked on occasion, chronologically challenged.It’s a valid point. This month, longevity researcher S. Jay Olshansky told the Chicago Tribune that a president who began his term at 72 would be about seven times likelier to die in office than a 47-year-old such as Obama. On the other hand, the Tribune reported, the fact that McCain has already lived past 70 suggests that he’s healthy enough to survive the illnesses that kill people before they reach that age.
Still, there are questions about McCain’s health that transcend his age — for example, the fact that he has had melanoma, a potentially fatal skin cancer, four times. The questions have been persistent throughout the campaign, in part because of the suspicious way the candidate has addressed them. In May, McCain allowed 20 reporters to examine his physical health records. They found insufficient evidence to develop a clear judgment on McCain’s cancer, but the constrictions placed on the journalists were curious. They were given only three hours to pore through 1,173 pages; they were not allowed to photocopy the records; and the pages were not numbered, raising the possibility of omissions.
“At least in Watergate,” cracked the New York Times’ Frank Rich, “we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.”
--
Also by Kevin Nance
The Aging Wonder BoyHow Paul Newman gained grace and gravitas as his youth waned.
Bo Diddley, Bo DiddleyEven if you don’t know the music of rock ’n’ roll legend Bo Diddley, who died last week at the age of 79, you almost certainly recognize his name. He made sure of it.
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