This President Had the Shortest Life

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 15, 7:30AM EDT

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This President Had the Shortest Life — © Wikimedia Commons

American presidents are living longer, or so it would seem. Currently, President Jimmy Carter is 96. However, the longevity of presidents is not entirely new. Herbert Hoover, born in 1874, lived to be 90. Some of America’s most revered presidents died young. Franklin Roosevelt was 63, as he started his unprecedented fourth term. Abraham Lincoln was 56 when he was assassinated as he started his second.

Being U.S. president is a dangerous job. There have been several assassination attempts in which presidents were not killed. Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912, as he ran for another term as president after being out of office. At the time he said, “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart.” Some presidents were not so fortunate. Four of them were assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy had the shortest life of any U.S. president. Here are the details:

Age at time of death: 46 years
Date of death: November 22, 1963
Cause of death: Gunshot wound
Place of death: Dallas, Texas

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On November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Kennedy was shot and killed by assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He was about three years into his presidency. The lack of a clear motive for the killing, as well as the subsequent assassination of Oswald by Jack Ruby, inspired a number of conspiracy theories. However, a commission established to investigate the assassination concluded that Oswald had been the sole party involved. At 43 years old, Kennedy was the youngest person ever to be elected president. At 46 years, he was the youngest U.S. president to die.

Click here to see which American presidents had the longest and shortest lives.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.