Carlson Brady - Dead presidents : an American adventure into the strange deaths and surprising afterlives of our nations leaders

DEAD
PRESIDENTS

BRADY CARLSON

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

NEW YORK LONDON

DEAD
PRESIDENTS

Copyright 2016 by Brady Carlson

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Book design by Brooke Koven

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Carlson, Brady, author.

Dead presidents : an American adventure into the strange deaths and surprising

afterlives of our nations leaders / Brady Carlson. First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-24393-2 (hardcover)

1. PresidentsUnited StatesDeath. 2. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. I.

Title.

E176.1.C23 2016

973.099dc23

[B]

2015032329

ISBN 978-0-393-24394-9 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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For Owen,

who has malice toward none and charity for all

Thanks first and foremost to my wife, Sonya, who kept our family running while I was traveling, and our kids, the best people in the world to come home to after a trip.

My parents and siblings encouraged my presidential hobby all those years ago and still encourage me today.

Farley Chase at Chase Literary Agency found my project on the Web and reached out on a hunch that a good book might come out of it. I hope this has proven him right. Not only did he patiently walk me through the process of planning and pitching a book, he even made his own trip to Buffalo to visit Millard Fillmores grave. Theres no better sign of dedication than that.

My editor, Matt Weiland, made this book immeasurably better with his ideas and suggestions, and made writing the book immeasurably easier with his kindness and perfectly timed Spiro Agnew references. Thanks also to Sam MacLaughlin, Remy Cawley, and everyone at W. W. Norton & Company.

My friend Mick Walsh let me stay with her during two long trips to DC, helped me find my way around the city, and got my weak stomach through a tour of a museum of morbid anatomy.

Many thanks to those who took the time to talk with me, show me around on my travels, or send me ideas and information. Most of them are mentioned in the book, but a few who arent deserve to be named here: Karen Bachmann and Joanna Ebenstein of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York, Dollie Boyd at Tusculum College, Andrew Clark, Stacy Conradt of Mental Floss magazine, Darren Garnick, Rebekah Hinckley, Becky Kraemer, Jann Mirkov, Jacqueline Santos at the Association for Gravestone Studies, Tom Schwartz and Lynn Smith of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, Kristin Sherry of the Hoover Presidential Foundation, Amity Shlaes and Rushad Thomas at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, Richard Norton Smith, and Anne Wheeler at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues at New Hampshire Public Radio for their encouragement and kindness, especially Rebecca Lavoie Flynn.

Thanks to the earliest backers of my trips: Erin Barnes, Charles and Samantha Behensky, Matthew Cain, Claudia Cowden, Sarah Fraser, Ben Leubsdorf, Mike Ostrego, Michael Saffell, Jonathan and Caroline Carter Smith, and Scott Vesely.

Finally, many thanks to Anna Brandenburg, Deb Baker, and the staff at the Concord, New Hampshire, Public Library, which received an endowment of $1,000 to help fund the purchase of books from none other than Franklin Pierce. So, thanks to him as well, I guess.

AN AMERICAN ADVENTURE

INTO THE STRANGE DEATHS

AND SURPRISING AFTERLIVES

OF OUR NATIONS LEADERS

T HERES A pretty good prime directive when it comes to anything presidential: start with George Washington.

Yes, the job has changed quite a bit since Washingtons time, but a huge amount of how presidents act today is based on how Washington acted as president back then, from how frequently to use powers like vetoes and executive orders to how many four-year terms to serve. Then, when the first president became the first dead president, the way the country dealt with the loss of Washington set a model for how to honoror, occasionally, dishonorhis successors.

So here I am, at Mount Vernonor, technically, George Washingtons Mount Vernon Estate, Museum & Gardens. If the house explains the owner, this one explains a lot about the man and his ambitions. George Washington wanted to have the fanciest house in the neighborhood (he turned a relatively modest farmhouse into a twenty-one-room mansion) and the biggest yard, quadrupling the size of the plantation to a peak of 8,000 acres. Washingtons mostly enslaved workforce grew wheat and corn, raised livestock, and operated what was at the time the largest whiskey distillery in America. Mount Vernon today is a huge historic site: it boasts of having a million visitors a year and nearly eighty million since the Mount Vernon Ladies Association purchased the place from Washingtons descendants in the 1850s.

For seventeen dollars a head, visitors to Mount Vernon can spend the day any number of ways. The big draw is the house tour, where one can see Washingtons study, the dining room where Charles Thomson informed the general he had been elected president, and the bed where he died, the victim of a nasty cold and/or incompetent, leech-slinging doctors. Historical reenactors stand in the greenhouse, talking about life on the plantation; theres a wharf, walking trails, and a gristmill. Depending on the day, Nicolas Cage fans can see some of the buildings used in the making of the National Treasure movies, and liquor connoisseurs can try whiskey based on a recipe used in Washingtons time.

Me, Im staying close to the tomb, a tall, elegant brick structure with a stone sign embedded near the top. Within this enclosure, it says, rest the remains of Genl GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Next to me is a docent who answers visitors questions. She handles most of them with one phrase: General Washington is in the sarcophagus on the right; Mrs. Washington is on the left. I actually get an emotional charge standing here, this close to the man by whom every president is measurednot so much that Id describe myself to be in a state of rapturous, patriotic awe, but enough so that I wish Id dressed a little better. Who wears a broken baseball cap and a paint-stained T-shirt to see the Father of Our Country?

The docents shift ends at two, and as she heads out another staffer comes on to start the wreath-laying ceremony. As the new docent unlocks the tombs large iron gate, she points out that the ceremony in which were about to take part has been host to presidents and queens and dignitaries. She gives a sort of eulogy, explaining that we lay the wreath because Washington spent much of his adult life leaving home to answer the call to public service, from the Revolutionary War to the Constitutional Convention to the presidency. In total, she says, twenty-one years. She says this last phrase very slowly so it sinks in, cause thats a long time. Twenty. One. Years. We all look around at each other with we havent been anything for twenty-one years expressions.