June 7, 2007
Presidential Longevity II Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:00 AM EST Two days ago, John Steele Gordon made a post, “Presidential Longevity,” that got me thinking. His entry raises an intriguing thesis, that the drop-off in Presidential life spans during the nineteenth century was a byproduct of industrialization and population growth, and that the elongation of the life spans of late twentieth-century Presidents was principally the result of modern medical advances. There can be no doubt about the second point. As Mr. Gordon observes, Ronald Reagan would likely have perished at John Hinckley’s hand if the doctors at George Washington University Hospital had been using the same methods that their medical predecessors used as they tried to save William McKinley from another assassin’s bullet, 80 years earlier. Additionally, even some recent Presidents who lived more briefly lived far longer than they would have a hundred years before. Without the advice and care of modern physicians, Lyndon Johnson might have died from a heart attack before ever reaching the Oval Office. Dwight Eisenhower might have died there from one of his own. On the question of the short-lived leaders of the nineteenth century, the evidence is considerably murkier, and resists simple conclusions. Looking down a list of presidential life spans, there is indeed a long stretch of shorter-lived Presidents between Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover. But can the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of their times effectively explain this? I doubt it. If you look beyond the birth and death dates of the individuals concerned, it is clear that many of them died early for reasons unrelated to changes in America’s living conditions. William Henry Harrison, for example, the first President after Van Buren, fell ill of pneumonia after riding through the bitterly cold streets of Washington at his inauguration. He was 68. Franklin Pierce, who only lived to 64, died from liver problems related to alcoholism. Benjamin Harrison, like the earlier President Harrison, succumbed to pneumonia in the wintertime at age 67. Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were all shot (at 56, 49, and 58, respectively). Furthermore, with patterns like these, it matters an awful lot how one arranges the numbers. Mr. Gordon sees a pattern in the lives of Presidents from John Adams to Calvin Coolidge, excluding James Buchanan. But what happens if one includes George Washington, who died at 67? Or what if one adds in Vice Presidents, including Hannibal Hamlin, who lived to 81, and the amazingly durable Levi Morton, who died at 96? Mr. Gordon asks, “what accounts for the fact that four of the first six Presidents lived to be 80 or more?” But one could just as easily ask, what accounts for the fact that only two of the five Presidents who served between 1932 and 1968 reached the age of 65? There are easy answers to the question, but they are rooted in individual circumstances rather than sweeping trends. Mr. Gordon suggests that “[w]ith so small a sample [of people], of course, it could be mere coincidence” that presidential life spans appear to change over time as he describes. This suggestion seems like the right one. A few early Presidents were unusually long-lived, most of their successors varied in life span within a predictable range, and a few recent Presidents have benefited from important developments in medicine. Beyond that, time and chance happeneth to them all.
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