In a White House that has suffered much death, Biden is the first president talking about grief

Joe Biden lives in a house that has seen an inordinate and unbelievable amount of personal grief and tragedy, but he may be the first president to openly talk to Americans about working through loss.

When Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died in the White House of typhoid fever, his wife, Mary, entered a long period of mourning. The Lincolns spent much of his remaining presidency living outside the White House, in a cottage on a hilltop in Washington, trying to get away from the house where their son died.

Calvin Coolidge’s son Calvin Jr. got a blister on his toe playing tennis at the White House. In those days before antibiotics, the resulting infection killed him after he was admitted to what’s now known as the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Coolidge, a stoic politician known as “Silent Cal,” later admitted he was changed by the loss of his 16-year-old son.

“When he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him,” Coolidge wrote in his autobiography.

Franklin Pierce’s only living son was cut down in a train accident between his election and inauguration. His wife was inconsolable, and Pierce ended up being a notoriously bad president.

So many presidents lost children and siblings, often before they were elected. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams both saw children die. In 1953, George H.W. Bush lost a daughter, the sister of George W. Bush.

Biden’s own personal list of tragedies is well known and predates his presidency. His first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, died in a car crash in 1972, shortly after he was elected to Congress as a senator from Delaware. His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. Biden talked with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about working through those losses in a new episode of the “All There Is” podcast.

Hearing Biden talk about vulnerability – his own vulnerability – is not new in terms of his political life. But hearing his discussion with Cooper, conducted in the White House, feels unique for an American president – all of whom have been men and all of whom, to varying degrees, have tried to exude invulnerable power, working to hide their maladies rather than relate to people through them.

Feeling Americans’ pain vs. sharing their pain

Barbara Perry is co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. She wrote back in February about some of the many tragedies that have befallen presidents.

I called her to ask what we know about how presidents express grief, and she told me about Lincoln commuting on horseback from the cottage where the rest of the family went in part to escape being in the house where his son had died.

She agreed that sharing individual grief with Americans has not previously been a presidential attribute.

“Somebody like Bill Clinton was not afraid to say, ‘I feel your pain,’ but notice he wasn’t saying, ‘I’m in pain,’” she said.

Biden may have changed the job in this way, embracing what might have been seen as a weakness in any previous presidency – particularly that of Donald Trump, who went to great lengths to find physicians to describe him as superhuman and created an epic photo-op to make it appear the Covid-19 that nearly killed him had no effect.

Presidents are people. They endure the same personal tragedies

John F. Kennedy’s son Patrick was less than 2 days old when he died in Massachusetts in August 1963. Jaqueline Kennedy and Mary Lincoln both endured the loss of a child and a husband while in the White House.

A quip about the Kennedy family, which carefully controlled its public image, is the oft-repeated admonition handed through generations that “Kennedys don’t cry.”

Andrew Jackson also suffered between his election and inauguration. It was vicious rumors about the first marriage of Jackson’s wife, Rachel, and the cruel suggestion that she was a bigamist, that may have contributed to her death – which occurred after the election of 1828 but before Jackson’s unruly inauguration.

While she had suffered ailments for years, “Jackson always blamed his political enemies for her death,” according to the Hermitage, a website for the estate they shared. Grudges helped fuel Jackson’s politics.

Another first lady, Ida McKinley, lost both of her daughters to disease before going to the White House, where she then suffered the death of her husband, William, in 1901, after which Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the presidency.

Both Biden and Roosevelt lost wives at young ages

In Biden’s case, his first wife and young daughter died in a car accident shortly after his first election to the Senate, 51 years ago in December 1972.

The experience helped shaped Biden’s career as a politician; he stayed in the Senate, but traveled home to Delaware every night on the Amtrak to see his surviving boys.

Roosevelt’s wife and mother died under separate circumstances, but coincidentally on the same day and in the same house, hours apart in February 1884, just two days after his first daughter was born.

Roosevelt rarely spoke of his first wife, Alice, and sent his daughter, also named Alice, to live with relatives while he fled west to the Dakotas, a decision that created his Rough Rider image he would protect for the rest of his life.

Alice, the daughter, ultimately returned to live with Roosevelt after he remarried, but only at the insistence of his new wife, Edith, according to Edward O’Keefe, a former CNN colleague who is now CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation and author of a forthcoming book, “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt.”

She was noted as an out-of-control socialite – “I can either run the country or I can father Alice, but I cannot possibly do both,” Roosevelt said, according to O’Keefe. But she also bore a striking resemblance to her mother, which must have caused Roosevelt personal pain as well.

“He was one of the most hypermasculine presidents in the American memory,” O’Keefe said. “He wanted to pretend that these things that hurt him didn’t, and they did. They were profoundly impactful to his psychology.”

All presidents represent their own time, and the current American era, under Biden, is one in which people have and lose fewer children. Death is more walled off from most people’s everyday lives, but certainly no less ubiquitous. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about it.

The new season of “All There Is” is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

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