1. Forty-five men (I’m going to keep using that word, rather than the weaselly “people”, because it’s accurate) have now served as US president. Donald Trump currently ranks as the 47th – but that’s because he has served two, non-consecutive terms; last time round, he ranked as 45th. Between 1885 and 1897, Grover Cleveland did this too (he was 22nd and 24th president).
2. Of those 45 men, eight died in office, a mortality rate of nearly 18%. If, god forbid, Trump were to become the ninth, the rate would be 20%. It’s hard to directly compare this to other workplace fatality statistics, which look at the number of people out of every 100,000 who die from workplace-related injuries in any given year, and also aren’t restricted to roles overwhelmingly held by men aged over 50. Nonetheless – would you take a job on those odds?
3. One of the reasons the number looks so bad, of course, is that four presidents have been assassinated, two of them quite famously. One night in 1865, the 16th president Abraham Lincoln was shot dead at the theatre by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate spy and also, oddly, one of the most famous actors of his generation, making it a bit like Tom Cruise deciding to assassinate Trump for some reason.
4. Ninety-eight years later, John F Kennedy (35th) was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, who didn’t even need a magic bullet to do it.
5. The other two assassinations are less remembered and – this may be connected – less prone to conspiracism. James A Garfield (20th) was shot in 1881 by a man mistakenly convinced he’d been promised a job. He spent two months failing to recover in hospital, despite the ministrations of doctors who didn’t realise they should be washing their hands, before eventually dying of sepsis.
6. Lastly, William McKinley (15th) was shot dead by an anarchist in 1901, a time when being shot dead by anarchists was all the rage.
7. Four other presidents died from natural causes. Most famous of these is the 9th president, William Henry Harrison, who in 1841 refused to wear a coat to his own inauguration, caught a chill and expired a month later, thus inspiring a song in The Simpsons.
8. Just nine years later, the 12th president, Zachary Taylor, died less than a year and a half into his own presidency. One of the men who served in between, 11th president James K Polk, died only three months after he left office, too – leading to theories that all three may actually have died due to a dodgy White House water supply.
9. The other two who died in office were Warren G Harding, in 1923, from heart problems; and Franklin D Roosevelt, in 1945, officially from a cerebral haemorrhage, but also after years of declining health which had been kept from the public.
10. All of which means that, in the 122 years between 1841 and 1963, a sitting president died on average every 15 years. And the 63 years since Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK (with no assistance from the Russians, the Cubans, the CIA or anyone else) is the longest period the nation has ever gone without burying a sitting president.
Suggested Reading
Nerd’s Eye View: Nine things you need to know about Dubai
8.9%
Proportion of US presidents who were assassinated in office
17.8%:
Total proportion that died in office
5.7%:
Estimated risk of death faced over a 45-year career by lumberjacks, frequently ranked as the deadliest profession in the United States
Six:
Number of presidents that someone as old Trump will be by the end of his second term (82.5 years) could have seen dying in office: 1841, 1850, 1861, 1881, 1901, 1923.
