The List That Refuses to Die

In August 1964, a small mimeographed sheet circulated through Republican congressional offices in Washington. Titled “A Few Curious Facts,” the sheet listed sixteen parallels between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Within a year, the sheet had been reprinted in the GOP Congress Committee Newsletter, picked up by syndicated columnists, mailed by readers to local newspapers, and read aloud on AM radio shows from Boston to Bakersfield. By the time the syndicated columnist Lloyd Shearer summarized a version of it in Parade magazine in 1968, the list had achieved its mature form: a numbered catalog of fifteen to twenty assassination coincidences each ostensibly proving that something more than chance linked the two slain presidents.

What that “something more” was, the list never quite said. Numerology, fate, divine pattern, supernatural recurrence, conspiracy, hidden meaning: the list invited every interpretation and committed to none. That ambiguity is the source of its forty-four year viral life. Every reader can supply the cosmic frame that suits their priors. The skeptic dismisses; the believer marvels; the curious half-believe and pass the page to a friend.

This article grades each of the fifteen most-circulated claims on a four-point rubric: true, true-but-meaningless, exaggerated, and fabricated. Each grade is paired with the specific receipt that supports it: a birth certificate, a hotel register, a payroll record, a newspaper clipping, a White House staff list, a coroner’s report, or in the cases of the most egregious inventions, the absence of any such document anywhere. The article also explains why a list of this kind feels uncanny even after every individual claim has been graded. The mathematics of selection bias, the elastic semantics of “similar,” and the birthday-paradox logic that makes coincidence inevitable across any two long lives operate beneath the surface of every supernatural list. Once those mechanisms are visible, the Lincoln-Kennedy list joins the catalog of pleasing patterns that human cognition manufactures from any sufficiently rich data set.

Where the List Came From and Why It Spread

The earliest documented version of the list appears in the GOP Congress Committee Newsletter dated August 13, 1964, nine months after Kennedy’s death in Dallas and four months before the Warren Commission published its findings. The newsletter’s editor, the late John A. Curtis, later told the journalist Edwin O. Guthman that the list arrived in his mail from an unnamed reader and that he printed it because the office needed copy that day and the sheet seemed harmless. The newsletter circulated to perhaps four thousand recipients, most of whom were Republican congressional staffers and state party officials. From that small base it leaked outward through two channels.

The first channel was direct reprint. A version of the list appeared in the Hartford Courant on August 16, 1964, attributed to “a friend in Washington.” The Chicago Tribune ran a similar version on August 23. By September, the list was being read aloud on the Joe Pyne radio show and reprinted in the small-circulation political weeklies that catered to grassroots conservative readers. The second channel was the chain letter. By 1965, copies of the list were being typed and retyped by individual readers, sent to neighbors and relatives, sometimes with embellishments and often with the new claims that the original sheet did not contain. The Marilyn Monroe entry, which appears in none of the August 1964 versions, surfaces in chain-letter copies from late 1965 and reaches print in 1967.

The list reached its widest audience through Lloyd Shearer’s Parade magazine column of January 14, 1968. Parade at that point had a circulation of roughly fourteen million across its Sunday newspaper inserts. Shearer presented the list as a curiosity rather than as proof of anything supernatural, but Parade’s reach gave the list the standing of mass-cultural fact. Subsequent reprints in Reader’s Digest in 1970 and in the syndicated television program In Search Of in 1977 cemented the list’s status. By the time the skeptic Martin Gardner addressed the list in his 1985 book The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix, the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels had become a fixed feature of American folklore, regularly cited in classroom history lessons, dinner-party conversations, and assassination-conspiracy literature.

Gardner’s analysis, expanded by the Skeptical Inquirer’s 1992 reader contest soliciting equally striking coincidences between unrelated historical figures, and by Snopes founder David Mikkelson’s 1999 systematic examination of the list claim by claim, established the modern consensus that the list is roughly half true, a quarter exaggerated, and a quarter fabricated. That consensus is the starting point of this article. The contribution this article adds is the receipt for each individual claim, the historiographic source that disproves or contextualizes the assertion, and the assessment of why each particular item has survived debunking attempts despite the documentary record being clear.

The Grading Rubric

Each of the fifteen claims is assigned one of four grades.

A grade of TRUE means the claim is factually accurate as stated. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846; Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. The dates are correct. The parallel is real. Whether the parallel carries any meaning is a separate question addressed by the second grade.

A grade of TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS means the claim is factually accurate but the parallel survives only because the criteria for matching are loose enough to find similar parallels between almost any two historical figures. “Both presidents have names containing seven letters” is true but uninformative; the universe of seven-letter American surnames is large and the universe of American presidents includes many seven-letter names. Selection bias and elastic criteria, together, manufacture matches at a rate the unaided intuition vastly underestimates.

A grade of EXAGGERATED means the claim contains a true core surrounded by false embellishment, or the claim stretches dates and facts to manufacture a parallel that the documentary record does not quite support. The “Booth born in 1839, Oswald born in 1939, exactly 100 years apart” claim is exaggerated: Booth was born May 10, 1838, not 1839, and the 100-year parallel is the kind of fact that gets repaired into truth by repeated retelling.

A grade of FABRICATED means the claim is false in its core, not just its details. Lincoln’s secretary was not named Kennedy; Lincoln had no secretary named Kennedy by any documentary record; the claim is an invention that propagated because nobody fact-checked it. Equally, Lincoln did not visit a town called Monroe, Maryland the week before his assassination; Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962 and Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 making any “with Marilyn Monroe the week before” claim impossible.

The grading table that follows is the article’s central artifact. Each entry includes the claim as commonly stated, the grade, the source that establishes the grade, and the reason the claim has propagated despite its truth status. A reader who absorbs only the table has the article’s argument in compressed form. The fifteen detailed sections that follow expand each entry with the documentary evidence and the historiographic source.

#	Claim	Grade	Decisive Source
1	Lincoln elected to Congress 1846; Kennedy elected to Congress 1946	TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS	Congressional Record election returns
2	Lincoln elected President 1860; Kennedy elected President 1960	TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS	Electoral College returns
3	Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters	TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS	Direct count
4	Both wives lost a child while living in the White House	TRUE	Willie Lincoln death Feb 1862; Patrick Kennedy death Aug 1963
5	Both presidents shot on a Friday	TRUE	Apr 14 1865; Nov 22 1963
6	Both shot in the head from behind	TRUE	Coroner reports
7	Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy; Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln	HALF-FABRICATED	White House staff records 1861-1865 and 1961-1963
8	Both assassinated by Southerners	TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS	Booth Maryland birth; Oswald Louisiana-Texas residence
9	Both succeeded by Southerners named Johnson, born exactly 100 years apart	TRUE	1808 and 1908 birth records
10	Booth born 1839; Oswald born 1939	EXAGGERATED	Booth born May 10, 1838
11	Both assassins known by three names totaling 15 letters	TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS	Direct count
12	Booth ran from theater to warehouse; Oswald ran from warehouse to theater	EXAGGERATED	Garrett’s barn was not a warehouse
13	Both assassins killed before standing trial	TRUE	Booth shot Apr 26, 1865; Oswald shot Nov 24, 1963
14	Lincoln shot in Ford’s Theatre; Kennedy shot in a Lincoln made by Ford	TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS	1961 Lincoln Continental SS-100-X
15	Week before, Lincoln in Monroe MD; Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe	FABRICATED	Monroe died Aug 1962; no Monroe MD visit

The table makes the central finding visible at a glance. Of the fifteen most-circulated claims, four are true-but-meaningless, four are true and parallel in a substantive sense, five are exaggerated or half-fabricated, and two are wholly fabricated. The list’s emotional impact comes not from any single claim but from the cumulative weight of fifteen items presented as if each were equally true. When the receipts are examined, the cumulative weight dissipates.

