By now probably everyone in America, at least, has seen that photo of a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with Jack Kennedy in the White House. Have there been any other documented incidents of a sitting President meeting with one of his successors? I don’t mean something like Roosevelt and Truman having a meeting, or an incumbent and a candidate in a debate. More along the lines of, say, Andrew Jackson bumping into Abraham Lincoln, or Eisenhower getting Ronald Reagan’s autograph. That kind of thing.
All I wanna do is to thank you, even though I don’t know who you are…
Well, there’s the family connections, where the younger one knew his forebear: John Quincy Adams would have “met” John Adams as a boy, and I would assume that Benjamin Harrison “met” William Henry Harrison. Were Theodore Roosevelt and FDR close enough in their family to have met?
Family connections aside, I assume that John Quincy Adams would have met Washington as a boy, since Adams was Washington’s Vice-President. That’s just a guess, though.
Thanks for doing your bit to advance the cause of human knowledge.
It is documented (at least according to The Book Of Lists 2; I’ll see tonight what sources they’ve used) that:
Young Franklin D. Roosevelt met with President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland looked down upon the smiling young lad and said, “Son, I have a very strange wish for you. I hope that you never grow up to be President.”
Young Calvin Coolidge met with ex-President Benjamin Harrison. Harrison was attending a baseball game where Coolidge was a ticket-taker. Harrison accidentally passed through the line without paying, and Coolidge chased him down to ask for the quarter admission fee.
(Both those off the top of my head; as I said, I’ll check my source tonight.)
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
I believe Grant encountered Taylor sometime during the Mexican-American War.
Other presidents served during the Civil War besides Grant: Hayes, Garfield, and McKinley come to mind. Perhaps one of them had dealings with Lincoln, although they all would have been adults at the time.
jti Yeah, those would kinda count, but since the Adamses and the Harrisons were related their meetings were somewhat - I hesitate to use the word ‘foreordained’, but it would have been more surprising for them not to have met at all. I had in mind things like John Corrado and BobT mentioned - two men, one a sitting President and the other a future President, having no direct connection with each other, meeting by some accident of fate.
I’m not so sure about that Coolidge one, though. Seems to me 25 cents would have been a high price for a baseball game. Also given the fact that Harrison left office in 1893 and died in 1901; Coolidge would have been at least 21 by the time Harrison became an ex-President and probably in college or law school. The other ones sound plausible though.
All I wanna do is to thank you, even though I don’t know who you are…
25 cents would be a fairly cheap admission to a baseball game at the turn of the century. Usually the cheapest seats were 50 cents and I doubt a former president would be sitting in those seats.
The timing doesn’t seem right for Coolidge to be getting a parttime job working as a ticket-taker.
Coolidge was at Amherst from 1891-1895 and studied law under two attorneys after that in Northampton, Mass. He was admitted to the Mass. Bar in 1897.
Harrison was active during his retirement giving speeches and serving as a counsel for Venezuela in a boundary dispute with the UK.
He died in Indianapolis.
So, while it could have happened, a meeting between Coolidge and Harrison at a baseball game would require a lot of luck. I think we need a citation for such an event.
Joseph Kennedy was Ambassador to the Court of St. James from 1938-1940, so if JFK met the sitting president it would have been FDR. FDR…sitting president. Sorry, I didn’t mean it.