Though it rarely feels like America is becoming safer, this is certainly the case if you happen to occupy the nation’s highest office.
Writing for Quartz, reporter Steve Friess noted that President Barack Obama’s continued existence on Wednesday marked “a major historical milestone.” According to Friess, it has now been more than 18,967 days (nearly 52 years) since a U.S. president died in office – the longest period of presidential survival since 1841.
(For those who haven’t been keeping count, that was the year William Henry Harrison died from pneumonia. Prior to his death, no American president had died in the office first occupied by George Washington in 1789.
CBS reports that Obama was likely sleeping soundly in his Chicago home when he broke the American record, an obscure historical fact that may come as a surprise to many.
“Most Americans (today) tend to think of assassination or death as being such a remote possibility,” Ronald Kessler, the author of “In the President’s Secret Service”, told Quartz.
The relatively safe nature of the job today is due to increased security and advancements in medicine. Since John F. Kennedy’s death, there have been shots fired at presidents three times, two directed at Gerald Ford, who was uninjured, and another aimed at Ronald Reagan, who was wounded.
In the summer of 1985, The Washington Post analyzed a number of presidential deaths that likely could have been prevented with better medical care, with the prime example of James Garfield succumbing to a bullet wound in the back.
The report says: “Dr. Willard Bliss violated the antiseptic standards even of 1881 by inserting his bare finger into Garfield’s wound, introducing infection, and then compounded his error by irrigating the wound with a catheter that ultimately was inserted to a length of 14 inches in the wrong direction.”
He also apparently fired every doctor critical of his practices. So, mistakes were made.
Meanwhile, Warren G. Harding’s doctor diagnosed his ultimately fatal heart condition as indigestion from eating bad crab meat, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s doctor said he was “the picture of health” shortly before he suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage, and one doctor who treated Kennedy later lost his medical license because he was found to have caused the deaths of patients through intravenous injections of amphetamines and cortisones.
Michael Towle, chair of the political science department at Mount St. Mary’s University, argued in the Baltimore Sun this week that the frequency with which presidents have historically died in office is good reason for voters to pay more attention to the second name on the ballot in the coming election.
Most presidential deaths “resulted in significant changes in the direction of the country,” Towle writes in a column titled “Why we should care about the next veep.”
