Sunday, December 03, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Will old Indian curse claim the next president?
To the editor:

When the winner of this year's expanded presidential election is ultimately sworn in next January, he faces a disturbing challenge of simple survival (not politically, but literally) based on an old Indian hex dating back to the 1820s.

As documented in early American history, it was in the 1820s that a particularly barbarous and savage attack on an Indian tribe by a division of the Army occurred. These Indians, believed to be the Algonquian tribe, sustained heavy loss of life, although the chief of the tribe managed to survive. The head of the Army authorizing the attack was Gen. William Henry Harrison, and the chief is said to have placed a hex on the general, roughly translated as follows: "You will someday lead your people, but you will not live to finish your task. Furthermore, future leaders that follow, of every 20 years, will suffer the same fate."

History clearly documents the inexplicable results, leaving us to wonder if there could actually be some validity to the hex, or just a series of very strange coincidences:

Gen. Harrison indeed became the country's leader, elected in 1840 as the ninth president of the United States. He served the shortest term in our history -- only 30 days -- dying of pneumonia.

1860 was the year Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th U.S. president, and he was, of course, assassinated in the spring of 1865.

1880 was the year James A. Garfield was elected the 20th U.S. president, and served only a few months before being assassinated at a public event.

1900 saw the election of the 25th president, William McKinley. At an exposition he was attending in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1901, he too was assassinated.

1920 was the election of Warren G. Harding, the 29th president. In 1923 on a train ride through the Pacific Northwest he became mysteriously ill, checked into a San Francisco hotel and died the following morning.

1940 was the beginning of the third term of FDR. He, too, died in office five years later.

1960 holds the most tragic memory of John F. Kennedy's election and subsequent assassination in Dallas three years later.

1980 was the year of Ronald Reagan's election as 40th president, and although he managed to serve a full two terms, before completing his second full month in office, he received an extremely close call when a would-be assassin shot him as he left a D.C. hotel, missing his heart by just one inch. Doctors said later that he would likely have died had he not gotten immediately to a hospital.

The 43rd president that ends up being elected this year, in 2000, will have his hands full in trying to govern a severely divided constituency, and having survived the closest presidential race in U.S. history. But based on history, his ability to simply survive in office must not be taken for granted.

JIM STOCK HENDERSON