Roosevelt’s wife and mother died under separate circumstances, but coincidentally on the same day and in the same house, hours apart in February 1884, just two days after his first daughter was born. The experience helped shaped Biden’s career as a politician he stayed in the Senate, but traveled home to Delaware every night on the Amtrak to see his surviving boys. In Biden’s case, his first wife and young daughter died in a car accident shortly after his first election to the Senate, 51 years ago in December 1972. John Chester Buttre/Library of CongressĪnother first lady, Ida McKinley, lost both of her daughters to disease before going to the White House, where she then suffered the death of her husband, William, in 1901, after which Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the presidency.īoth Biden and Roosevelt lost wives at young ages Rachel Jackson, wife of President Andrew Jackson. Jaqueline Kennedy and Mary Lincoln both endured the loss of a child and a husband while in the White House.Ī quip about the Kennedy family, which carefully controlled its public image, is the oft-repeated admonition handed through generations that “ Kennedys don’t cry.” Kennedy’s son Patrick was less than 2 days old when he died in Massachusetts in August 1963. “Somebody like Bill Clinton was not afraid to say, ‘I feel your pain,’ but notice he wasn’t saying, ‘I’m in pain,’” she said.īiden may have changed the job in this way, embracing what might have been seen as a weakness in any previous presidency – particularly that of Donald Trump, who went to great lengths to find physicians to describe him as superhuman and created an epic photo-op to make it appear the Covid-19 that nearly killed him had no effect. She agreed that sharing individual grief with Americans has not previously been a presidential attribute. I called her to ask what we know about how presidents express grief, and she told me about Lincoln commuting on horseback from the cottage where the rest of the family went in part to escape being in the house where his son had died. She wrote back in February about some of the many tragedies that have befallen presidents. sharing their painīarbara Perry is co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. But hearing his discussion with Cooper, conducted in the White House, feels unique for an American president – all of whom have been men and all of whom, to varying degrees, have tried to exude invulnerable power, working to hide their maladies rather than relate to people through them.įeeling Americans’ pain vs. Hearing Biden talk about vulnerability – his own vulnerability – is not new in terms of his political life. Biden talked with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about working through those losses in a new episode of the “All There Is” podcast. His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. His first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, died in a car crash in 1972, shortly after he was elected to Congress as a senator from Delaware. Bush.īiden’s own personal list of tragedies is well known and predates his presidency. Bush lost a daughter, the sister of George W. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams both saw children die. So many presidents lost children and siblings, often before they were elected. His wife was inconsolable, and Pierce ended up being a notoriously bad president. MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Imagesįranklin Pierce’s only living son was cut down in a train accident between his election and inauguration. Calvin Coolidge with his wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, and their sons, Calvin Jr.
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