How the myth arose
For many years, emails and websites have circulated lists of supposedly astonishing parallels between the biographies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. The list often ends with the suggestive question: “Coincidence or …?”
This is precisely what makes the example so interesting. The list below reproduces claims as they have been circulated by supporters of the myth. It is not a list of facts asserted by me. Some points are approximately correct, others are distorted, and some are simply false.
The alleged coincidences
- Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, Kennedy in 1946.
- Lincoln became president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.
- Both were especially concerned with civil rights.
- The wives of both presidents lost a child while living in the White House.
- Both presidents were shot on a Friday and hit in the head.
- Lincoln’s secretary was called Kennedy, and Kennedy’s secretary Lincoln.
- Both were murdered by a Southerner.
- Both were succeeded by a man named Johnson, both of them Southerners.
- Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon Johnson in 1908.
- John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839, Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939.
- Both assassins were known by three names; each full name had 15 letters.
- Lincoln was shot in a theatre called “Ford” — in some variants even “Kennedy” — while Kennedy was shot in a Ford model called “Lincoln”.
- Both assassins were shot before they could stand trial.
- A week before Lincoln’s death he had been in Monroe, Maryland; a week before Kennedy’s death, Kennedy had been with Marilyn Monroe.
- Lincoln’s assassin fled from a theatre to a warehouse; Kennedy’s assassin fired from a warehouse and fled to a theatre.
Why the list is persuasive
The list works rhetorically because it collects hits and makes differences invisible. Anyone already inclined to believe in a hidden order can interpret the result as divine intervention, a cosmic conspiracy or almost any other preferred explanation.
Some claims can easily be refuted or put into perspective. Marilyn Monroe died in 1962; Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. There is no solid evidence that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838, not 1839. And the theatre in which Lincoln was shot was Ford’s Theatre — not a theatre named Kennedy.
But this leads to an even more important point:
Even if every item on the list were true, the list would still not be evidence of a hidden connection.
A collection of selected similarities is not a causal explanation.
The logical mechanism: selecting after the hit
Two extensively documented biographies offer an enormous number of possible features, dates, names, places, relatives, events and verbal formulations that can be compared. The selection rule is usually adjusted after an interesting match has been found:
- Sometimes an exact year counts; elsewhere only a gap of 100 years matters.
- Sometimes a name counts; then suddenly the number of letters in a name counts.
- At one point offices are compared, then birthplaces, vehicles or buildings.
- Differences that do not fit are simply omitted.
This is a form of selection bias and resembles the problem of multiple comparisons: the more possible comparisons we allow, the easier it becomes to discover apparently striking matches after the fact.
McKinley and Garfield: a counter-test
John Leavy examined whether similar coincidences could be found for other pairs of presidents. For William McKinley and James Garfield, parallels included the following:
- Both were Republicans.
- Both were born and raised in Ohio.
- Both were veterans of the Civil War.
- Both served in the House of Representatives.
- “McKinley” and “Garfield” each contain eight letters.
- Both were succeeded as president by vice presidents from New York.
- Both successors wore a moustache.
- Both presidents were shot in September.
A list like this already feels mysterious once only the matches are shown. That is the real test of the Kennedy–Lincoln myth.
A final, deliberately ironic test
Richard Nixon and Thomas Jefferson? Both names end in “on”. Is that not strange? Both lost vice presidents through scandals. Both lost a presidential election against a challenger named John from a wealthy Massachusetts family. In each case, the next president was named James.
And it remains entirely unresolved whether Jefferson owned a bird named Nixon and Nixon one named Jefferson. If not, perhaps that was precisely why neither of them was assassinated.
:-)
The last paragraph is, of course, irony. It demonstrates how easily a seemingly meaningful story can be generated when the rules of selection are arbitrary.