The Man Present at Three Presidential Assassinations — Then Refused a Fourth

 


Robert Todd Lincoln spent much of his adult life standing at the edges of American tragedy, close enough each time to wonder what it meant that he kept being there.

He was Abraham Lincoln's eldest son, born in 1843, one of only four Lincoln children and the only one to survive to old age. On the night of April 14, 1865, his parents invited him to join them at Ford's Theatre for a performance of Our American Cousin. Robert, exhausted from his recent service on General Grant's staff, declined and went to bed early at the White House instead. When word came that his father had been shot, he rushed to the Petersen House across the street from the theater and was at his father's bedside when Abraham Lincoln died the next morning — present for the ending, though not the shooting itself, a distinction that later popular retellings often blurred.

The ordinary situation, for the next sixteen years, was simply a successful public career — Robert became a lawyer, then Secretary of War under President James Garfield. On July 2, 1881, he arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington to accompany Garfield on a trip, running slightly late. He reached the station just as Charles Guiteau shot the president in the waiting room.

Twenty years passed. Robert built a career as a corporate lawyer and eventually president of the Pullman Company, largely avoiding public office and the spotlight that had followed his family name. In September 1901, President William McKinley invited him to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Robert arrived at the Temple of Music as McKinley was greeting the public in a receiving line, approaching to meet him, when Leon Czolgosz fired the shots that would kill the president.

The growing unease, by that point, wasn't subtle. Three presidents, three assassinations, four decades, and Robert Todd Lincoln present or arriving at the scene each time. He is reported to have said, of a later White House invitation, that there was "a certain fatality about presidential functions" when he was present — historians note the exact quote isn't verified in his own writing, though it circulated during his lifetime and he never denied holding the sentiment.

The turning point came quietly, without a public statement or dramatic scene. After 1901, Robert declined further invitations to events involving a sitting president. He kept mostly to his law practice, his business affairs, and eventually his Vermont estate, Hildene, avoiding the kind of public presidential functions that had, by pure and repeated coincidence, placed him three times at the edge of American history's worst moments.

The quiet revelation of his later decades wasn't supernatural, whatever the popular legend implied. It was simply a man old enough and unlucky enough to recognize a pattern and choose, deliberately, not to test it further. He lived the rest of his life almost entirely outside the presidential orbit he'd spent his early career inside.

The aftermath spanned twenty-five more years. Robert Todd Lincoln died at Hildene on July 26, 1926, six days before his eighty-third birthday, found by his butler, having passed peacefully in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. He outlived his father by sixty-one years, and outlived the two other presidents he'd stood near by twenty-five and forty-five years respectively.

What stays with the story isn't the coincidence itself, remarkable as it is. It's the image of an old man in Vermont, decades removed from three gunshots he'd each arrived just in time to hear, who spent the back half of his life quietly declining every invitation that might have made him a witness to a fourth.

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