Claim One: Both Were Elected to Congress One Hundred Years Apart

Verdict: TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS

Receipt: Lincoln was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois’s seventh congressional district in the election of August 3, 1846, taking his seat at the opening of the Thirtieth Congress on December 6, 1847. Kennedy was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s eleventh congressional district in the election of November 5, 1946, taking his seat at the opening of the Eightieth Congress on January 3, 1947. The election years are separated by exactly one hundred years. This much is documented in the Congressional Record’s certified election returns and is not in dispute.

The claim’s emotional impact depends on the reader treating “elected to Congress” as a tightly defined event whose recurrence at a hundred-year interval is striking. The trick is that congressional elections happen every two years and that both Lincoln and Kennedy entered Congress relatively young, with Lincoln aged thirty-seven and Kennedy aged twenty-nine. Across any randomly chosen one-hundred-year span, the probability that two future presidents will have entered Congress in years separated by exactly one hundred is not vanishingly small. It is roughly one in fifty.

The deeper objection is the elastic criteria objection. The claim “elected to Congress” can be substituted with many other event categories: “first held public office,” “married,” “had first child,” “delivered first major speech,” “lost first election.” For each substitution, the probability of finding a one-hundred-year parallel between two presidents drawn from the relatively narrow pool of historical figures with rich biographical documentation rises. Across a dozen substitutions, the probability that at least one will produce a one-hundred-year coincidence approaches certainty. Selection bias selects the substitution that worked and discards the eleven that did not.

The historian and skeptic Martin Gardner, in The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix, illustrated this with the parallel he constructed between the lives of Mexican generals Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Porfirio Diaz, who happened to share birth months, military rank progressions, and major political defeats at roughly comparable points in their careers. Gardner’s point was not that Santa Anna and Diaz were mystically linked but that any two figures with sufficiently long and well-documented lives will produce parallel-events lists if the criteria for matching are flexible. The Lincoln-Kennedy congressional election claim survives debunking attempts because the underlying fact is true. What is meaningless is treating the true fact as evidence of anything other than the mathematical inevitability of one-hundred-year intervals across well-documented biographies.

The 1992 Skeptical Inquirer reader contest invited readers to find equally striking coincidences between any two unrelated American presidents. The winning entry paired Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson on a list of fifteen parallels of comparable strength. The runner-up paired Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt across thirteen items. The contest’s purpose was to demonstrate that the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels are not unique but are an artifact of the matching procedure that any sufficiently determined reader can replicate across any historical pair.

Claim Two: Both Were Elected President One Hundred Years Apart

Verdict: TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS

Receipt: Lincoln won the Electoral College on November 6, 1860, with 180 electoral votes against the combined opposition of Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell. Kennedy won the Electoral College on November 8, 1960, with 303 electoral votes against Richard Nixon. The election years are separated by exactly one hundred years. This is documented in the certified Electoral College returns held by the National Archives and is not in dispute.

The mathematics of selection bias apply here with even greater force than for the congressional-election claim. The United States holds presidential elections every four years, and the pool of presidents elected between 1789 and the modern era includes forty-three individuals. Across that pool, the expected number of pairs of presidents separated by exactly one hundred years in their election dates is not small. There are many such pairs once one looks: William Henry Harrison elected 1840 and Franklin Roosevelt elected 1940; Abraham Lincoln 1860 and John Kennedy 1960; Rutherford Hayes 1876 and Jimmy Carter 1976; James Garfield 1880 and Ronald Reagan 1980. The Lincoln-Kennedy pairing is one of four such hundred-year electoral pairings between 1840 and 1980 alone.

The Harrison-Roosevelt pair is a useful counterexample because it provides another set of parallels that no urban legend has bothered to assemble. Both were elected after substantial political careers in their respective parties. Both inherited economic crises (Panic of 1837 aftermath for Harrison; Depression for Roosevelt). Both made famous inaugural addresses (Harrison’s was the longest in history at 8,445 words; Roosevelt’s was the most influential of the twentieth century at 1,883 words). Both faced challenges from the opposition Senate. The Harrison-Roosevelt parallels could fill a chain letter as easily as the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels. They do not, because no traumatic public event has motivated readers to construct the matching list.

This is the second mechanism beneath the Lincoln-Kennedy list’s persistence: traumatic events activate the human pattern-matching faculty in a way that uneventful presidencies do not. The Lincoln assassination of April 1865 and the Kennedy assassination of November 1963 are two of the most shocking events in American public memory. The pairing of the two traumas motivates the search for additional parallels in a way that the pairing of, for example, Hayes and Carter (both one-term presidents who exited under economic distress) does not. The trauma is the engine; the coincidences are the manufactured cargo.

The “one hundred years apart” claim, considered cleanly, tells us only that two presidents were elected in years separated by a multiple of four (since elections occur every four years) and that one was elected in the year following Lincoln’s by an interval that happens to be one century. The interval is fixed by elementary number theory once the trauma has selected the pair to compare. The “one hundred years” sounds significant; the underlying combinatorics produce comparable intervals across many presidential pairs that no one has bothered to assemble.

Claim Three: Both Names Contain Seven Letters

Verdict: TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS

Receipt: L-I-N-C-O-L-N is seven letters; K-E-N-N-E-D-Y is seven letters. The count is correct.

The objection here is the simplest of any claim on the list, and the response illustrates the selection-bias mechanism at its most transparent. The set of American presidents whose surnames contain exactly seven letters includes Lincoln, Kennedy, Madison, Jackson, Grant (when written without the “U.S.” prefix that some lists prepend), Harding, Hoover, Truman, and Clinton when counted as seven plus the lowercase modifier. Once the seven-letter surname is fixed as the criterion, fully a quarter of all American presidents satisfy it. The claim is true; the claim is also approximately as informative as observing that both presidents had two-syllable surnames or that both surnames began with consonants.

The selection-bias mechanism is straightforward. The chain-letter author first picked Lincoln and Kennedy as the comparison pair (because both were assassinated). Then the author searched for biographical features the two shared. The features that emerged were the features that survived the search. Features the two did not share (Lincoln’s surname is Anglo-Saxon and pre-revolutionary while Kennedy’s is Irish-Catholic and post-famine; Lincoln stood six feet four while Kennedy stood six feet exactly; Lincoln practiced law while Kennedy went directly into politics from journalism) did not survive the search. The list reports the survivors. The losers are invisible.

The “seven letters” claim has propagated alongside the parallel and equally trivial claim that the assassins’ names each contain fifteen letters when their three-part forms are counted (John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, addressed at Claim Eleven below). The parallel between the two “letter-count” claims illustrates the elastic criteria mechanism. Once “letter count of surname” has been established as a valid criterion for measuring similarity between historical figures, “letter count of three-part assassin name” is a permissible extension. From there, “letter count of presidential running-mate” or “letter count of birthplace” or “letter count of mother’s maiden name” become equally permissible. With enough permissible criteria, any two figures can be linked by some letter-count coincidence.

The mathematician John Allen Paulos, writing in Innumeracy in 1988, called this the “twos and twos” problem. If you allow yourself to combine arbitrary criteria in arbitrary ways, you can construct connections between any two entities in the universe. The Lincoln-Kennedy seven-letter claim is the cleanest example on the list because it is true but transparently empty. It survives in the list because removing it would shorten the list, and the list’s emotional impact depends partly on its length. Fifteen items feels like overwhelming evidence even when half are meaningless. Three substantive items would feel like coincidence. Pattern-matching cognition rewards length more than substance.

