Seven vice presidents have died in office

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Seven vice presidents have died in office

March 6, 2001 Web posted at: 9:10 AM EST (1410 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Seven vice presidents have died in office, all of them from natural causes. Most were frail to begin with.

William Rufus King, vice president to Franklin Pierce, was too weakened by tuberculosis to stand unaided when he was sworn in in 1853. Congress passed legislation to allow him to take the oath in Cuba, where he was trying to regain his health away from wintertime Washington, but he died at 67 before making it back to the capital.

When George Clinton first presided over the Senate in 1805 as the nation's fourth vice president, he was described by a senator as so "weak and feeble" of voice that senators could not "hear the one half of what he says." He had retired from public life once in 1795, pleading ill health.

Still, Clinton managed to serve as vice president to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for seven years before he died in 1812 at age 72. Along the way, his age and infirmity "if anything, enhanced his value to the president," because Jefferson needed an "honest, 'plain' Republican vice president" until he could pass the mantle of the presidency to Madison, according to a vice presidential history by Mark O. Hatfield with the Senate Historical Office.

Overall, the office of the vice president has been left open 18 times because of deaths, resignations and successions to the presidency. The issue of vice presidents and their health surfaced again Monday when Vice President Dick Cheney, who has had four heart attacks over the past 25 years, was hospitalized in Washington with chest pains.

Cheney's doctors said they expected him to be able to fill his full term as vice president with vigor.

Senate Historian Richard Baker said vice presidents in the early days of the republic were prone to health problems because they were "people who were sometimes beyond their prime. They were older, in the sunset of their careers, often chosen to balance the ticket geographically and politically."

The last time a vice president died in office was 1912, when James S. Sherman died during the presidency of William Taft. He had suffered from Bright's disease, a serious kidney ailment, since 1904.

When Taft was renominated for president in 1912, Sherman was too ill to campaign and his family doctor urged him not to give a speech accepting the nomination.

"You may know all about medicine, but you don't know about politics," Sherman told him, according to Hatfield's history. Sherman collapsed two days after giving his half-hour speech and died before the election.

Taft, his defeat seen as almost a foregone conclusion, went through the election with a deceased running mate and lost to Woodrow Wilson.

The four other vice presidents who died in office:

--Elbridge Gerry, vice president to Madison after Clinton, died in 1814 after a year and a half in office at age 70. He suffered a stroke not long after taking office but kept up "relentless socializing" that sapped his strength when combined with his public duties, according to Hatfield.

--Henry Wilson, second vice president to Ulysses S. Grant, died in 1875 after two years in office. He helped Grant win re-election by taking a 10,000-mile speaking tour to deliver 96 speeches, but ruined his health in the process, according to Hatfield. "Wilson's ill health kept him from playing any role of consequence as vice president," Hatfield wrote.

--Thomas A. Hendricks, first vice president to Grover Cleveland, served less than a year before he died in his sleep in 1885 while resting up at home in Indiana for the next congressional session. His death left the nation without a vice president for more than three years for the second time in a decade.

--Garret A. Hobart, vice president to William McKinley, served two years before he died in 1899 after suffering fainting spells and serious heart problems. "History has remembered Garret Hobart less for his life than for his death," Hatfield wrote. "The vacant vice-presidency was soon occupied by one of America's most dynamic political leaders, Theodore Roosevelt."

-- (dick@number.8), March 07, 2001

Answers

The info's OK, but your choice of e-mail handles is beyond sick.

You should get some help. You need it.

-- Chicken Little (cluck@cluck.com), March 07, 2001.


It is you who is sick CL.

There are hundreds of millions of people who are thinking it is very possible that Cheney could become statistic #8, including those who wrote this article. Nothing sick about it, just realistic. There is nothing wrong with dying either, it happens to each and every one of us.

You can't handle reality, get some help.

-- (get.help@chicken.choker), March 07, 2001.


I was just thinking about this two days ago, but hadn't looked up the history yet.

So we've had seven vice presidential and eight presidential deaths in office -- roughly equal frequency. However, only presidents have been assassinated -- four-and-a-close-call of them -- whereas all vice presidents died natural deaths.

Some of you may recall my thread a few months ago about the 1840-1960 zero-year-election presidential death cycle. I think I pointed out then that the zero-year-election coincidence was less improbable than it seems at first because a) multi-term presidents were more likely both to die in office and to have won a zero-year election than single-term presidents, and b) two of the zero-year-elected presidential deaths in office occurred not in the terms to which they were elected in the zero-year, but in later terms to which they were elected in nonzero-years (Lincoln in 1865 after his 1864 reelection, and F. Roosevelt in 1945 after his 1944 reelection).

Anyway, now we have the combination of a zero-year-elected president and a somewhat frail-to-begin-with vice president. Hmmm... what's the name of that Speaker of the House again?

-- No Spam Please (nos_pam_please@hotmail.com), March 08, 2001.


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