First Dad

...and the four sons of Theodore Roosevelt became extreme risk-takers, perhaps trying in some way to match fathers who were not only presidents but popular heroes...

...Or take risks or take drugs...

...While he talked, his father sat reading a document...

...he can just hope to match him...

...had perished...

...Robert Todd Lincoln, captain of industry...

...It was only after his father had failed in public—when he lost the 1992 race to Bill Clinton—that the career of the younger man started to flourish...

...Rutherford B. Hayes had seven children...

...On that date in 1955, President Eisenhower had his first major heart attack...

...The elder George Bush became the father of a son at twenty-two and president at sixty-four, a whole lifetime later...

...Why do so many presidents' children commit suicide...

...Celebrities in general have short, stressful lives: They are four times more likely to commit suicide than normal Americans, two and one-half times more likely to die in an accident, and two times more likely to die of cirrhosis or kidney diseases, often from drinking or drugs...

...Many children, especially daughters, suffered through difficult marriages...

...Years later, on the 23rd of September, Mamie Eisenhower had her fatal stroke...

...Abraham Lincoln two of four...

...It is no accident that the presidents whose children showed the most overt hostility were those of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt, two great national leaders who found it much easier to establish the illusion of intimacy with millions of strangers than to establish the real thing with their children...

...The notoriously detached John Kennedy had to be pried away from his infant son's coffin...

...The current state of the Jeb Bush family, with one child being groomed for political stardom and another in court-ordered rehab for substance dependency, is a pattern John Adams would recognize...

...Mary Todd Lincoln fell into a coma on the anniversary of the death of her son Tad and died one day after...

...A few weeks before he died, John Kennedy Jr...

...It means having a father whose love affair with his calling and country often comes at the expense of his family...

...Presidents' children routinely see their parents denounced as thieves, fools, liars, and killers...

...But presidents' children have additional problems that drive self-esteem down...

...Rushmore...

...One of Jefferson's daughters died at four months...

...And if children survive beyond childhood, that does not end the story...

...Compare that with John F. Kennedy, elected at forty-three, who became president and the father of a son the same month...

...and when their parents fail, the failures are public and huge...

...John Tyler lost three of his adult daughters within a six-year period....William McKinley and Franklin Pierce saw all their children die...

...When that firstborn son is the namesake of the president, as with John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., John Kennedy Jr., and George W. Bush, the strain is intensified...

...three died before their second birthday...

...All the Presidents' Children tells us why...

...Grover Cleveland found the death of his twelve-year-old Ruth 'almost unbearable,'" Wead notes...

...He already knew that the sons and the namesakes of presidents have a fatal attraction to risk—and that under the power and glory of presidents lies a secret connection of grief...

...This is what destroyed the elder three sons of Franklin Roosevelt, who got too many freebies and never learned discipline...

...A grieving Eliza Johnson lived in seclusion on the second floor of the White House during her husband's term...

...Some people have wondered why George and Laura Bush keep their children so far from the life of the White House...

...John F. Kennedy Jr...

...The most pressured political sons of the twentieth century were those of Albert Gore Sr...

...left the White House when he was three and spent his whole life in the giant shadow of a father he could not remember himself...

...The son told his mother he would never talk to his father about anything that troubled him again...

...Beaten down by his father's relentless exactions, he began to drink heavily, lost money entrusted to him by family members, and fathered a daughter by a maid in a friend's house...

...A president's son cannot surpass his father...

...applied to the Park Service for permission to climb up the face of Mt...

...Meanwhile, in all the ways that matter—power, pressure, exposure, and privilege—the families of Robert F. Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida are nearly "presidential," and all of them have the drug problems to prove it...

...It was the problems of that adulthood—as he tried and failed to catch up with his father who always kept rising—that may have caused him his acknowledged problems, particularly his drinking...

...also failed in a bid to be a governor, a post that George Bush had in mind at the time...

...president, wrote a paper about presidents' children for his associate, George W. Bush...

...Many years later, Grace Coolidge would die on July 8, the day after the date on which her son Calvin Jr...

...George W. Bush not only remembered his father, he had known him intimately as a child, a teenager, and a more-or-less equal adult...

...The curse continued into a more modern era of medicine: Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and the elder George Bush all buried young children...

...John, the youngest, became a committed Republican, . . . another endorsed his father's opponent when he ran for a third term...

...was an alcoholic who died young in another accident...

...A son's wife (the actress Faye Emerson) was hospitalized after cutting her wrists...

...The sons moved back and forth between using the family name to get money and indulging in acts of overt and covert hostility...

...Andrew Jackson Jr...

...John and John Quincy Adams each had one son who became justly famous and powerful, and each had two sons who became alcoholics...

...died in a freak hunting accident...

...Calvin Coolidge was a 'different person' after the passing of his teenage son...

...But many more suffered defeat and failure, and they flood history in a sad and angry tide...