Claim Four: Both Presidents Had Wives Who Lost a Child While Living in the White House

Verdict: TRUE

Receipt: Mary Todd Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln lost their son William Wallace “Willie” Lincoln on February 20, 1862. Willie was eleven years old. The cause of death was typhoid fever, contracted from contaminated water in the White House plumbing system, which drew from the Potomac River. The death is documented in the White House physician Dr. Robert K. Stone’s medical records (held in the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress) and in the funeral services held in the East Room on February 24, 1862.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and John F. Kennedy lost their newborn son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy on August 9, 1963. Patrick was born five and a half weeks premature on August 7, 1963 at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, weighed four pounds ten ounces, and died at Boston Children’s Hospital from hyaline membrane disease (now called infant respiratory distress syndrome). The death is documented in the hospital’s medical records, the Kennedy White House daily diary, and the funeral mass held in Cardinal Cushing’s private chapel in Boston on August 10, 1963.

Both deaths are real. Both occurred during the respective presidencies. The parallel is genuine and is not the kind of thing manufactured by selection bias because the criterion (child died during presidency) is narrow and the satisfaction is exact. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals (2005) treats Willie’s death as a turning point in Lincoln’s emotional life and a source of the spiritual deepening visible in his Second Inaugural Address; the historian Robert Dallek in An Unfinished Life (2003) treats Patrick’s death as a turning point in the Kennedy marriage and a catalyst for the closer companionship between John and Jacqueline visible in the autumn of 1963.

What is the parallel worth? Considered honestly, the parallel is striking in a way that the letter-count and election-year claims are not. The set of American presidents who lost a child in office is small. Beyond Lincoln and Kennedy, the relevant cases include Franklin Pierce, whose son Benjamin died on January 6, 1853 in a train accident two months before Pierce’s inauguration (technically pre-presidency but commonly counted), and Calvin Coolidge, whose son Calvin Junior died on July 7, 1924 from sepsis after a blister on his toe became infected. Across forty-three presidents, four cases of child death during or immediately bracketing the presidency is unusual.

The honest reading is that the parallel is real and is not statistical noise, but the meaning of the parallel is not what the chain-letter author wants it to be. The meaning is that the office of the presidency imposes severe pressures on the families who occupy the White House and that the medical environment of nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century Washington was not always sufficient to protect children from contagious or congenital disease. These are sociological observations, not supernatural ones. The parallel is true; the inference of cosmic linkage is unwarranted.

Claim Five: Both Presidents Were Shot on a Friday

Verdict: TRUE

Receipt: Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865. April 14, 1865 was a Friday. The day was Good Friday in the Christian liturgical calendar, which has been noted in religious commentary since John Hay’s diary entry of April 15, 1865 and in the funeral sermons preached in the days following.

Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963. November 22, 1963 was a Friday. The day was not a liturgical holiday in any major Christian tradition.

Both dates are correct. The parallel is real. The question is whether the parallel carries any weight.

The mathematics of the claim are straightforward. Any given date falls on one of seven days of the week with roughly equal probability across the long calendar. The probability that two randomly selected dates both fall on a Friday is approximately one in seven, or about 14.3 percent. This is not vanishingly small. Across the universe of presidential assassinations and assassination attempts in American history, the expected number of Friday events is roughly proportional to the total number of events. The presidential assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield (shot July 2, 1881, a Saturday), McKinley (shot September 6, 1901, a Friday), and Kennedy include two Fridays out of four. The successful assassination attempts on Theodore Roosevelt (October 14, 1912, a Monday, survived), Franklin Roosevelt (February 15, 1933, a Wednesday, survived), Harry Truman (November 1, 1950, a Wednesday, survived), Gerald Ford (twice in September 1975, both Mondays, survived), and Ronald Reagan (March 30, 1981, a Monday, survived) raise the day-of-week distribution to a sample large enough to evaluate. Of the nine major presidential shooting events, the days fall as: Friday three, Monday three, Wednesday two, Saturday one. The Friday share is one-third, modestly above the 14.3 percent baseline.

The “shot on Friday” parallel is real for the Lincoln-Kennedy pair and is mildly above chance across the broader presidential-shooting sample. Considered cleanly, the claim contributes no supernatural weight to the parallel. It simply registers the calendrical fact that both shootings occurred on the day that begins the weekend, which is also the day historically associated with public events and theatrical performances in nineteenth-century America (Lincoln was attending Ford’s Theatre as a Friday-evening leisure outing). The day-of-week parallel is true; the supernatural inference is unwarranted.

The 1985 analysis by Martin Gardner treated this claim as the cleanest example of a true-but-statistically-unremarkable parallel. Gardner noted that the Skeptical Inquirer’s earlier examination of UFO sighting reports showed a similar weekend-clustering pattern and that the day-of-week distribution of any major event category in human life tilts toward weekend days because that is when more people are available to be involved in noteworthy events. Lincoln went to the theater on Good Friday because Friday evening was the customary social outing slot in 1865 Washington. Kennedy was in Dallas on a Friday because the Texas swing of his political reelection tour had been scheduled to conclude with a Friday-night Democratic fundraiser in Austin. Both events fall on Fridays because Fridays are the most likely day for such events to be scheduled, not because Fridays are mystically marked for presidential death.

Claim Six: Both Presidents Were Shot in the Head From Behind

Verdict: TRUE

Receipt: The Lincoln autopsy was conducted by U.S. Army Surgeons J. Janvier Woodward and Edward Curtis on April 15, 1865 in the second-floor guest room of the Petersen House at 516 Tenth Street NW, Washington, where Lincoln had been carried after the shooting. The autopsy report, preserved in the National Archives, records that a single bullet entered the back of Lincoln’s head behind the left ear, traveled forward through the brain, and lodged behind the right eye. The trajectory is consistent with John Wilkes Booth’s account of firing from a position behind Lincoln as the president sat in the State Box at Ford’s Theatre.

The Kennedy autopsy was conducted by Commander James Humes, Commander Thornton Boswell, and Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland on the night of November 22-23, 1963. The autopsy report, designated CE 387 in the Warren Commission exhibits, records that one bullet entered the back of Kennedy’s head, traveled forward, and exited at the right front of the head. A second bullet entered the back of Kennedy’s neck and exited the front of the throat. Both entrance wounds were on the rear surface. The trajectory is consistent with Oswald firing from a position behind and above Kennedy at the Texas School Book Depository.

Both presidents were shot in the head. Both shootings were from behind. The parallel is a real and verifiable feature of the medical record.

The objection is straightforward: the parallel is real but the parallel is what an assassin who wants to succeed will engineer. A bullet to the back of the head, fired from a position the victim cannot see, is the assassination method that maximizes lethality and minimizes the assassin’s risk. The parallel reflects the convergent strategy of two assassins acting independently. It does not reflect supernatural patterning.

Consider the alternative methods documented in the broader presidential-shooting sample. Charles Guiteau shot James Garfield in the back at close range with a small-caliber revolver on July 2, 1881. Garfield did not die from the gunshot but from infection introduced by the unsterilized fingers of his attending physicians over the following eleven weeks, finally expiring on September 19, 1881. Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley in the abdomen at point-blank range with a concealed revolver on September 6, 1901. McKinley initially appeared to recover but died from gangrene on September 14, 1901. Both Guiteau and Czolgosz used closer-range, smaller-caliber methods than Booth or Oswald. The reason Lincoln and Kennedy share the “shot in the head from behind” detail is that both assassins were operating from a distance behind a moving or seated target and that head shots from such positions were the lethal options available.

The historian Bishop in The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955) reconstructed Booth’s positioning in the State Box and confirmed that Booth had crept up behind Lincoln from a small antechamber at the rear of the box. The historian William Manchester in The Death of a President (1967) reconstructed Oswald’s positioning on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and confirmed that Oswald fired downward and forward as the presidential motorcade passed below. The reconstructions match because the geometry of successful presidential assassination strongly constrains the trajectory: the assassin requires a position the victim cannot defensively orient toward, which means the bullet must enter from behind. The “shot in the head from behind” parallel is forced by the physics of the situation. It carries no meaning beyond the geometry.

