Louis L. Picone - The President Is Dead!: The Extraordinary Stories of the Presidential Deaths, Final Days, Burials, and Beyond

Also by Louis L. Picone

Where the Presidents Were Born

To my Mom and Dad

Copyright 2016, 2020 by Louis L. Picone

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

First paperback edition 2020

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Picone, Louis L., author.

Title: The president is dead!: the extraordinary stories of the presidential deaths, final days, burials, and beyond / Louis L. Picone.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016013528 (print) | LCCN 2016014139 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5107-0376-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-5107-0377-3 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5107-5454-6 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: PresidentsUnited StatesDeath. | PresidentsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC E176.1 .P4979 2016 (print) | LCC E176.1 (ebook) | DDC 973.09/9dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016013528

Cover design by Laura Klynstra

Cover photo credit: Library of Congress

Printed in China

Contents

George Washington
December 14, 1799

Thomas Jefferson
July 4, 1826

John Adams
July 4, 1826

James Monroe
July 4, 1831

James Madison
June 28, 1836

William Henry Harrison
April 4, 1841

Andrew Jackson
June 8, 1845

John Quincy Adams
February 23, 1848

James Knox Polk
June 15, 1849

Zachary Taylor
July 9, 1850

John Tyler
January 18, 1862

Martin Van Buren
July 24, 1862

Abraham Lincoln
April 15, 1865

James Buchanan
June 1, 1868

Franklin Pierce
October 8, 1869

Millard Fillmore
March 8, 1874

Andrew Johnson
July 31, 1875

James Abram Garfield
September 19, 1881

Ulysses Simpson Grant
July 23, 1885

Chester Alan Arthur
November 18, 1886

Rutherford Birchard Hayes
January 17, 1893

Benjamin Harrison
March 13, 1901

William McKinley
September 14, 1901

Grover Cleveland
June 24, 1908

Theodore Roosevelt
January 6, 1919

Warren Gamaliel Harding
August 2, 1923

Woodrow Wilson
February 3, 1924

William Howard Taft
March 8, 1930

Calvin Coolidge
January 5, 1933

Franklin Delano Roosevelt
April 12, 1945

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
November 22, 1963

Herbert Clark Hoover
October 20, 1964

Dwight David Eisenhower
March 28, 1969

Harry S Truman
December 26, 1972

Lyndon Baines Johnson
January 22, 1973

Richard Milhous Nixon
April 22, 1994

Ronald Wilson Reagan
June 5, 2004

Gerald Rudolph Ford
December 26, 2006

George Herbert Walker Bush
November 30, 2018

John Hanson
First President of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation
November 22, 1783

Sam Houston
Twice President of the Republic of Texas
July 26, 1863

David Rice Atchison
President for a Day
January 26, 1886

Jefferson Finis Davis
Only President of the Confederate States of America
December 6, 1889

Introduction

C oming after my first book, Where the Presidents Were Born: The History and Preservation of the Presidential Birthplaces , this one may seem like the natural follow-up, given its subject. In fact, I cant tell you how many people, upon learning that I had written a book about where the presidents were born, had the wiseacre response, Whats your next book gonna be about? Where they died? (They all thought they were being original.) I hadnt originally planned to write a book on this subject, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became.

The truth is, after years of researching and writing about the presidents, I wasnt quite ready to say goodbye to them yet. There is something enormously compelling about the presidentsthe good, the bad, and the mediocre. They have each held the most powerful position in America, if not the world, and almost every aspect of their lives has been meticulously studied and written aboutbut that is not the case with their deaths. It is always frustrating to me to read a weighty presidential biography only to have their exit and aftermath summed up in a line or two. There is much to learn from their final days, when these once all-powerful men are at their most vulnerable, and perhaps, the most human. In their deaths we often can understand how they wanted to be remembered, but in their funerals and death-related monuments, we learn how the American public chose to remember them. While sometimes moving and poignant, their deaths and the sites related to their demise are also teeming with fascinating stories.

For this book I vowed to dig deep and travel far to find the true stories of how the presidents illustrious lives came to an end. Birth and death, while the bookends of life, were vastly different to research and write about. The place where a president was born only became historic in the rearview mirror, as I like to say, after he achieved prominence and won the office many years later. Nobody knew he would grow up to be president, and his birth would have been a major event to relatively few people outside of the family. What scant details were recorded were often lost and replaced years later with embellishments and folklore. But that is not the case with death and burial, where often the minutest detail is documented and the most trivial artifact is preserved. While the difficulty of writing about birthplaces was finding sufficient credible sources, the challenge of writing this book was processing the abundance of information.

In writing The President Is Dead! , my guiding principle was follow the body as I explored the presidents final journeys, from their last breath to the grave and everything in betweenand, in fact, beyond, into the public afterlife that all presidents have. And as the title suggests, burial is sometimes not the end of the journey. More than a third of the presidents have been reinterred, and a handful more than once. Often the end of their lives is replete with fascinating and bizarre storiesmysterious circumstances of death, attempted grave robbings, and a corpse temporarily misplaced. Of course, I explore graves and funerals, but also hospitals, viewing sites, funeral homes, and all locations in between. Many people are interested in all sites presidential, no matter how obscure. But while GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE signs dot the landscape as well as a few scattered MILLARD FILLMORE STUDIED HERE and HARRY S TRUMAN ATE HERE, rarely do you see a marker that CHESTER ARTHUR WAS EMBALMED HERE or BENJAMIN HARRISONS FUNERAL WAS HERE. This book includes such sites. It is for both the reader of history who wants to know what occurred after the presidents deaths and the traveler who wants to visit those locations. Some are closer than you realize. In downtown Manhattan, for instance, there are many hipster fashion stores, but I bet only a handful of passersby could point out the one that sits at the location where James Monroe died. Sometimes you may be at a historic location and have no idea that a dead president once occupied the same spacein a train station, hospital, or government building. That is because death, while obviously not something to be celebrated, is rarely even recognized . In fact, of the many historic markers at death-site locations, most dance around the obvious and do not even mention it is there that the president expired.