Are these facts about Kennedy and Lincoln true? I got them from an email from a student…It sounds pretty hokey to me…I can varify some from my own knowledge but others just seem to be a fabrication.
Happy 40th anniversary, so to speak, of JFK’s death.
These coincidences and correspondences started circulating almost immediately after JFK’s assassination. The one that seems to be completely wrong is that Lincoln did not have a secretary named Kennedy.
Oh yeah, and the bit about Marilyn Monroe is a much later addition to the list.
Ahhh… Good old Snopes.
Here’s what Snopes has to say about it.
…I take the time to preview and mske beats me to it…
Snopes has a good page here examining most of the Kennedy-Lincoln coincidences.
In the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest there was a list of many more similarities than I usually see in these lists. (And I don’t think they had the bit about the secretaries) Among the other items:
Each served as a captain during a war
Each became particularly well-known because of debates with more famous opponents.
Each was killed by shots to the head. Their wives, who were beside them, were unharmed, but the nearest man to the president was wounded by the assassin.
Each, while in his thirties, married a 24 year old woman who spoke fluent French.
Both succeeding VP’s, named Johnson, were from southern states beginning with “Te…”
There were others, but I can’t recall them.
I don’t see anything cosmic in this set of coincidences. They happen, sometimes, even in groups like this. The magazine Sleptical Inquirer ran an article a couple of years ago listing similaritries between other pairs of presidents, just to show it could be done.
I had a book when I was a kid that noted the similarities between the Russian campaigns of Hitler and Napoleon. There were surprising similarities there, too. But I suppose it doesn’t have the same emotional “hook” as something about Kennedy and Lincoln.
I particularly like the Marilyn Monroe bit. As they say, shocking* if true.
*Marilyn died in August, 1962.
as CalMeacham pointed out, there isn’t anything particularly cosmic in those coincidences - to often people fail to appreciate that you can have some coincidences that are more likely than others.
i remember knocking up one of these for Churchill and Hitler just to prove a point once.
Don’t forget that Lincoln grew up in a Log Cabin and and Kennedy once spilled Log Cabin syrup in his dad’s Lincoln!
Shocking but true!
Kudos to BMalion. I can’t hope to top that.
While I liked the one about Marilyn Monroe, the jury seems to still be out on whether she ever slept with President Kennedy. While actual proof seems to be lacking, it appears to be one of those cases where everybody says it, so there must be something to the story whether it’s true or not. Similarly, I’ve read that as near as historians can make out, Monroe is said to have slept with Robert Kennedy solely because so many people said she slept with John Kennedy that the story got misrepeated from time to time.
Years ago David Letterman revealed the incredible “sean Connery–Abraham Lincoln Connection”. Among the eerie similarities between the well-known Scottish actor and the 16th President of The United States:
The name Connery had seven letters, and the name Kennedy has seven letters.
Abraham Lincoln was shot in a theater, Sean Connery’s movies are shown in theaters and often involve shooting.
Abraham Lincoln’s father was a carpenter. Sean Connery reportedly knows a man named Carpenter who is a father.
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The name Connery has seven letters.
And while we’re at it: “Anglo Saxon”/“angled saxophone”; only a coincidence?
As noted above, nobody seems able to find record of Lincoln having a secretary named Kennedy. One of the guards who accompanied him on his trip to Washington for his first innaugural was named Kennedy, but that is hardly the same thing.
It is said that both presidents received a suggestion from their secretary that they should stay home rather than go to where they were shot.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1938.
It is true that he is referred to by all three names, but that is because this is how the press chose to refer to him. In his lifetime people apparently knew him simply as Lee Oswald.
Refering to assassins this way seems to be something of a journalistic cliche, possibly because of the example of John Wilkes Booth, who was known by all three names professionally. Note, for instance, Mark David Chapman, who apparently saw the shooting of John Lennon as some kind of political statement, and so might be considered an assassin. I guess John Hinckly Jr. and Lynnette “Squeeky” Fromme might also be examples of the three names phenomenon.
Whether Lincoln and Kennedy were both partilarly interested in civil rights, or were, rather, products of their times could be argued endlessly.
It’s highly arguable whether Booth can be said to have been “assassinated”. It has been noted, however, that he was in a barn when he had his shootout with the Army, and a barn is a kind of warehouse. Oswald is said to have shot President Kennedy from a book warehouse, and was later arrested in a movie theater.
Obvious dissimilarities between the two cases are, of course, overlooked as uninteresting. While it is true that Lincoln was elected in 1860 and Kennedy in 1960, people rarely point out that Lincoln was also elected in 1864. And rarely if ever does anyone note that John Wilkes Booth was already an extremely well-known person when he committed his crime, while Oswald was an obscure schmuck.
If someone made a list of all the things they don’t have in common, I’d bet it would be 10 times as long as the list of “spooky” coincidences.
Maybe, maybe not, but it’s definitely not just a coincidence that this line was used in a B. Kliban cartoon. The technical term is “plagiarism.” 
One missing from that list is, “Lincoln was shot in a theater, and his assassin was captured in a warehouse. Kennedy was shot from a warehouse, and his assassin was captured in a theater.”
The miracle of data mining. Go through two biographies with a fine tooth comb, and you too can pile up all sorts of coinciding ‘facts’ between the two.