Claim Seven: Lincoln’s Secretary Was Named Kennedy and Kennedy’s Secretary Was Named Lincoln

Verdict: HALF-FABRICATED

Receipt: Kennedy’s personal secretary from his 1953 entry into the U.S. Senate through his assassination in November 1963 was Evelyn Lincoln, born Evelyn Norton on June 25, 1909 in Polk County, Nebraska, married in 1930 to Harold “Abe” Lincoln, and employed in the Kennedy office as personal secretary from January 1953 onward. Lincoln’s role was meticulously documented in the Kennedy White House daily logs and in her own 1965 memoir My Twelve Years With John F. Kennedy. The Evelyn Lincoln part of the claim is verifiable, true, and not in dispute.

The reverse half of the claim is fabricated. Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretaries were John George Nicolay (1832-1901), private secretary, and John Milton Hay (1838-1905), assistant secretary. Both men later wrote the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (1890), the standard primary-source biography of the Lincoln administration. Lincoln had no secretary named Kennedy by any documentary record.

The chain-letter claim sometimes specifies “William H. Crook” or “John Hay” as the secretary, then asserts that Hay’s middle name was Kennedy (it was Milton) or that Crook’s wife was a Kennedy (no such marriage is documented). Variants of the claim cite “John Kennedy” as a Lincoln administration figure (no such employee existed) or claim that one of Lincoln’s bodyguards was named Kennedy (Lincoln’s bodyguard on the night of the assassination was John Parker, a Metropolitan Police officer assigned to White House protection duties; Parker was famously absent from his post outside the State Box at the moment Booth approached). None of the variants survives contact with the White House staff lists of 1861 through 1865, which are held in the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress and reproduced in Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008).

The Snopes investigation of 1999 traced the “Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy” claim to a 1965 chain-letter version that added the entry to the earlier GOP newsletter list. The earliest known instance of the claim in print is in a Reader’s Digest condensation of the Parade column from late 1968. By the early 1970s the claim was standard, and several editions of school-classroom American history textbooks repeated it as established fact, despite its absence from any primary source. The claim is the single most-cited entry in the Lincoln-Kennedy list and is also the entry with the weakest documentary foundation.

The chain-letter version sometimes goes further and claims that the Kennedy secretary, Lincoln, warned Kennedy not to go to Dallas and that the Lincoln secretary, Kennedy, warned Lincoln not to go to Ford’s Theatre. The reverse-warning claim is fabricated in both directions. Evelyn Lincoln did urge Kennedy to reconsider the Texas trip on November 21, 1963 (the day before the assassination) on grounds of crowd-security risk, and she recorded the conversation in her 1965 memoir. There is no documentary evidence that a Lincoln secretary named Kennedy warned Lincoln of anything; no such secretary existed.

The “both secretaries” claim has propagated because the half that is true (Evelyn Lincoln) provides cognitive scaffolding for the half that is invented. The reader who confirms by memory that Kennedy did indeed have a secretary named Lincoln then accepts the reverse claim without independent verification. The mechanism is the same mechanism that powers all successful misinformation: a true core wrapped in a fabricated extension. The list survives because the easy-to-verify half (Evelyn Lincoln) creates the impression that the hard-to-verify half (a Lincoln secretary named Kennedy) is equally well-grounded. It is not.

The Snopes founder David Mikkelson made this claim the centerpiece of his 1999 examination because the asymmetry of the two halves is so cleanly diagnostic. Mikkelson noted that no Lincoln scholar from Carl Sandburg in 1939 through David Donald in 1995 has mentioned a Lincoln secretary named Kennedy, and that the silence of the entire Lincoln historiography is itself a documentary finding. The claim is a fabrication. Removing this claim from the list reduces the apparent weight of the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels more than removing any other single item.

Claim Eight: Both Presidents Were Assassinated by Southerners

Verdict: TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS

Receipt: John Wilkes Booth was born May 10, 1838 on a farm in Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland. Maryland was a slave state and, although officially Union throughout the Civil War, was riven by Confederate sympathies. Booth himself was an active Confederate partisan, briefly enlisted in the Virginia militia in 1859 to participate in the hanging of John Brown, and became a Confederate agent in the latter years of the war. By any common definition of “Southerner,” Booth qualifies. The detail is documented in his biography by Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus (2004).

Lee Harvey Oswald was born October 18, 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Louisiana is unambiguously Southern by both geography and culture. Oswald spent significant childhood years in New Orleans, joined the U.S. Marine Corps from a Texas address in 1956, lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 through 1962, returned to Texas in 1962, and was a resident of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963. By the geographic-birthplace definition, Oswald was a Southerner. The detail is documented in Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993) and Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995).

Both assassins were born in Southern states. The claim is true.

The “meaningless” judgment derives from the underlying demographic and historical context. Maryland in 1838 and Louisiana in 1939 are different societies separated by a century and by the Civil War, and the political meaning of “Southerner” in the two cases is incommensurable. Booth was a Confederate partisan whose motive for killing Lincoln was the political revenge for Southern defeat in the Civil War, articulated in his April 14, 1865 diary entry: “Our country owed all our troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.” Oswald was a Marxist and Soviet defector whose motive for killing Kennedy was a confused mixture of personal grievance, ideological commitment to Castro’s Cuba, and the desire for historical significance, none of which had anything to do with his Louisiana birth. The “both Southerners” claim treats geographic origin as if it were a politically meaningful category across a century when in fact the politics of the two assassins were as distant as any two American assassins’ politics could be.

The claim also overstates the discriminatory power of “Southern” as a category. The United States contained more than eleven Southern states in 1838 and more than eleven Southern states in 1939. The probability that any randomly selected American was born in a Southern state, weighted by population, was roughly thirty percent across both eras. The probability that two assassins drawn from American assassins were both born in Southern states is roughly nine percent. This is small but not vanishing. Across the universe of presidential assassins (Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, Oswald), the Southern fraction is two of four. Across the universe of would-be assassins (Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz, Oswald, the Roosevelt and Truman and Ford and Reagan attackers), the Southern fraction is approximately the same as the national population baseline. The “both Southerners” parallel is true but is approximately a chance result.

The deeper point is the elastic criteria objection. “Both Southerners” is one category of geographic similarity; “both Catholics” or “both Protestants” or “both Marxists” or “both military veterans” or “both unmarried” or “both unemployed at the time of the killing” are other categories. Once the search begins, the category that produces a match is the category that gets reported. Booth was Episcopalian by upbringing and Catholic by conversion late in life; Oswald was nominally Lutheran from his Louisiana childhood and atheist from his Marine Corps years onward. The religious categories do not match cleanly. The geographic category does. The list reports the geographic category and omits the religious. Selection bias selected the survivor.

Claim Nine: Both Presidents Were Succeeded by Southerners Named Johnson, Born Exactly One Hundred Years Apart

Verdict: TRUE

Receipt: Andrew Johnson was born December 29, 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, the son of Jacob Johnson, an illiterate North Carolina inn porter, and Mary “Polly” McDonough, a domestic worker. North Carolina was a slave state. Andrew Johnson moved to Greeneville, Tennessee in 1826 and built a political career in the Tennessee Democratic Party. He was selected as Lincoln’s running mate at the 1864 National Union Convention to balance the ticket with a War Democrat from a border-state location. Upon Lincoln’s death on April 15, 1865, Johnson became the seventeenth president and served until March 4, 1869. The birth date is documented in Hans L. Trefousse’s biography Andrew Johnson: A Biography (1989) and in the National Archives genealogical records.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was born August 27, 1908 in Stonewall, Texas, the son of Sam Ealy Johnson Jr., a Texas state representative, and Rebekah Baines Johnson, a college-educated former teacher. Texas was a former Confederate state. Lyndon Johnson moved through the Texas political establishment in the 1930s and 1940s, became Senate Majority Leader from 1955 through 1961, was selected as Kennedy’s running mate at the 1960 Democratic National Convention to balance the ticket with a Southern Protestant, and upon Kennedy’s death on November 22, 1963 became the thirty-sixth president and served until January 20, 1969. The birth date is documented in Robert Caro’s multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson and in the Texas state birth records.

