Coincidences
There is an inexplicable order to the universe. Sometimes that is simply thought-provoking. Others, it is downright unsettling. The parallels to be found in the remarkable lives and subsequent gory demise of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy strain credulity.
Abraham Lincoln was one of our most influential Presidents. Public domain.
Honest Abe
Abraham Lincoln was famously born in a one-room log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky, in 1809. He was the second of three children. As was so distressingly common back then, Lincoln’s younger brother perished as an infant. His older sister died in childbirth when Abraham was nineteen. Lincoln was understandably gutted as a result.
Young Abe Lincoln was largely self-educated. However, he was also legendarily driven. Lincoln ultimately became a self-taught lawyer, earning a license to practice law in 1836 on the strength of his independent study of period law books and the mentorship of a few practicing attorneys. In 1860, Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States. He was the first Republican to earn the office.
John F. Kennedy was cut down in his prime. Public domain.
JFK
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born into the prominent Kennedy family in 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard and then joined the US Navy Reserve in 1941. Kennedy commanded PT boats in the Pacific during World War II, surviving the sinking of PT109 and earning fame and notoriety as a war hero as a result. His exploits spawned both a pretty good movie and his meteoric political career.
In 1960, JFK became the 35th US President. At 43, he was the youngest man ever elected to that office. Kennedy was a Democrat who beat out Richard Nixon for the job.
Curious Parallels
Though they should have had absolutely nothing in common, Lincoln and Kennedy seemed to have been somehow cosmically joined. The similarities between their lives and their political careers were uncanny. Nobody knows why that was.
Lincoln was elected to the US Congress in 1846. Kennedy was elected to the US Congress exactly a century later in 1946. Lincoln was elected President of the United States in 1860. Kennedy was elected President of the United States in 1960.
Both Kennedy and Lincoln were murdered while in office. Both men were killed on a Friday. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot in the head. Both men were assassinated with their wives by their sides.
Abraham Lincoln’s secretary’s last name was Kennedy. John F. Kennedy’s secretary’s last name was Lincoln. Both esteemed presidents were followed by men named Johnson. Lincoln’s successor was Andrew Johnson. Kennedy’s was Lyndon B. Johnson. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1908.
John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed Lincoln, was born in 1839. Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin assumed to have shot Kennedy, was born in 1939. Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Kennedy Theater while enjoying a production of Our American Cousin with his wife Mary Todd. At the time of his murder, Kennedy was traveling in a Lincoln car built by Ford.
John Wilkes Booth, after shooting Lincoln, escaped from a theater to a warehouse. Lee Harvey Oswald, following his assassination of Kennedy, escaped from a warehouse to a theater. Both killers were murdered before they could face formal justice. A week before his untimely death, Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland. A week before Kennedy was killed, he was enjoying the company of Marilyn Monroe.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem sounds kind of cheeky and cool, only it’s not true. Public domain.
Paranoia and Human Nature
I lend little credence to conspiracy theories myself. Taking spooky black government helicopters as an example, such machines simply cannot be real. That’s because, if there really were classified black helicopters spying on our every move, there would also be some young mechanic maintaining them. That guy would eventually blab to his girlfriend, and she would post it on Instagram. It is markedly tougher to keep proper secrets this deep into the Information Age. However, this Kennedy/Lincoln thing does seem somehow more substantiated.
It has been postulated that if you had enough monkeys banging on enough typewriters, then they would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. That’s the classic example used to illustrate the creative power of random. It’s called the Infinite Monkey Theorem. Only that’s not actually true.
If every proton in the known universe were actually a monkey with a typewriter, and that massive herd of monkeys just steadily banged away without respite from the Big Bang until the universe burned out, they still wouldn’t even get close. In fact, there is only a one-in-one-trillion chance that all those apes could replicate a known sequence only 79 characters long. Random is not nearly so powerful as we were once led to believe.
Draw your own conclusions regarding the probability that a bunch of random inanimate goop might eventually self-organize into something as lovely as my wife. I’m putting my money on God myself. That’s just me.
The Lincoln/Kennedy thing is indeed pretty weird. It is, at the very least, thought-provoking. Such stuff gives us a fascinating glimpse into a deeper, inscrutable world.
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