...Thomas Jefferson buried five of six children...

...Being a president's child does not merely refer to the few years the parents may live in the White House...

...Some of that stress is passed on in the instant and undeserved fame that comes to the children of presidents—together with constant attention, high expectations, and gleeful notice when they slip...

...But even when the honors are split up, as with George Washington Adams and his younger brother John Adams, the dangers don't decrease: "When there was confusion over just who the heir apparent might be, the firstborn or the namesake, fate would often overtake them both...

...Wead tells the story of Roosevelt's son who had to make an appointment through his father's aides for a formal meeting in the Oval Office to discuss a matter of personal urgency...

...It means having a father who is constantly busy, frequently traveling, and for various reasons may be unavailable...

...After Dwight Doud Eisenhower died at age three, his parents made a practice of sending each other flowers and notes on his birthday, the 24th of September...

...After the death of her first child . . . First Lady Jane Pierce would wear black for the rest of her life," Wead writes...

...Bush himself had a superficial resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.: a president's namesake, with a brother in politics whose career started in promise and burned out in farce...

...The symbolism of this—climbing over the heads of men even greater than Daddy—is almost too neat to be true...

...he carried a lock of her hair all his life...

...And only two men have done that...

...One daughter's second husband threw himself out of a window...

...One is the difference age makes in these stories...

...The second point to be made is that these strange strains and stresses are no longer confined to the children of presidents...

...En route to a feared confrontation with his ex-president father, he jumped or fell from a steamer into Long Island Sound...

...Two sons worked for their father's bitterest enemies, and another married into a family that openly despised him," Wead observes...

...The stress of the American presidency is a killer," Wead tells us...

...It can come from the overblown praise that makes a father appear all too godlike...

...Doug Wead has written a great story and a frightening thesis, a must-read for students of horror and history, for all politicians who try to rear children, and for the publishers and writers who may try to exploit them...

...She may have been prescient, since her other two children would also die young...

...John Eisenhower, a distinguished historian, and Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, the most-decorated man in the history of America's armed forces—dying a hero just after D-Day at fifty-six, a ripe old age for the son of a president...

...But a president's child has no place to run: no line of work with more power and glory, fame and dazzle, or chance to change the world...

...It means having a father who drives both himself and the people around him...

...Mary Lincoln was an emotional wreck after the death of her son Willie and held White House seances trying to speak to him...

...A brother died at age thirty-five, a possible suicide...

...Kermit Roosevelt, third son of Theodore, shot himself in the mouth on an army base in Alaska in 1943...

...His death saddened Wead but did not surprise him...

...Some presidents' sons became famous, if not quite untroubled: Presidents George W. Bush and John Quincy Adams...

...With his narration, history, and psychological musings, Wead seems to have covered most sides of this story, but two points remain to be made...

...One of these was George Washington Adams, a son and a grandson and a namesake of presidents...

...Perhaps because they had less to distract them, the first ladies seemed to grieve even more...

...One of the spurs for finishing the book may have been the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., who was killed with his wife and her sister while flying a plane in bad weather in 1999...

...John and John Quincy Adams each buried two of their children...

...It can even come, as Wead notes, with "a complete lack of connection between doing and getting...

...It means a lifetime of being the child of the kind of person who wants to be and then makes himself president...

...Of these four, two died disgraced and estranged from their families, and three died before age thirty-two...

...The five surviving Roosevelt children wracked up nineteen marriages, with associated scandals and suicide efforts...

...John Kennedy Jr...

...It can also come with undue abuse...

...An actor's son may become a doctor and believe he is doing something more important...

...Andrew Johnson Jr...

...John Adams could not speak for years of his one-year-old daughter...

...remarkable common denominator among American presidents than their early encounters with premature death," Wead writes...

...There is no more Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Twenty-six children of presidents died before the age of five, and dozens more before they reached thirty...

...What Wead found disturbed him—and disturbed the young George Bush when he read it: The children of America's presidents had a terrible record of failure and premature death...

...Franklin Jr...

...a doctor's son may become an actor and be much better known...

...Charles Francis Adams, a Civil War diplomat, Senator Robert A. Taft...

...When his father became president in 1988, he was forty-two—young middle age, the same age Theodore Roosevelt was when he became president and only a year younger than Kennedy...

...Wead's forty-four-page paper is now a heart-wrenching and impressive book, All the ^-residents' Chil^^en: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America's First Families...

...The chaos reached new and strange heights in the family of Franklin Roo-sevelt—the only man to be elected four times, and a man whose wife became almost as great a celebrity as her presidential husband...

...and Joseph P. Kennedy, two men who weren't president but thought that they should be and aimed their sons at the White House with a force and ferocity never yet seen in an actual president...

...George W. Bush was eighteen in 1964 when his father was first elected to Congress, and thirty-four in 1980 when his father was elected Vice President...

...Different reasons suggest themselves...