The Presidents and Presidency of the United States

On this date in 1831, 10th Secretary of State Martin Van Buren resigned after two years in office. He was a successful Secretary, but resigned to help President Andrew Jackson with an overall Cabinet shake-up. Jackson named Van Buren minister to Great Britain, but the Senate rejected the nomination. In 1832, Van Buren was elected Jackson's second Vice President (John C. Calhoun was dropped from the ticket), and in 1836, Van Buren won his own term as President. Van Buren was the fifth Secretary of State to later be elected President.

On this date in 1802, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, the first First Lady, became the first to die. Mrs. Washington (or Lady Washington, as she was called while her husband was President) died 11 days before her 71st birthday, and two and a half years after her husband George.

On this date in 1943, former First Lady Helen Taft died 11 days before her 82nd birthday. Helen had been First Lady from 1909 to 1913, and is the only woman to have been married to both a President and a Supreme Court Justice (her husband, William Howard, was both). Her thirty years of retirement from being First Lady places her tenth on that list. Her husband predeceased her by 13 years.

On this date in 1911, Henry L. Stimson took up his post as the 45th Secretary of War, appointed by Republican William Howard Taft. He served until the end of Taft's term, in 1913. Sixteen years later, in March 1929, Republican Herbert Hoover appointed Stimson the 46th Secretary of State, and he served the full four years of Hoover's term. In July 1940, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt recalled Stimson to head the War Department, making him the 54th Secretary. Stimson resigned in September 1945, five months after Roosevelt's death, during Democrat Harry Truman's term. Stimson is the only person to serve in the Cabinet under four Presidents.

On this date in 1891, Alphonso Taft died at the age of 80 years 198 days. He was the 31st Secretary of War from March 8 to May 22, 1876, and then he moved over to be the 34th Attorney General, retiring from that post on March 4, 1877 (the day President Grant left office).

In 1857, his third (of six) children, William Howard, was born. That son grew up to succeed his father as the 42nd Secretary of War (1904-08), and then exceeded him as the 27th President of the United States (1909-13) and the 10th Chief Justice (1921-30).

Alphonso is number nine on the list of longest-lived Presidential fathers.

On this date in 1863, Associate Justice Stephen Johnson Field took his seat on the Supreme Court. The 47-year-old was Abraham Lincoln's fourth appointment to the Court, and the first Justice from California (he was appointed while he was the 5th Chief Justice of California). Field was an Associate Justice for 34 years, 195 days (the second-longest term of all Justices); he retired on December 1, 1897, and died a year and a half later.

On this date in 1899, John Marshall Harlan II was born in Chicago, Illinois. His father, John Maynard Harlan, was the son of John Marshall Harlan (who was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911). Dwight Eisenhower appointed the younger John Marshall Harlan to the Supreme Court in 1955, just a year after appointing him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Harlan retired from the Court in 1971, months before his death from spinal cancer.

On this day in 1994, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy died, two months before her 65th birthday. She was the youngest First Lady to be married to her President-husband before he took office (she was just 31 on January 20, 1961). She was also only the second widowed First Lady to remarry (after Frances Cleveland). In October 1968, Jacqueline married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975) as his second or third wife (reports of his potential first marriage vary). After Onassis' death, she lived in New York City and worked as an editor. After her death, she was buried with her President-husband in Arlington National Cemetery.

I met her once, very briefly, shortly before her death. At the time, we were both working for different divisions of the publishing behemoth Bantam Doubleday Dell (before the merger with Random House made it even larger). We were riding an elevator up in the Bertelsmann Building in Times Square on the way to work.

On this date in 1921, 9th Chief Justice Edward Douglass White died after ten and a half years in the middle chair, at the age of 75. Previously, he had been an Associate Justice from 1894 until he became the first to be elevated from an Associate seat to be Chief. William Howard Taft tapped White to be Chief Justice, and following White's death, Warren Harding appointed Taft to replace him.

On this date in 1921, Franklin Knight Lane died at the age of 56. Born in July 1864 in Prince Edward Island, Canada, his family moved to California when he was 7. Lane was a newspaper writer and editor before being elected City Attorney of San Francisco in 1898. Theodore Roosevelt appointed Lane to the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1905, and he was elected Chairman of that body in January 1913. Two months later, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Lane the 26th Secretary of the Interior. Lane resigned from the Cabinet days before his 7th anniversary in the post, and died of heart failure just over a year later.