All good points, Yllaria. See the HBO John Adams series for more on father and son, and their sometimes-fraught relationship.
Remarkably, this means that the so-called Silent Generation was skipped entirely. Not one president came out of that generation. The U.S. went straight from the Greatest Generation to the Boomers.
Jimmy Carter got some attention as the first President from the Deep South since the Civil War (Wilson, although born in Virginia, rose to political prominence in New Jersey).
This is stretching the topic a little bit, but while the odds of a Veep getting to the Presidency one way or another are pretty decent, the odds against a Veep nominee on a losing ticket doing so are absolutely astronomical. Only two of them in the past 90 years have even become a major-party Presidential nominee (Dole, Mondale) and both of them lost as Presidential candidates.
The losing veep candidates back to 1924:
Paul Ryan (who could always break the pattern, you never know); Sarah Palin, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Jack Kemp, Dan Quayle, Lloyd Bentsen, Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, Sargent Shriver, Ed Muskie, William Miller, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. , Estes Kefauver, John Sparkman, Earl Warren, John Bricker, Charles McNary, Frank Knox, Charles Curtis, Joseph Taylor Robinson, Charles Bryan.
You’ve got to go all the way back to 1920 to find a losing veep candidate who eventually became President: James Cox, who lost to Warren G. Harding, had as his running mate a fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who later went on to win just a few Presidential elections.
Both Washington AND Lincoln were born on Presidents Day. I think it had something to do with the Gregorian calendar.
John Edwards, Joe Lieberman and Dan Quayle also ran in their own right for President and didn’t even make it out of the primaries.
Edmund Muskie ran for President in 1972 and didn’t make it out of the primaries.
Wasn’t Nixon VP under Ike? Or by directly do you mean ‘immediately afterwards’? I ask because i first read ‘directly’ as opposed to ‘through appointment after POTUS died/stepped down’. Even so, what about LBJ?
Yes, I meant “immediately afterwards.” And T.R., Harry Truman and LBJ all became President after the death of a President, and then were elected themselves in their own right in the next election. Different kettle of fish.
Franklin Roosevelt was a virtual exception on this. He was technically not an only child but, for all practical purposes, he was raised as an only child. His brother James was twenty-eight years older than Franklin and was married and had two children of his own by the time Franklin was born.
Gotta admit, RT, there’s a few on that list who might have made decent presidents.
I guess that means that you need to speak up.
I might prefer Bill Miller’s daughter because she’s funnier. As a journalist you know the value of a funny president.
He was certainly the first president who was not born to an elite or upper-class family; that was certainly a big deal at the time.
Who invented the phrase “Founding Fathers”? None other than Warren G Harding, in everybody’s list of Worst Presidents Ever…
Not entirely coincidentally, each of those Presidents served in the US military during WWII (all on active duty, except Carter, who was a Naval Academy Midshipman during the war).
Of those, five consecutive Presidents over a 20 year span served as Naval Officers, Kennedy through Carter (plus GHWB, after Regan, who served stateside in the Army Air Corps).
Washington and Lincoln were both born on national holidays, which always struck me as a strange coincidence…
But strangely, while twelve former generals have become President not a single former admiral has ever become president.