Andrew Johnson born 1808; Lyndon Johnson born 1908. The interval is exactly one hundred years. The claim is true and documented.

The “meaningless” question turns on whether the parallel survives elastic-criteria analysis or is a substantive coincidence. The author’s judgment is that this is the strongest claim on the list. The set of American vice presidents who became president via the death of the incumbent is small (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford via resignation rather than death). The set of those vice presidents who were Southerners is smaller still. The set whose surnames are identical to another such vice president is one (Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson). The set whose birth years differ by exactly one hundred is again one. The intersection of all four conditions is the Lincoln-Kennedy pair alone.

That said, the claim does not survive supernatural inference. The reason both Lincoln and Kennedy chose Southerners named Johnson as running mates is institutional. The political logic of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century presidential ticket construction strongly favored geographic balance, and the Southern Democratic-affiliated politician with the surname Johnson was a politically convenient choice in both eras for entirely terrestrial reasons. Andrew Johnson was a War Democrat whose Tennessee credentials gave Lincoln a unionist Southern voice for the 1864 ticket. Lyndon Johnson was a Texas Democrat whose Senate Majority Leadership gave Kennedy a Southern Protestant voice for the 1960 ticket. The surname “Johnson” is the third-most-common surname in the United States (after Smith and Williams), and the probability that two Southern Democrats from different generations would share it is not negligible.

The hundred-year birth interval is the genuinely arresting detail. Across the four pairs of presidential predecessors and Southern Johnson successors in American history (Lincoln-Andrew Johnson; Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson; the hypothetical pairings that do not exist), the exact-century birth alignment is a single pair. The probability of such alignment is hard to compute precisely because the reference class is small, but the alignment is not the kind of thing that selection bias readily manufactures. Considered cleanly, this is the one item on the list where the supernatural framing has its strongest case. The author’s view is that the claim is true and unusual but is also one of the recurring artifacts produced by the dense web of American political institutions, where surname distribution, regional balance norms, and ticket-construction conventions narrow the candidate pool sufficiently that hundred-year coincidences are not the vanishingly rare events the supernatural reading requires.

Claim Ten: Both Assassins Were Born One Hundred Years Apart, in 1839 and 1939

Verdict: EXAGGERATED

Receipt: John Wilkes Booth was born May 10, 1838 on the family farm at Tudor Hall near Bel Air, Maryland. The birth date is documented in the Booth family Bible (now held in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington) and in the genealogical records reproduced in Stanley Kimmel’s The Mad Booths of Maryland (1940) and in Michael Kauffman’s American Brutus (2004). Booth was born in 1838, not 1839.

Lee Harvey Oswald was born October 18, 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The birth date is documented in the Orleans Parish birth certificate, reproduced in the Warren Commission Hearings volume sixteen, and in Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993). Oswald was born in 1939.

The interval between Booth’s actual 1838 birth and Oswald’s 1939 birth is one hundred and one years, not one hundred. The “exactly one hundred years apart” claim is true only if Booth’s birth year is misstated as 1839, which it routinely is in the Lincoln-Kennedy lists.

The misstatement of Booth’s birth year as 1839 traces to several early sources. The 1965 GOP-newsletter version of the list gave 1839, possibly because the author was working from an unreliable secondary source or possibly because the author noted the 1838 date and rounded for the sake of the parallel. Subsequent reprints inherited the 1839 figure. By the 1970s, the 1839 date was so widely circulated in chain-letter and newspaper versions of the list that even readers who knew Booth was born in 1838 sometimes assumed they had misremembered.

This is the cleanest example on the list of an exaggerated claim: a true parallel (both assassins were born within roughly a century of each other) inflated into a false parallel (both were born exactly one hundred years apart) by the alteration of a single digit. The exaggeration is not a fabrication because the underlying interval is roughly correct, but the exaggeration is an exaggeration because the claim asserts exactness where the data show approximation. The grade is EXAGGERATED rather than TRUE because the precision claim is what gives the entry its punch in the list. “Both born around a century apart” reads as banal; “both born exactly one hundred years apart” reads as uncanny. The list trades on the precision claim that the documentary record does not support.

The Skeptical Inquirer’s 1992 reader contest noted that nine of the fifteen most-circulated Lincoln-Kennedy claims have this exact structure: a true parallel exaggerated by inserting precision the data do not bear. The exaggeration pattern is one of the principal mechanisms by which the list achieves its uncanny effect. Once the reader is shown that the precision is a manufactured veneer over an approximate underlying parallel, the supernatural inference loses its grip.

Claim Eleven: Both Assassins Are Known by Three Names, Each Totaling Fifteen Letters

Verdict: TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS

Receipt: J-O-H-N W-I-L-K-E-S B-O-O-T-H counts to fifteen letters when the three name components are summed. L-E-E H-A-R-V-E-Y O-S-W-A-L-D counts to fifteen letters when the three name components are summed. Both counts are correct.

The claim is the cleanest letter-counting trick on the list, and its mechanism deserves close attention because the technique recurs across folkloric coincidence lists more broadly. The list pre-selects the comparison criterion (letter count of three-part name) after observing the names. The selection happens silently. The reader is presented with the criterion as if it had been chosen independently of the data, and the data are then offered as confirmation.

Consider the universe of possible criteria that could have been applied. The list could have counted syllables (John Wilkes Booth has three syllables; Lee Harvey Oswald has five syllables, so this criterion fails). The list could have counted letters in the surnames alone (Booth has five; Oswald has six, fail). The list could have counted letters in the first names (John has four; Lee has three, fail). The list could have summed vowels (Booth: 3; Oswald: 5, fail). The list could have summed consonants (Booth: 9 if including middle; Oswald: 10, fail). The list could have looked at first letter (J versus L, fail). The list could have looked at initials (JWB versus LHO, fail across every comparison metric). The list could have looked at name origin (Booth is English; Oswald is Anglo-Saxon, true but trivial). The list could have looked at religion (both Protestant by birth, true but the religion is the dominant American religion and so the parallel is statistically unremarkable).

Across the dozen or more criteria that could have been applied, the criterion that produced a match (three-name letter count totaling fifteen) was reported. The criteria that did not produce a match were not reported. This is the textbook definition of post-hoc selection bias, and the technique is the same technique that produces every folkloric coincidence list across cultures and centuries.

The “fifteen letters” claim is also exploitable in the opposite direction. Suppose a list author wanted to prove that John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald were notably different rather than notably similar. The author could observe that the two surnames begin with different consonants, that the first names have different vowel structures, that the middle names share no common letters, that the syllable counts differ, and that the patronymic origins are different (Booth from “boa” or “boat” Old English; Oswald from “Osweald” Old English meaning divine ruler). Any sufficiently determined author can construct evidence of difference or evidence of similarity from the same name data, depending on which criteria are selected. The criteria that survive selection are the criteria that produced the desired result.

Martin Gardner’s 1985 analysis in The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix treated the letter-count claim as the paradigm case for what he called “post hoc numerology.” Gardner offered the corresponding numerology for the names of John F. Kennedy’s vice president (Lyndon Baines Johnson: L-Y-N-D-O-N B-A-I-N-E-S J-O-H-N-S-O-N is nineteen letters) and Lincoln’s vice president (Andrew Johnson: A-N-D-R-E-W J-O-H-N-S-O-N is thirteen letters). The Johnson successor name lengths do not match. The list omits the Johnson letter counts because they do not produce a match. The list’s claim of supernatural correspondence rests on the criteria the list selected and the criteria the list ignored.

