| Presidential Tales | |||
|
Who can be President? The US constitution stipulates that, to be eligible for the Presidency, a candidate must be a natural born citizen, must have lived in the United States for a minimum of 14 years and must be at least 35 years old. The requirement to be natural born was waived at first, because before the War of Independence, all Americans were British subjects Candidates had merely to be US citizens at the time the constitution was adopted in 1788: Martin Van Buren, the eighth President, was the first not to have been born a British subject. But there are no other legal qualifications or restrictions for the post, so there is nothing in US law to prevent a lunatic, a bankrupt or a convicted criminal from becoming President. |
|||
|
Monopoly of Power. Most Presidents have been Protestants. All have been white and so far no woman has held the post. Until John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, no Roman Catholic had been President. Although Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, was nominated as the Democratic Presidential candidate in 1928, he lost the election to the Quaker Herbert Hoover. |
|||
|
Young and Old John F. Kennedy was the youngest man to be elected President at the age of 43. But he was not the youngest President. Theodore Roosevelt was only 42 when he was moved from the Vice-Presidency after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. The oldest man to become President was Ronald Reagan, who was 69 when he first took office in 1981. |
|||
|
Family Ties John Quincey Adams , the sixth President, was the son of John Adams, the second President. Benjamin Harrison who took office in 1889, was the grandson of William Henry Harrison, who was President in 1841. The two Roosevelts who have been Presidents - Theodore and Franklin delano - were related only as distant cousins. George Walker Bush who became the 43rd President in 2001, was the son of George Herbert Walker Bush who held office from 1988 to 1993. |
|||
|
On the Rocks President Hoover became so unpopular during the Great Depression - for which he was chiefly blamed - that the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, built in the early 1930s, had its name changed to the Boulder Dam in 1933. The name was changed back by congress in 1947 - after the passage of time and Hoover's work for famine relief during and after the Second World War had helped to restore his reputation. |
|||
|
President who was Never Elected Gerald Ford who was President for three years, never won a national election. He was promoted to the Vice Presidency by Richard Nixon in 1973 after the elected Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned to avoid being brought to trial over bribery charges. Ford took over as President eight months later when Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal. |
|||
|
I Cannot Tell a Lie The story of young George Washington nobly confessing to chopping down his father's cherry tree was almost certainly an invention. The fable seems to have been created by an American clergyman and notorious romanticiser, Mason Locke Weems, who wrote a biography of the President with the avowed intention of extolling his virtues. The story was first published in the book's fifth edition, which was issued in 1806, when Washington had been dead for seven years. |
|||
|
Killed in Office Four of America's 43 Presidents have died at the hands of assassins. Abraham Lincoln was shot in a Washington theatre in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who had supported the defeated South during the Civil War. James Garfield was shot only four months after his inauguration in 1881 by Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker. William McKinley was shot by an anarchist Leon Czolgosz, in 1901. John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine, in Dallas, Texas. |
|||
Last Wattz
|
|||
|
Bargain Buy When President Thomas Jefferson began negotiations to buy Louisiana from the French (which had itself only just acquired the territory from Spain), he envisaged at the most buying an area around the mouth of the Mississippi River and paying up to $10 million for it. In the end, however, the French, preoccupied with the threat of war in Europe, were so eager to sell that in 1803 Jefferson was able, for a mere $15 million, to buy almost all the land between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. The territory covered more than 2,000,000km² (more than 700,000 square miles), doubling at a stroke the area of the USA. |
|||
|
The Grey House The White House, the President's official home, was originally grey, the colour of the pale Virginian sandstone used to build it. During the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, which went on till 1814, British troops captured the city of Washington in August 1814 and put the mansion to the torch. When it was rebuilt after the war, the walls were painted white to hide the smoke stains. |
|||
|
The 20 Year Cycle of Fate Seven of the eight Presidents who have died in office - either through illness or assassination - were elected precisely at 20 year intervals. The seven were William Harrison (elected 1840), Abraham Lincoln (1860), James Garfield (1880), William McKinley (elected to second term in 1900), Warren Harding (1920), Franklin Roosevelt (elected to a 3rd term in 1940) and John F. Kennedy (1960). The eighth was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 and died in office in 1850. |
|||
|
Unbeatable Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won four Presidential elections and spent 12 years in the White House - longer than any other President - is unlikely to have his record beaten. Since 1951 a constitutional amendment has barred Presidential candidates from being elected to more than two four year terms. |
|||
Teddy and the Bear
|
|||
