THE NEXT U.S. PRESIDENT 1

By: IZAKOVIC

UPDATED: 01-22-2001

THE COURSE OF THE CURSE

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Abraham Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. 

In 1858 he ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860 and the nomination as the sixteenth President in 1861.

On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free the slaves within the Confederacy. Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue: a new birth of freedom, the government of the people, by the people and for the people.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

Lincoln was the second President that died during his presidency. He was elected twenty years after the Harrison. 

James A. Garfield was born in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1831. Fatherless at two, he later drove canal boat teams, somehow earning enough money for an education.

At the 1880 Republican Convention, Garfield failed to win the Presidential nomination for his friend John Sherman. Finally, on the 36th ballot, Garfield himself became the dark horse nominee and later, by a margin of only 10,000 popular votes, become twentieth President in 1881.

As the last of the log cabin Presidents, James A. Garfield attacked political corruption and won back for the Presidency a measure of prestige it had lost during the Reconstruction period.

On July 2, 1881, in a Washington railroad station, an embittered attorney who had sought a consular post shot him. Doctors tried to find the bullet with a metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell, but the device failed because Garfield was placed on a bed with metal springs, and no one thought to move him. 

On September 19, 1881, he died from an infection and internal hemorrhage.

At the 1896 Republican Convention, in time of depression, the wealthy Cleveland businessman Marcus Alonzo Hanna ensured the nomination of his friend William McKinley as the advance agent of prosperity. 

After being elected as twenty-fifth President he condemned the trusts as dangerous conspiracies against the public good and was generally on the side of the public and against private interests.

His was elected  in 1901, 20 years after the Garfield, to serve a second term. In September 1901, while standing in a receiving line at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, a deranged anarchist shot him twice. McKinley died of a chest wound eight days later.

He was the fourth President that did not survive his term.

An Ohio admirer, Harry Daugherty, began to promote Harding for the 1920 Republican nomination because, he later explained, he looked like a President. 

Harding won the Presidential election by an unprecedented landslide of 60 percent of the popular vote and become twenty-ninth President.

As by the 1923, the postwar depression seemed to be giving way to a new surge of prosperity, newspapers hailed Harding as a wise statesman carrying out his campaign promise: Less government in business and more business in government. Behind the facade, not all of Harding's Administration was so impressive. Word began to reach the President that some of his friends were using their official positions for their own enrichment. Alarmed, he complained: My...friends...they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!

He did not live to find out how the public would react to the scandals of his administration. In August of 1923, he died in San Francisco of a heart attack.

Assuming his first Presidency in 1932, as a thirty-second President, at the depth of the Great Depression, during the first of his four terms in office, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. Than, and later on, he proposed a sweeping program of reforms, enabling the Government to legally regulate the economy.

Roosevelt had pledged the United States to the good neighbor policy, transforming the Monroe Doctrine from a unilateral American manifesto into arrangements for mutual action against aggressors. Although he sought to keep the United States out of the war in Europe, he made every effort to strengthen nations threatened or attacked and led the Nation through the World War II. Feeling that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United States and Russia, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which, he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.

Exhausted by the effort, his health deteriorated, and  one month into his record fourth term as president, on April 12, 1945, while at Warm Springs, Georgia, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

He was elected third time in 1940, twenty years after Harding.

In 1956 Kennedy almost gained the Democratic nomination for Vice President, but four years later, in 1960, and twenty years after Roosevelt was inaugurated third time, he become a first-ballot nominee for President. Millions watched his television debates with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Winning by a narrow margin in the popular vote, Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President.

Among other things JFK set loose in the U.S. the era of the common man, he wanted to change the practice contrary to the U.S. Constitution which allows the Federal Reserve, a private company, to charge interest on the U.S. Dollar insurance thus benefiting certain ruling families, stop the war in South-East Asia, banish wars and create a world of law and free choice for all. 

On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. 

Kennedy was the youngest man elected President and he was the youngest to die.

Ronald Reagan won the Republican Presidential nomination in 1980 and chose as his running mate former Texas Congressman and United Nations Ambassador George Herbert Walker Bush. Voters troubled by inflation and by the year-long confinement of Americans in Iran swept the Republican ticket into office. Reagan won 489 electoral votes to 49 for President Jimmy Carter.

On January 20, 1981, Reagan took office. Only 69 days later he was shot by a would-be assassin, but quickly recovered and returned to duty. His grace and wit during the dangerous incident caused his popularity to soar, which helped him in later dealings with Congress, by which he obtained legislation to stimulate economic growth, curb inflation, increase employment, and strengthen national defense.

A renewal of national self-confidence by 1984 helped Reagan to win a second term with an unprecedented number of electoral votes. During his administration, the Nation was enjoying its longest recorded period of peacetime prosperity without recession or depression.

It was generally hoped that, surviving the attempt on his life, Regan broke the Curse of Tippecanoe.

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      Image of the Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Warren G. Harding, and Franklin D. Roosevelt were sourced from http://www.whitehouse.gov

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