Claim Twelve: Booth Shot Lincoln in a Theater and Ran to a Warehouse, While Oswald Shot Kennedy From a Warehouse and Ran to a Theater

Verdict: EXAGGERATED

Receipt: Booth shot Lincoln on the evening of April 14, 1865 at Ford’s Theatre, 511 Tenth Street NW, Washington. This part of the claim is true. Booth then leaped from the State Box to the stage (fracturing his left fibula in the process), fled out the back stage door to a waiting horse, rode south through Washington, crossed the Anacostia River at the Navy Yard Bridge, and reached southern Maryland by the early morning of April 15. He continued through southern Maryland and into Virginia. He was finally cornered on April 26, 1865 in a tobacco-curing barn on the Garrett family farm near Port Royal, Caroline County, Virginia. The Garrett barn was a small farm structure used for hanging tobacco leaves to dry. It was not a warehouse in any commercial or industrial sense. The Garrett barn was burned by Union soldiers to flush Booth out, and Booth was shot in the neck by Sergeant Boston Corbett at approximately three o’clock on the morning of April 26. He died several hours later. The trajectory from Ford’s Theatre to Garrett’s barn is documented in the official report of the manhunt prepared by Lafayette Baker of the War Department’s intelligence service, in the testimonies given at the conspiracy trial of May through June 1865, and in Edward Steers’ comprehensive treatment Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (2001).

Oswald shot Kennedy on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 from the southeast corner sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, 411 Elm Street, Dallas. The Texas School Book Depository was a seven-story commercial building used for storing schoolbook publishers’ inventory and was, by any reasonable definition, a warehouse. Oswald descended from the sixth floor by the back staircase, exited the building through the front entrance, boarded a city bus and then a taxi, returned to his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley Avenue in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, collected a revolver and a jacket, and walked south. He shot and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit on a residential street at approximately 1:15 in the afternoon. He then continued south and entered the Texas Theatre at 231 West Jefferson Boulevard, a movie theater showing the picture War Is Hell, at approximately 1:35. He was arrested in the theater at approximately 1:50. The trajectory is documented in the Warren Commission report’s volume nineteen and in Posner’s Case Closed (1993).

The “warehouse to theater” half of the claim is true: Oswald went from the Texas School Book Depository (a warehouse) to the Texas Theatre (a theater). The “theater to warehouse” half of the claim is exaggerated: Booth went from Ford’s Theatre (a theater) to Garrett’s tobacco-curing barn (a farm building, not a warehouse). The chain-letter author used “warehouse” because the symmetric inversion produced a more elegant claim than “theater to barn.” The inversion’s elegance comes at the cost of the documentary record.

Snopes’ 1999 investigation noted that the original 1964 GOP-newsletter version of the list specified “barn” for Booth’s hiding place. The “warehouse” substitution appears in the chain-letter versions of 1966 onward, presumably introduced by an enterprising copyist who recognized the rhetorical improvement and traded accuracy for symmetry. The “barn” version is documented; the “warehouse” version is fabricated; the parallel survives in the popular memory because the warehouse-theater inversion is the version that everybody quotes.

This is the cleanest example on the list of a claim that has been quietly altered over four decades to improve its rhetorical effect. The reader who encounters the modern “warehouse to theater” version has no way of knowing that the original “barn to theater” version was the historically accurate one. The list’s authority is the authority of repetition. Each repetition replaces the documentary memory with the rhetorical memory. After forty years, the rhetorical memory wins.

Claim Thirteen: Both Assassins Were Killed Before They Could Stand Trial

Verdict: TRUE

Receipt: John Wilkes Booth was shot at Garrett’s farm in Caroline County, Virginia at approximately three o’clock on the morning of April 26, 1865, twelve days after assassinating Lincoln. The shot was fired by Sergeant Boston Corbett of the 16th New York Cavalry, who acted against direct orders from Lieutenant Edward P. Doherty to take Booth alive. The bullet struck Booth in the upper neck below the right ear, severed the spinal cord, and paralyzed him. He survived for approximately two hours in great pain before dying on the porch of the Garrett farmhouse. The killing is documented in Doherty’s after-action report, in Boston Corbett’s congressional testimony of August 1865, and in the medical report prepared by Dr. Charles Urquhart at the scene.

Lee Harvey Oswald was shot at the basement parking ramp of the Dallas Police Department’s headquarters at approximately 11:21 in the morning of November 24, 1963, two days after assassinating Kennedy. The shot was fired by Jack Ruby, the owner of a Dallas burlesque establishment called the Carousel Club, who had entered the police garage with the press corps assembled to witness Oswald’s transfer to the county jail. Ruby’s bullet struck Oswald in the lower torso, traversed the abdomen, and caused massive internal hemorrhage. Oswald died at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:07 in the afternoon, never having regained consciousness sufficient to make any further statement. The killing was televised live on national television and is documented in the Warren Commission’s volume five testimony, in Ruby’s subsequent trial transcript of March 1964, and in the Dallas police department’s internal investigations.

Both assassins were killed before standing trial. The claim is true.

The “meaningless” judgment turns on whether the parallel is forced by the circumstances or reflects a substantive coincidence. The honest reading is that the parallel reflects forced circumstances. Presidential assassinations in the United States have provoked extraordinary public emotion in every instance, and the assassins have faced exceptional risk of vigilante or quasi-vigilante killing in the days immediately following the assassination. The historian James L. Swanson, in Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (2006), documented the lynching pressure surrounding Booth’s pursuit and the explicit calls in the Northern press during April 15 through 26 for Booth to be killed rather than tried. Ruby’s killing of Oswald, while less premeditated in the formal sense, occurred in the context of a Dallas Police Department that had been criticized for not protecting Kennedy and that faced enormous pressure to demonstrate competence in handling Oswald.

The two cases differ on a structural detail that the parallel obscures. Booth’s killing was carried out by a federal officer acting in the line of duty in a chaotic capture sequence. Corbett’s claim was that Booth had pointed a weapon and that Corbett fired in self-defense, though the documentary record is ambiguous and Corbett was court-martialed for disobeying orders before being acquitted on grounds of pre-existing mental instability. Ruby’s killing was carried out by a private citizen who somehow gained access to a controlled police facility and who claimed he was motivated by sympathy for Jacqueline Kennedy and grief at the loss of the president. The two situations parallel in outcome (assassin killed before trial) but differ structurally in cause (federal officer in pursuit versus private citizen in police custody). The parallel collapses to “both shot to death by other people” once the structural difference is examined. The supernatural reading dissolves into the more mundane observation that presidential assassins are exposed to violent retribution.

Claim Fourteen: Lincoln Was Shot in Ford’s Theatre, Kennedy Was Shot in a Lincoln Made by Ford

Verdict: TRUE-BUT-MEANINGLESS

Receipt: Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, the establishment owned and operated by the theatrical manager John T. Ford. Ford had acquired the building (originally the First Baptist Church of Washington) in 1861, converted it to a theater, suffered a fire in 1862, rebuilt it in 1863, and reopened it under the Ford name. The theater hosted Lincoln on April 14, 1865 for a performance of Tom Taylor’s comedy Our American Cousin. The historical detail is uncontested and documented in the Library of Congress’s holdings on Washington theatrical venues.

Kennedy was shot while riding in the second car of a presidential motorcade through downtown Dallas. The car was a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible four-door, license plate SS-100-X, modified by Hess and Eisenhardt for presidential service. The Lincoln Continental brand is a luxury division of the Ford Motor Company, founded in 1922 and continuously produced (with the Continental name) since the 1939 model year. Kennedy’s specific vehicle had been delivered to the Secret Service in June 1961 and was driven on November 22, 1963 by Special Agent William Greer. The vehicle is preserved (with extensive post-assassination modifications) at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Lincoln shot in Ford’s Theatre. Kennedy shot in a Lincoln-brand vehicle manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The claim is correct on both halves.

