Six Interesting Coincidences-- Part 2: Robert Todd Lincoln and Three Presidential Assassinations

 3.  ROBERT LINCOLN ON SCENE AT THREE PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATIONS

Robert Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son and the man Edwin Booth saved in Philadelphia in 1863, was at his father's death in 1865.  Less than a month later, he resigned from the Army and moved to Chicago with his distraught mother.  He later married, had children and established a successful law practice.

He also remained involved in politics and  became Secretary of War in President James A. Garfield's  administration in 1881.  That July, Lincoln was at a train station in Washington, ready to travel to New Jersey with Garfield (who had been in office less than two months).  Before their train left the station, however, Charles Guiteau shot Garfield in the back.  The president died from complications from the wound two months later.

In 1901, President William McKinley to Buffalo, New York, invited Robert Lincoln to attend the Pan-American Exposition.  Lincoln arrived when the event was already in progress and was heading to meet the president when Leon Czolgosz fatally shot McKinley in the chest and abdomen in front of a crowd of well-wishers.

Lincoln, who was  in the later part of his career, president of the Pullman Company, was said to have remarked that there was "a certain  fatality about the  presidential function when I am present."

--Cooter