Lincoln-Kennedy Connections

It’s hard to ignore how many coincidences there are between US presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. But it made me wonder just how accurate these claims are. Before we get into that, let’s look at what they are.

• Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. Kennedy was elected in 1946.
• Lincoln was elected as president in 1860. Kennedy, 1960.
• Both presidents were associated with and passionate about civil rights.
• Both were shot on a Friday and in the head.
• Lincoln and Kennedy both have seven letters.
• Lincoln’s secretary (who’s last name was Kennedy) warned him not to go to the theater while Kennedy’s secretary (Evelyn Lincoln) warned him not to go to Dallas.
• Both were succeeded by Southerners with the last name of Johnson. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.
• John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839 and Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939. Both were also known by all three names, which both have fifteen letters. They were also assassinated before they could be tried.
• Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and ran to a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran to a theater.
• While Abe and John were in office, they lost children.

Most of these, you really can just brush off as coincidences. After all, there’s a 1-in-7 chance for both Lincoln and Kennedy to be shot on a Friday. Presidential elections only happen every four years in the US, so it isn’t that weird that they got elected 100 years apart. For Andrew and Lyndon, so many people are born 100 years apart.

Let’s look at some of these claims a little more closely.

• “They were both elected in ‘60.” - I mentioned this already, but Lincoln and Kennedy could not have been elected as presidents in ‘51 or ‘68 or anything like that.
• “Seven/fifteen letters in their names.” - I think a lot of us can agree that this might be the most trivial on this list. There are a lot of people who have the same number of the letters in their names. To me, this one doesn’t really mean anything.
• “Concerned with civil rights.” When you take into consideration the times in which Lincoln and Kennedy were in office, they were almost forced to deal with civil rights. Take FDR and Churchill as examples - they were in their respective offices during times of war, so is this a coincidence or were they forced to be concerned about this?
• “Both lost a child while in office.” A literally true statement, but entirely different circumstances. For the Lincolns, they actually lost two children and all of them were born before they were in office. One died of tuberculosis just before his 4th birthday and the other actually died within their first year of living in the White House of typhoid. For the Kennedys, one of their children had been a preme and died two days after being born.
• “Shot on a Friday and shot in the head.” It comes down to that 1-in-7 chance again. And similarly with being shot in the head, to most likely kill someone, your best bet is the head or chest. So there’s a 50% chance that it’ll be one or the other.
• “Kennedy/Lincoln secretaries.” - This one seems to be just straight up wrong. While JFK did have a secretary with the last name of Lincoln, there doesn’t seem to be any record of a Kennedy secretary working under President Lincoln.
• “Successors named Johnson.” - This one is also kind of trivial. While Johnson is still a relatively common last name today, it was a lot more common back in Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s day.
• “Both assassins were born in ‘39.” - Another that is just straight wrong. John Wilkes Booth was actually born in 1838, not 1839. His birth year was most likely fudged to fit in the pattern.

Snopes did a whole article looking into this where you can look at all of the coincidences. But what do you think? Is there still something to these, or is it all just small, trivial coincidences that led to something bigger?