GRIEF IN THE WHITE HOUSE
DAVID BANNON LOOKS BACK THROUGH THE YEARS AT U.S. PRESIDENTS AFFECTED BY THE LOSS OF FAMILY MEMBERS
This article first appeared in History Magazine, Winter 2020/21
The death of a child exacts a heavy toll. In grief, prime ministers and presidents are the same as homemakers and poets, farmers and clergy. The pain plays no favorites. Parental bereavement is as profound as the lifelong changes that accompany it.
A shocking number of United States presidents were bereaved parents. John Adams lost three children; John Quincy Adams, two; Rutherford B. Hayes, three; Thomas Jefferson, five; John Tyler, three. William McKinley and Franklin Pierce watched all their children die. Grover Cleveland described the death of his twelve-year-old daughter as “almost unbearable.” Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan also knew the burden of parental sorrow. The list numbs us, unable to comprehend such heartbreak: eighteen presidents in all.
Other bereaved presidents include Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Calvin Coolidge, Theodore Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Each man was unique, as was his grief, yet there are common threads that bind many bereaved parents. From them we learn the high cost of compassion.
A SEARCH FOR MEANING
Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, died on Thursday, 20 February 1862. Shortly afterward Lincoln burst into the office of his secretary, John Nicolay. “My boy is gone,” he sobbed. “He is actually gone!” The sight of Willie’s washed and dressed body in the Green Room stayed with Lincoln for years. The next Thursday, and many Thursdays after, the president sought seclusion in the room where his son had lain. “The blow overwhelmed me,” he told a visitor, “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”
Lincoln spent a good deal of time in the stables with Willie’s horse, which the boy had been riding shortly before he fell ill. Other presidents have found similar tactile solace in physical reminders and mementos. Thomas Jefferson carried a lock of his dead four-month-old daughter’s hair all his life. John F. Kennedy lingered for hours at his infant son’s grave, whispering again and again, “It’s awful lonely here.” The child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had died less than two days after his birth in August 1963. Kennedy was too grief stricken to speak to anyone, even his family. At the mass, attended by thirteen people, he wept unrelentingly. Afterward he remained alone with the cardinal in the prelate’s small chapel, circling the coffin in his arms, “as if he wanted to take it with him”. Throughout the day Kennedy asked why God would allow a child to die. His wife had given him a St. Christopher medal when they were married. Kennedy buried it with his son.
Lincoln also sought insight and communion in reading, notably William Shakespeare and the Holy Bible. During a visit to Fort Monroe in May of 1862, Lincoln borrowed a copy of Shakespeare’s works from General John Wool. After reading for a few hours, the president asked Colonel Le Grand B. Cannon if he might share a few selections with him. Lincoln then recited from Macbeth, King Lear, and King John. The last play was written shortly after the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who, like Willie, was also eleven. Lincoln came to the powerful scene where a character mourns the loss of her son: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.” Cannon noticed that the president’s voice trembled. Lincoln reached the end of the passage and set the book aside. “Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality?” he asked Cannon. “That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.” Lincoln then broke down into convulsive weeping, as did Cannon.
After Willie’s passing, spiritual concerns came to dominate Lincoln’s life. Though never formally associated with a church, he was impressed with Francis Vinton’s sermons on death and asked for a collection. By July of 1862 Lincoln was speaking of emancipation.
The president shocked his cabinet after the Confederate retreat at Antietam. “He had made a vow, a covenant,” wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles on 22 September 1862, “that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine Will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation”. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued less than a year after Willie’s death: 1 January 1863. That same day the White House held its first public reception since the boy’s passing.
Lincoln’s famous address at Gettysburg, delivered on 19 November 1863, was not unexpected. As with his views on emancipation, the president’s thoughts on American national purpose had for years been leading up to this point. Still, we are stunned by his compassion and resolve. Lincoln’s search for meaning had raised him to new heights of eloquence.
GUILT AND REMORSE
Calvin Coolidge also lost a son while in office. Sixteen-year-old Calvin Jr. died of blood poisoning on 7 July 1924. “When he was suffering,” Coolidge said later, “he begged me to help him. I could not.” Those who dismiss Coolidge as a do-nothing president might consider the burden he carried. “When he went the power and the glory of the presidency went with him,” Coolidge wrote. It is easy to dismiss such mourning as giving up, but this seems unjust. Calvin was rarely given to hyperbole. Perhaps we can take him at his word. Amassing and maintaining power requires an expenditure of effort, as does any perceived glory. It may be that Coolidge did not surrender to apathy: he was merely uninterested.
Calvin’s search for meaning had expanded beyond the presidential gates. He gave standing orders to his Secret Service detail that no young boy should be refused admittance to the White House: “Never turn one away or make him wait.” After Coolidge left office in 1929, the Republican Party urged him to run as vice president on the 1932 Herbert Hoover ticket. Calvin flatly refused. He felt that his son’s death had been the price for his public life. Politics no longer held any interest for him. “You know, it’s my past life that makes all the trouble,” he told a friend on New Year’s Day 1933, “if only I could get rid of my past life.” Calvin Coolidge died four days later.
This combination of guilt, regret and wishful thinking is all too common with grieving parents. Theodore Roosevelt blamed himself for his son’s death. Quentin Roosevelt died in aerial combat over France on 14 July 1918. The robust president had always been a patient, but demanding, father. He expected his sons to fight for what they believed to be right. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death,” Theodore wrote of Quentin, “has a pretty serious side to a father.”
