Fate, Stress of the Job, Divine Intervention or Just Sheer Coincidence – Currency Thoughts
Fate, Stress of the Job, Divine Intervention or Just Sheer Coincidence
March 5, 2026
Whatever the reason, there is a pattern of short-lived retirements of American presidents who presided over the country’s major wars. It starts with James Polk, a one-term president for the four years through March 4, 1849. It was on his watch that the Mexican War was fought between April 1846 and February 1848. As a result of that conflict, U.S. territory expanded by around 525,000 square miles including California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming. Polk himself was less fortunate as a private citizen after leaving office. He lived just 15 weeks longer, dying from what is believed to have been cholera at the age of 53.
Abraham Lincoln at age 56 was shot and killed by an assassin just five weeks into his second term and a mere five days after the General Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to Union General Grant at Appomattox, ending America’s four-year Civil War and slavery.
The Spanish American War lasted just four months in the middle of 1898 following the sinking of the USS Maine in Cuba but shifted sovereignty over numerous island territories to the United States. William McKinley was the U.S. president at the time of that conflict. In 1900, he was reelected to a second term but served only about a half year of such when he became the third American president to be assassinated. He was four months short of what would have been his 59th birthday.
The U.S. president during the first world war was Woodrow Wilson. Just 11 months after the armistice ending that conflict and following a strenuous yet ultimately unsuccessful campaign by him to garner sufficient support for the U.S. to join the World of Nations, Wilson experienced an extremely compromising stroke in October 1919 that left him significantly diminished for the rest of his life. It ended a little more than four years into his retirement at the age of 67.
Franklin Roosevelt, America’s longest serving president whose term covered the depression and most of the second world war, suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945 just one month into his final term and shortly before the war ended. FDR lived just 63 years and five months.
Lyndon Johnson’s legacy of vast civil rights legislative breakthroughs and other landmark social programs launched on his watch was undermined by the Vietnam War, a conflict that killed over 58,000 American GI’s and was ultimately lost around six years after LBJ left office. Johnson chose not to seek reelection in 1968, partly because of health issues but also due to the divisive effect of the war on American society and morale. He died at age 64 just four years after returning to private life.
The U.S. presidency is a very hard job even in times of peace, and it shows when comparing pictures of most past presidents taken at the start and end of their presidencies. Being a wartime leader no doubt adds to the strain it takes on occupants of the White House. Even so, the roll call of shortened lives among the leaders in those times seems almost too consistent to be true.
Copyright 2026, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
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