Eight U.S. presidents have died in office, beginning with William Henry Harrison in 1841 and ending with John F. Kennedy in 1963. Four, including Kennedy, were assassinated; the other four, including Harrison, died of natural causes.

Until now, the longest period without a president dying in office was 51 years, 11 months and 4 days – the time between April 30, 1789, when George Washington took office and April 4, 1841, when Harrison, our ninth president, died from a cold caught while delivering his inaugural address.

We passed that record last fall and marked a full 52 years on Nov. 22, the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. Every day now just adds to the new record. 

When one looks back at the mortality of U.S. presidents, the statistic that most often comes up is the fact that every president from Harrison to Kennedy elected in a year that ended in a zero – every 20 years – died in office.

This is sometimes referred to as the Curse of Tippecanoe or Tecumseh’s Curse because of its association with Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior who led an unsuccessful Native American uprising that ended with his death in 1813.

Tippecanoe was the site of a battle in which Harrison wiped out a Shawnee camp and killed Tecumseh’s half brother. 

Some 80 years later in 1931, the curse was reported in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” as a statement attributed to either Tecumseh or his half brother predicting that Harrison would die after being elected president and that “every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die.”

Or something like that. There were no concurrent reports or eyewitness accounts. Nor has there ever been an explanation of why it took 30 years for the curse to claim Harrison as its first victim.

In fact, if people back then were aware of the curse, they might have been inclined to disregard it when the second president to die in office turned out to be Zachary Taylor, who died July 9, 1850, of what was said to be a digestive ailment. 

Taylor served only 16 months as president. His death, nine years and three months after Harrison’s demise, marks the shortest period between two presidential deaths in office. 

Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860, was the next to die and the first president to be assassinated, on April 15, 1865, 14 years and nine months after Taylor’s death. 

The timespan between subsequent presidential deaths in office ranged between 16 and 21 years.

James Garfield was in office less than a year before he died on Sept. 19, 1881, after being shot July 2, 1881, by a disgruntled office-seeker.

William McKinley was six months into his second term when a deranged anarchist approached the president in a receiving line and shot him. McKinley died eight days later on Sept. 14, 1901.

Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack during his third year in office on Aug. 2, 1923. Franklin Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, and John Kennedy was assassinated as his motorcade drove through Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963.

Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, survived an assassination attempt outside a Washington hotel on March 30, 1981, prompting some to speculate that the curse had been broken. Those same speculators point to a failed attempt on the life of George W. Bush during a 2005 trip to Russia. 

The real truth is that modern medicine and technology could have saved all but two of the eight presidents who died in office, and enhanced security would have protected Lincoln and Kennedy.