Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen
Author’s Note
It would be easy to look at the timing of this book and assume it was inspired by all the impeachment talk surrounding Donald Trump. In reality, I began the book before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, well before any speculation about impeachment, and it is being published with a cloud of uncertainty continuing to linger. My interest in this topic started with a bag of campaign buttons I purchased at a flea market in New York and subsequently evolved into an intellectual journey that had me reading presidential biographies on the playground at school. I grew up fascinated by it all—scandal, war, the campaigns—but what really attracted my attention were the unexpected transitions. The concept of a president dying in office and what happens became a historical obsession of mine. I devoured any book I could read on the subject, collected old newspapers and memorabilia depicting the events, and annoyed anyone who would listen with long regurgitations of what happened. When I saw Oliver Stone’s 1994 film about the Kennedy assassination, I did what any precocious preteen would do; I set out to solve the conspiracy myself! I made charts and graphs, practiced giving talks about the magic bullet, and I was certain that I had found a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll. I even went through my own mourning process and decorated an entire “Kennedy Room”—as it became known in my house—with Life magazine covers, political buttons, Kennedy posters, and photographs.
Not surprisingly, my efforts to solve the Kennedy assassination mystery proved fruitless. But the exercise at least gave me an excuse to ask all the baby boomers about where they were and what they were doing when Kennedy was shot. The responses were emotional. My mother was in seventh grade, it was eighth period and she was just leaving art class. She saw people crying in the hallways and heard a classmate say, “Kennedy has been shot!” They didn’t let them out of school early because it was too complicated with the buses, but as soon as she got home, she was glued to the TV. My mother like everyone else of her generation recites this without hesitation, with intimate detail. She can’t recount events without reminding me that “when the Kennedys came it was magical, like having royalty in the White House. And Jackie spoke nine languages, wore size ten shoes, and had a miscarriage while in office.” She compared their arrival in Washington to “the prince and princess being born and representing a whole new hope. Eisenhower was a general and represented war. This was a different time; Jackie was a fashion icon.” She couldn’t remember anything else from seventh grade, but asked rhetorically, “How can I possibly remember all of that?”
It didn’t take long for me to develop a fascination with the Lincoln assassination. When my grandfather took me on a trip to Washington, D.C., as a young boy, I made him take me to every landmark and spot related to the assassination, Booth’s escape route, and the trial of the co-conspirators. We went to Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House, and the poor guy also had to take me to Fort McNair, where I could see the tennis courts that rest on the exact spot where the four conspirators were tried and executed. I began collecting newspapers related to the assassinations, but soon broadened my interest to presidents who died in office. I liked the phrase “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” I felt connected to Zachary Taylor since we were both born on November 24. I gave my youngest daughter the middle name Garfield. I read everything I could about McKinley and became fascinated by the Harding scandals, and spent my youth anxiously waiting for his notorious love letters to be released in 2013.
It seems that my boyhood obsession has followed me well into adulthood, as evidenced by this book. I have also felt this romanticized desire to feel connected to these moments of history and began collecting locks of presidential hair. I acquired a lock of Lincoln’s hair from the night of the assassination, and was able to purchase two long strands of William Henry Harrison’s hair that had been pulled off his head while his body lay in rest in the East Room. Nobody thinks this is normal, yet when people come over they can’t avert their eyes from the carefully designed shadow-boxed frames where the hair dangles on ribbons.
I will continue to collect locks of hair and more odd memorabilia, but the completion of this book marks an important personal milestone, satisfying a longtime desire to understand and tell the story of our accidental presidents.