The supernatural reading invites the reader to see a cosmic loop: Lincoln assassinated in a Ford, Kennedy assassinated in a Lincoln-Ford. The elastic-criteria objection collapses the loop. The parallel depends on the historically contingent facts that one specific Washington theater happened to be named after a man named Ford and that one specific luxury car brand happened to be named after a man named Lincoln. The Ford name and the Lincoln name are common American surnames, and the names that the chain-letter author paired (theater venue and vehicle make) are two of the many possible categories that could have been searched.

The criteria-selection mechanism is identical to the mechanism described under Claim Eleven. The list searched for venue and vehicle parallels that produced matching surnames. The search found one. The matches that the search did not find (the venue or vehicle did not correspond to any famous American name, the venue or vehicle name had no rhetorical relevance to either presidency) were not reported. Selection bias selected the survivors.

The further objection is that the “Ford” and “Lincoln” surnames are both common American family names whose appearance in the locations and vehicles of two presidential assassinations a century apart is not vanishingly improbable. The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903 by Henry Ford, the most influential industrialist of the early twentieth century. The Lincoln Motor Company was founded in 1917 by Henry M. Leland and named after Abraham Lincoln (Leland had been a Lincoln admirer since voting for him in 1864). The Lincoln Motor Company was acquired by the Ford Motor Company in 1922. The cross-pollination of the two surnames in American automotive history is dense and was already established four decades before the Kennedy assassination. The probability that a presidential vehicle in 1963 would be a Ford-manufactured Lincoln was high enough to approach inevitability, given that the Lincoln Continental was the premium American luxury sedan and that presidential vehicles in the mid-twentieth century were sourced from premium American manufacturers as a matter of national-pride policy.

The Ford’s Theatre name is the more genuinely coincidental detail, but here too the contingency is reduced by historical context. Mid-nineteenth-century American theaters were typically named after their owners. John T. Ford was a successful Baltimore theater manager who expanded to Washington in 1861. The probability that a major Washington theater in 1865 would be named after a man named Ford was nonzero but small. The claim is genuinely a coincidence at the Ford’s Theatre half. It is a non-coincidence at the Lincoln-brand vehicle half. The two halves are not equivalent. The list’s elegance comes from treating them as equivalent. The receipt corrects the elegance.

Claim Fifteen: The Week Before Each Assassination, Lincoln Was in Monroe, Maryland and Kennedy Was with Marilyn Monroe

Verdict: FABRICATED

Receipt: Marilyn Monroe died of acute barbiturate poisoning at her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles, in the early morning hours of August 5, 1962. The death was ruled probable suicide by Los Angeles County Coroner Theodore Curphey on August 17, 1962. The autopsy report is in the public record, the Brentwood Police Department report is in the public record, and the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office case file (number 81128) is in the public record.

Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, fifteen months and seventeen days after Monroe’s death. The “week before Kennedy’s assassination” was November 15 through 22, 1963. Kennedy could not have been “with Marilyn Monroe” during this week or any week in 1963, because Monroe had been dead for over a year.

The claim is fabricated. It cannot be true under any interpretation of the words used.

The companion half of the claim, that Lincoln was in “Monroe, Maryland” the week before his assassination, is also fabricated, although in a slightly different way. No town named Monroe, Maryland is documented in any nineteenth-century Maryland gazetteer or in the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System. The closest match is Monrovia, Maryland, a small village in Frederick County, which is approximately forty-five miles northwest of Washington. Lincoln did not visit Monrovia, Maryland the week before his assassination. He was in Washington for the entire week of April 7 through 14, 1865, returning from City Point and Petersburg on April 9 and remaining at the White House and War Department for the duration. His daily movements are documented in the Lincoln Day-by-Day chronology compiled by Earl Schenck Miers and in the diaries of John Hay and Gideon Welles. There is no Monroe, Maryland visit because there is no Monroe, Maryland and because Lincoln did not visit any nearby town by the name.

This is the most thoroughly fabricated claim on the entire list. It survives in circulation because the rhetorical symmetry (Monroe place name for Lincoln, Monroe surname for Kennedy) is elegant and because the claim has been repeated so many times in published lists that readers assume the documentary basis must exist somewhere. The documentary basis does not exist. The claim is invention from beginning to end.

Snopes’ 1999 examination identified this claim as the second of two fully fabricated items on the standard list (the other being the “Lincoln secretary named Kennedy” claim at Item Seven). Both fabrications were added to the list after the initial 1964 GOP-newsletter version. Both fabrications propagated through chain-letter copying and Reader’s Digest reprinting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both fabrications have proven resistant to debunking because the elegance of the parallel is so satisfying that readers prefer the falsehood to the dull historical record.

The Skeptical Inquirer contest of 1992 used this claim as the diagnostic test for whether a chain-letter recipient was reading critically. Recipients who flagged the impossibility (Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, Kennedy in 1963) tended to flag other inconsistencies in the list as well. Recipients who accepted the claim without questioning the dates tended to accept the rest of the list uncritically. The “Marilyn Monroe” claim is the canary in the cognitive coal mine: the reader who notices its impossibility has the critical apparatus to dismantle the list.

Why the List Feels Uncanny Even After Debunking

The list’s persistence across four decades of debunking attempts requires explanation. Each individual claim, once examined, dissolves into either banality (true-but-meaningless), inflation (exaggerated), or invention (fabricated). Yet the cumulative effect of fifteen items presented together is genuinely arresting, even to readers who know the individual items are weak. The cognitive mechanisms that produce this disproportion between part and whole are well-studied in the psychological and statistical literature, and the same mechanisms explain a wide range of paranormal-belief and conspiracy-belief phenomena beyond the Lincoln-Kennedy list specifically.

The first mechanism is the birthday paradox. In a room of twenty-three people, the probability that at least two share a birthday is roughly fifty percent. The result is counterintuitive because most readers compute the question as “what is the probability that someone shares MY birthday” (which is small) rather than the correct question of “what is the probability that ANY two people share ANY birthday” (which is much larger). The Lincoln-Kennedy list operates on the same cognitive bias. The reader implicitly computes “how many coincidences should I expect between Lincoln and Kennedy specifically” (small) rather than the correct question of “how many coincidences should I expect between any two long-lived, well-documented presidential biographies if I am willing to search across all possible categories of similarity” (large). Across the universe of categories (birth year, death day, name length, spouse details, child details, vice presidential details, place of education, professional history, religious background, military service, election margins, inaugural date, speech word counts), the expected number of coincidences between any two presidents is much higher than naive intuition predicts.

The 1992 Skeptical Inquirer reader contest demonstrated the principle empirically. Contestants were asked to construct Lincoln-Kennedy-style coincidence lists between Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, between Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, between Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt, and between Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Every contestant pair produced lists of comparable length and apparent strength. The Jefferson-Jackson list contained fifteen items of similar quality to the Lincoln-Kennedy list. The Roosevelt-Roosevelt list contained twenty-one items. The Cleveland-Roosevelt list contained thirteen. The Grant-Eisenhower list contained eighteen. None of these alternative lists has achieved the cultural penetration of the Lincoln-Kennedy list. The difference is not the strength of the parallels (the parallels are equivalent) but the trauma of the events that motivated the comparison.