At first, Roosevelt could not write about Quentin at all. He broke down each time he tried. By the end of August he managed to write a generalized eulogy for all the young men dying in Europe: Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.
This tribute, “The Great Adventure,” ran in newspapers on 17 September 1918 and in the October 1918 issue of Metropolitan magazine. The article ends on a weak and plaintive note. The task was too much. No eulogy could be more eloquent than when Theodore was heard sobbing into the mane of his son’s pony: “Poor Quentyquee!”
Theodore Roosevelt died on 6 January 1919, six months after Quentin was shot down. An acquaintance that saw Theodore a few months earlier noted that his old exuberance was gone: “The boy in him had died.”
MEMORY AND LOSS
Bereavement is a permanent state. Researchers have identified one universal note for all parents that have lost children: they never get over it. There may be hope and joy, to be sure, but memory and grief are now part of their reality.
“She is still with us,” wrote George H. W. Bush of his daughter Robin. The three-year-old had died of leukemia in 1953. George and Barbara were numb. “We need her and yet we have her,” he wrote to his mother five years later, in 1958. “We can’t touch her, and yet we can feel her.”
George W. Bush was seven when cancer took Robin. Years later, the younger Bush related that when his father was asked to describe what personal difficulties he had faced, he did not mention being shot down by enemy fire in World War II or that he nearly died of a staph infection in high school. No other challenge compared to watching Robin die over the course of six months. “My father never stopped thinking about his daughter,” George W. wrote. “For as long as I can remember, he has kept a three-by-five framed photo of her on the desk in his office.”
JOE BIDEN: “I had to do my job”
Joe Biden lost his wife and daughter on 18 December 1972. Neilia Biden had been shopping for a Christmas tree with their three children when the family station wagon was hit by a tractor-trailer. A few hours later the phone rang in Joe’s temporary Washington office. The senator-elect was gripped by fear “like a little pinprick at the center of my chest.” His sister Val answered, listened, and hung up. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Joe cried. Neilia and 13-month-old Naomi had been killed. Their sons — Beau, four, and Hunter, three — sustained severe injuries. “I felt God had played a horrible trick on me,” Biden wrote later. On 5 January 1973, the 30-year-old widower took his oath of office in the Delaware hospital’s chapel so both boys could attend. “We can always get another senator,” he said, “but they can’t get another father.” True to his word, Biden commuted each day between DC and Wilmington. He remarried in 1977, but more sorrow was to come. While serving as vice president in 2015, Joe lost Beau to brain cancer. As a result, the grieving father did not seek the presidency. “I had to do my job,” he said, “as a husband, father and Pop [grandfather].” Joe ran for president four years later. On the day of the election, 3 November 2020, the Biden family spent the morning in church, visiting the graves of Neilia, Naomi and Beau.
Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, also lost a child. Their first son, Doud Dwight, died at age four. Known as “little Ike,” a nickname ultimately shortened to Icky, the boy took ill just before Christmas in 1920. The family’s new maid had recently recovered from scarlet fever and still carried the bacteria. Icky contracted the disease and was quarantined. It turned to meningitis.
Eisenhower haunted the halls of the hospital. He was not allowed into the room, but he could wave to Icky from a porch or occasionally stand in the door and speak to the boy. Ike felt helpless. “Hour after hour,” he wrote, “Mamie and I could only hope and pray.”
Icky lasted for ten days. He died in Ike’s arms on 2 January 1921. The Eisenhowers did not ignore the death, but that particular moment remained taboo for years. “We never talked about it,” Mamie told her granddaughter. “I never asked him because it was something that hurt so badly.”
Ike brooded for decades over the time he had missed with his son due to the demands of military life. “I have never known such a blow,” he wrote in 1967. “I blamed myself because I had often taken his presence for granted.” Ike and Mamie also felt guilt for hiring the maid and for trusting the Army doctors, who were ill-equipped at that time to deal with children’s diseases.
Over the years, Ike and Mamie honored Icky’s memory in their own ways. Yellow had been their son’s favorite color. For the rest of his life, Ike sent Mamie yellow roses on Icky’s birthday. Ann Thomas, who served as Ike’s secretary during his presidency, from 1953 to 1961, recalled coming upon him staring off into space from the Oval Office. Without preamble he turned to her and said that he was thinking of his dead son. On another occasion, Ike pointed to some fresh blossoms in the living quarters and told Ann, “Icky always liked those flowers.”
Ike and Mamie Eisenhower found meaning in life, despite and perhaps in some ways, because of their loss. The shadow of death was no longer an ill omen. It was a fact of existence.
GRIEF AND THE PRESIDENCY
Many bereaved parents find that the loss of a child shifts their priorities. They seek meaning in life, with all that such a search entails. They also experience a new perspective on what they value: life’s transience seems more immediate; relationships more vital. These presidents show us a few of the many forms grief can take. Theodore Roosevelt was crippled with guilt; Calvin Coolidge discovered new priorities; George H. W. Bush and Dwight Eisenhower found ways to go on, though never to forget; Abraham Lincoln demonstrated how sorrow and compassion can save a people and heal a nation.
This article first appeared in History Magazine, Winter 2020/21.
David Bannon is a translator and the author of Wounded in Spirit. He taught college for many years and has appeared on The Discovery Channel, A&E, The History Channel, NPR, Fox News and in The Wall Street Journal. His daughter, Jessica, died in 2015. He currently writes on grief.
