Yes he was. Here are some editorial cartoons in which he (or his teddy bear) are identified as “TR.”
Not quite the same thing but “Jeb” Bush is really John Ellis Bush. And “Jeb” Stuart was really James Ewell Brown Stuart. In both case, though, “Jeb” is used in place of a first name, not in place of a full name.
Robert Louis Stevenson is commonly known as RLS today, but I don’t know if he was during his lifetime. (This sort of thing is very difficult to Google.)
Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of Tarzan and John Carter) is and was often referred to as ERB. The first Tarzan novel was published in 1912 so he might well have been known by three initials
I’m not sure how well known it was among the public, but John Quincy Adams sometimes referred to himself as J.Q.A. (with periods), and some members of his family did too.
Aside: I saw a crossword puzzle clue a while back, “Successor to HST”, three letters, and wasn’t sure how the heck to fit in “NGST” or “Webb” (the Next Generation Space Telescope, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope).
Of course, as anyone but me would recognize, the answer was actually “DDE”.
I read an article that said that calling family members by their initials was a common thing in Franklin Roosevelt’s family. His mother, Sarah Delano Roosevelt, was known as SDR. And when Franklin was born he was identified as FDR in his birth announcement and their are childhood letters he wrote that he signed as FDR.
I can’t speak for the others, but AOC is simply because the normal shortening–referring to the person by last name, is rather cumbersome with her name. You’d have to call her Ocasio-Cortez over and over. She has a hyphenated last name, so you can’t simply call her Cortez.
And since she had three names she goes by, it’s easy to initialize. We don’t like using only two letters, it seems. I note that John F. Kennedy tended to be referred to in that way, too, (not merely “John Kennedy”) so JFK also makes sense. And it was always “Marten Luther King”, so MLK makes sense. I don’t know if it was always “Lyndon B. Johnson” and “Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” however.
If they were, then I would propose the theory that this only tends to happen to people who regularly go by three names.
And Robert Louis Stevenson signed himself as R.L.S.. He was called thatby others from the early 20th Century.
Liz instead of Elizabeth Taylor.
? What’s that have to do with initials, though?
According to a world-class expert on Gilbert and Sullivan (Dad), the former was inordinately proud of his initials, WSG, but Arthur Schwenk Sullivan (unsurprisingly) hated his.
Nice find.
Saudi Prince MBS (Mohammed bin Salman). The first time I heard it I couldn’t figure out who / what the heck was being discussed. This definitely seems like one that was coined by the media (?)
RMS - Richard Matthew Stallman
ESR - Eric S. Raymond
DMR - Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
All of them famous in the world of computer programming.