A History of the Presidency

Presidents: A Reference History, (2002) by Henry F. Graff

Presidential children are treated with deference when they are young and regarded as extensions of their parents when they are older. The son of President Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, known affectionately to the public as John-John, became world famous as a mere three-year old in a picture published around the world that showed him saluting the casket of his martyred father. Years later John junior's death in an airplane crash in 1999 evoked national mourning. The one presidential son who as a boy may have altered American history was Robert Todd Lincoln. Having failed the entrance examination to Harvard College in fifteen out of sixteen subjects, he was enrolled in Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in order to "bone up." Eager to visit and encourage him there, his father came east in 1860, lured by a fortuitous invitation to address the Cooper Union Institute in New York City for a fee of $200 and expenses. That address became a key factor in spreading Lincoln's fame and making possible his nomination for the presidency the following month.

Presidents and the First Ladies have all kept keenly in mind the difficulties that their prominence creates for their sons and daughters. But for her father's presidency, Jenna Bush's brush with the law involving an underage drinking violation in Texas in 2001 would not have been public knowledge. Several first families have made earnest efforts to shelter their children not only from public exposure but also from the effects of the flattery and luxury that flow toward them. Chester A. Arthur notably tried to shield his daughter Nell from the world. The Kennedys hoped that the media would keep the spotlight off their daughter, Caroline. The media were respectful of the similar strong wishes of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton for their only child, Chelsea.

Still, the doings of children in the White House especially in times of crisis have added to the president's appeal by making him seem ordinary even though the public expects him also to be extraordinary. During the Great Depression, Sistie and Buzzie Dahl, the children of the Roosevelts' daughter, Anna, and her husband, came to be national personages. Even during the agony of the Civil War, the Northern public was amused to hear that Tad Lincoln, only eight years old in 1861, had led a team of goats through the executive mansion. And a generation later, Theodore Roosevelt did not object when his lively children introduced a pony into the Blue Room and walked on stilts across the elegant broadloom carpeting. Amy Carter, just turned nine years old when her father became president, "slept over" occasionally in the tree house her parents had had constructed for her on a White House lawn.

A few presidential sons may have added special luster to their parents' reputation by virtue of their military service. Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, perished in an air duel over France in 1918 during World War I, the only child of a presidential couple killed in action for his country. Two other Roosevelts were wounded in the war, leading Roosevelt to say proudly, "Haven't I bully boys, one dead and two in the hospital." Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. landed in the first wave at Normandy in 1944 at the age of fifty-seven, and died of a heart attack a month later. He was awarded posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor.