Will the White House hoodoo strike down another President?

Press, 28 August 1980, Page 17

Will the White House hoodoo strike down another President?

By

ROSS MADDEN,

Features International

Is there a hoodoo on the coming American Presidential Election? And will victory this autumn bring tragedy 7 to the winner — and. to the nation?

These are the questions being asked by American statisticians who have been studying the patterns of election history . . . and have discovered that every president elected in a year ending in zero has died in office.

Is it nothing more than a bizarre coincidence — or does it mean that the lucky candidate in. the 1980 race for the White House will be the one who ultimately loses?

William Oscar Johnson, an author, who first drew public attention to the pattern of deaths in office, says: “We shall not know until the winner dies, fails to seek re-election, or gives up the job. • “Until one of those things happens, a shadow of doubt will inevitably hang over the . White House.” The first man to die in the Presidency was the ninth to' hold that office, William Henry Harrison. After his election in 1840 — the first time voting had taken place in a zero year — his inauguration was set for March 4, 1841. It dawned damp and chilly, but. Harrison, a

doughty old campaigner, insisted on giving his inauguration address out in the open, without wearing hat or coat. Within day's Harrison had fallen ill with pneumonia: and on April 4 he died. He scarcely had time to take a single Presidential decision.

The pattern had been set. In 1860, America elected one of its greatest figures to the highest office in the land. Abraham Lmcoln became sixteenth. President of. the United States. As the man whc 1 ended slavery and led h'S country through the Civil. War,

he mace sure that his name will live for ever in history. But he also earned a distin itkn of a different kind when he became the first President to be assassinated. Lincoln was with his wife at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. on > the night of April 14, 1865, when he was gunned down by John Wilkes. Booth. The next President elected in a year ending in zero was. James Garfield — and he too was to die from an assassin’s bullet. Garfield became the twentieth President in 1880 and was inaugurated early in 1881. Four months later, he was shot-

by Charles J. Guiteau, a political activist. Garfield slipped into a coma and the United States was without leadership for the 80 days between the shooting and his death, on September 19. 1881. William McKinley first won the Presidency in 1896 — the twenty-fifth man to hold office —and under his leadership the country entered an era of prosperity. He was reelected by a big majority in 1900 — and less than a year later he was dead. He was attending a Pan American Exposition at Buffalo on September 6, 1901, when he was shot by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. Eight days later, McKinley died. ■ In 1920, Warren Harding became the twentyninth President, and soon his health started to deteriorate dramatically. During a trip to San Francisco he collapsed in a state tf “utter mental and physical exhaustion,” and .died there on August 1, 1923. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President — the thirty-second — in 1932. He was re-elected in 1936, and again for a record third term in 1940. Despite having been crippled with polio as a youngster he was the man who pulled America out. of the Great Depression, and he went on to lead his country to the edge of victory in the Second World War. After se-

curing a fourth term in o f fice in the election of 1944, Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, of a heart attack on August 12, 1945. The last man to be elected in a year ending in zero was John Fitzgerald Kennedy who came to the White House in 1960 and lit fires of optimism throughout the world with his ringing oratory and his championing of freedom. On November 22, 1963, as his motorcade was passing through Dallas, President Kennedy was shot down by a sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald. He died soon afterwards in hospital, at the age of 46. And so to the election of 1980. Does the curse still exist? Is the victor inevitably doomed? Or will the pattern finally be broken and exposed as nothing more than an accident of circumstances? President Carter, although knowing of the apparent jinx, has chosen to ignore it. His chief rival, Ronald Reagan, who will be 70 by Inauguration Day, has spoken of the possibility of his death in office.

Certainly, both men — and the whole American nation ~ are hoping' that whoever wins, the next President will finally lay the spectre of this extraordinary jinx, and live to tell the tale. ■ ’