The Zero-Year Presidential Curse - Presidencies for 120 Years Reminiscent of the Fate of Spinal Tap Drummers

What follows is Claude's answer, lightly trimmed, when I asked it to lay out the full roster of the zero-year presidential curse. I'm sharing it because I couldn't improve it, which is its own data point about the moment we're living in. And it adds a Spinal Tap drummer element to presidential history. This is an odd bit of history that over a 120 year period, presidents elected in a zero-year (e.g., 1840 or 1960) died in office. 

Here's the full roster of the so-called "Curse of Tippecanoe" (also called the zero-year curse, and in its most embroidered version, "Tecumseh's Curse," supposedly laid by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa after Harrison's 1811 battle). The list genuinely reads like something a novelist would reject as too tidy:

**Elected 1840 — William Henry Harrison (Whig).** Served 31 days. Died April 4, 1841, of what was long called pneumonia from his marathon inaugural address in the cold; modern analysis suggests enteric (typhoid) fever from Washington's sewage-contaminated water supply. Either way: the shortest presidency in American history, and patient zero of the curse.

**Elected 1860 — Abraham Lincoln (Republican).** Served 4 years, 1 month into his second term. Assassinated April 14–15, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, five days after Appomattox.

**Elected 1880 — James A. Garfield (Republican).** Served 6 months. Shot July 2, 1881, by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker; died September 19 after eleven weeks — killed as much by his doctors' unsterilized probing of the wound as by the bullet itself. (Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate the bullet with a metal detector he invented for the occasion; the metal bed frame confounded it.)

**Elected 1900 — William McKinley (Republican).** Served 6 months into his second term. Shot September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; died September 14 of gangrene. The newly invented X-ray machine was on display *at the same exposition*, but doctors declined to use it to find the bullet.

**Elected 1920 — Warren G. Harding (Republican).** Served 2 years, 5 months. Died August 2, 1923, in a San Francisco hotel, of a heart attack (long misattributed to food poisoning and swirling with baseless poisoning rumors), just as the Teapot Dome scandals were beginning to surface.

**Elected 1940 — Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat).** The technicality entry: elected in 1940 to his *third* term, then again in 1944; died April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, 82 days into term four — but squarely inside the tenure the 1940 election conferred, so the curse claims him.

**Elected 1960 — John F. Kennedy (Democrat).** Served 2 years, 10 months. Assassinated November 22, 1963, in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. The curse's final kill.

**Elected 1980 — Ronald Reagan (Republican).** The pattern-breaker — barely. Shot March 30, 1981, by John Hinckley Jr., 69 days into office; the bullet stopped roughly an inch from his heart, and he survived largely because the Secret Service made a split-second decision to drive to the hospital rather than the White House. The curse, in other words, wasn't repealed so much as *missed by an inch*. Nancy Reagan took it seriously enough to consult an astrologer about the president's schedule thereafter — arguably the curse's strangest institutional legacy.

**Elected 2000 — George W. Bush.** Survived two terms, definitively retiring the streak (a shoe was thrown; the curse had clearly lost its fastball).

**Elected 2020 — Joe Biden.** Served his full term.

Seven consecutive zero-year presidents dead in office across 120 years, then a one-inch miss.