The second mechanism is selection bias. The chain-letter author begins with the Lincoln-Kennedy pair (selected because both were assassinated) and then searches across categories of similarity for matches. The matches that survive the search are reported. The non-matches are not reported. This is the cleanest form of confirmation bias: the data set is filtered through a search procedure designed to find similarities, and the absence of dissimilarities is treated as confirmation. The full data set of Lincoln-Kennedy differences would fill many lists. Lincoln was a self-educated lawyer from frontier Illinois; Kennedy was a Harvard-educated Pulitzer-winning author from Boston-Brahmin Massachusetts. Lincoln spent his presidential career on a wartime crisis whose stakes were the survival of the nation; Kennedy spent his presidential career on a Cold War standoff whose stakes were the survival of civilization. Lincoln was a Republican; Kennedy was a Democrat. Lincoln was a Protestant from the most fervently Protestant region of American religion; Kennedy was the first and (as of 2008) only Catholic president. Lincoln’s wife was a Southern slaveholder’s daughter; Kennedy’s wife was a French-Catholic-Episcopalian East Coast socialite. The dissimilarities are vast. The list omits them.

The third mechanism is elastic criteria. The list’s matching criteria are loose enough to accept very different facts as parallels. The “both Southerners” claim treats nineteenth-century Maryland-Confederate-partisan and twentieth-century Louisiana-Marxist-defector as the same category. The “both assassinated by Southerners” claim ignores the political content of the two assassinations and treats geographic birthplace as the only criterion. The “warehouse to theater” claim accepts a tobacco-curing barn as a warehouse because the symmetry is more elegant if both halves use the word warehouse. The “Monroe to Marilyn Monroe” claim accepts that a town (Monroe, MD) and a person (Marilyn Monroe) can be conflated because both contain the surname Monroe. Across the fifteen claims, the criteria expand and contract to fit the available data. The contraction would be visible if the criteria were stated in advance. The chain-letter format makes the criteria invisible by presenting each claim as a discovered parallel rather than a constructed one.

The fourth mechanism is repetition. Repeated assertion creates the illusion of independent verification. A reader who has encountered the list twenty times across forty years experiences the twentieth encounter as confirmation of the first nineteen, even though the twentieth encounter is causally derived from the same chain-letter source. The illusion of multiple independent attestations is a well-documented mechanism in the psychology of belief, and was studied by Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino in 1977 (the “illusory truth effect”) and replicated extensively across the subsequent decades. The Lincoln-Kennedy list benefits from a half-century of repetition that creates phantom corroboration.

The fifth mechanism is post-traumatic pattern-seeking. The human cognitive system, when exposed to traumatic events, reaches for explanatory patterns more readily than under normal conditions. The trauma of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 motivated millions of Americans to seek meaning in the event, and the parallels-to-Lincoln framework offered a meaning-making structure. The list functioned as a quasi-religious or quasi-supernatural compensation for the disordering effect of the assassination on national identity. The same mechanism produced an outpouring of conspiracy theories in the months and years following Dallas, of which the parallels-to-Lincoln framework was the comparatively benign and undirected version. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in April 1861, recounted in detail in the Lincoln habeas corpus decision, provoked similarly intense meaning-making in its own century, with Copperhead pamphleteers constructing elaborate conspiracy narratives that bore the same cognitive signatures as the post-Dallas chain letters.

The interaction of these five mechanisms produces a list that feels uncanny even after the individual items are debunked. The reader can absorb the debunking of any single claim while retaining the overall impression that “something” is going on, because the residual impression is not produced by any single claim but by the cumulative force of the format. Removing one item from the list does not weaken the overall impression in proportion. The list’s emotional impact is approximately constant across debunking attempts, which is why the list has survived from 1964 to the present without significant erosion. The defense against this effect is not item-by-item debunking but pattern-level analysis: showing the reader that the same cognitive mechanisms produce arbitrary lists between any two well-documented figures, and that the apparent uncanniness is a property of the listing format rather than of the historical figures.

The Complication: Some Parallels Are Genuinely Striking

Honesty requires acknowledging that not every item on the list dissolves to nothing. The “both succeeded by Southerners named Johnson, born exactly one hundred years apart” claim at Item Nine, the “both wives lost a child in the White House” claim at Item Four, and the “Booth and Oswald both killed before trial” claim at Item Thirteen are real parallels that do not collapse to selection-bias artifacts under examination. The set of vice presidents who became president via the death of the incumbent is small. The set whose surnames are common but specifically Johnson is two of the small set. The set whose birth years differ by exactly a century is one pairing. The compound improbability of the Johnson-Johnson hundred-year alignment is genuinely modest and is the kind of fact that the supernatural-reading reader will treat as a center of gravity for the rest of the list.

The honest response is to acknowledge the modest residue of striking parallels while denying that the modest residue justifies the supernatural framing of the whole. Two or three genuine coincidences across the fifteen claims are within the range that the birthday-paradox mathematics predicts. The list claims fifteen striking coincidences and treats them all as evidence of cosmic patterning. The data support roughly two or three genuine coincidences with no patterning required. The remaining twelve are either banal, exaggerated, or fabricated. The list overstates by a factor of roughly five.

The Marilyn Monroe fabrication and the Lincoln-secretary-Kennedy fabrication are the most diagnostically significant because they prove that the list is not a careful compilation of documented parallels but a chain-letter accretion of items added because they sounded good regardless of factual support. A list that contains demonstrable fabrications cannot be trusted on its less verifiable items. The reader who notices the Monroe impossibility (fifteen months between her death and Kennedy’s assassination) has the diagnostic warning needed to approach the entire list with appropriate skepticism. The fabricated items function as test cases for the reader’s critical apparatus. A list that fails these test cases fails the standard for evidentiary reliability.

The “warehouse to theater” exaggeration is the second-most-diagnostically-significant because the alteration of “barn” to “warehouse” is documented in chain-letter copying across the 1965 through 1968 period. The alteration is not an honest mistake but a deliberate rhetorical improvement that has propagated through the cultural memory by repetition. The list has been edited over time to be more elegant than the documentary record supports. Once the reader knows that such editing has occurred, the assumption that the rest of the list is preserved in original form becomes untenable. The other items have likely been similarly polished. The list is not a primary source but a folkloric artifact.

The strongest defense of the list as a curiosity rather than a fraud is the line of argument that Gardner and Mikkelson both offered: the list functions as a pleasant cognitive game and a teaching opportunity. Pleasant cognitive game because the parallels, even when banal, provide the satisfaction of pattern recognition that the human mind finds intrinsically rewarding. Teaching opportunity because the list demonstrates, in compact form, the cognitive mechanisms that produce supernatural belief generally. A high-school or college statistics class can use the list as a case study in selection bias, post-hoc reasoning, and the birthday paradox, and students who absorb the lesson are inoculated against the broader class of paranormal claims that exploit the same mechanisms. The list’s pedagogical value is in its dissection rather than its acceptance.

The Verdict

The Lincoln-Kennedy assassination parallels list, in its fifteen-item canonical form, consists of approximately two genuine parallels (the Johnson-Johnson alignment at Item Nine, the wives’ lost children at Item Four), three forced-by-circumstance parallels that the assassination contexts compelled (Item Six head shots, Item Eight Southern births, Item Thirteen both killed before trial), four true-but-meaningless parallels that selection bias readily manufactures (Items One and Two election-year intervals, Item Three name letter counts, Item Five Friday shootings, Item Eleven assassin name letter counts, Item Fourteen Ford/Lincoln name pairings), four exaggerated parallels in which the documentary record has been polished for rhetorical effect (Item Seven Lincoln-named secretary fabrication paired with true Kennedy-named secretary, Item Ten Booth birth year inflation, Item Twelve warehouse-for-barn substitution), and two fabricated parallels in which the underlying claim is false (Item Seven Lincoln secretary claim, Item Fifteen Monroe place-name claim).

The list does not support its implicit thesis that cosmic patterning links the two assassinations. The list supports the explicit thesis that the human cognitive system, exposed to two traumatic events at a century’s interval, will manufacture as many parallels as the elastic criteria of folkloric matching permit. The matching procedure is the active ingredient. The historical figures are the raw material. Across any two raw-material sets of comparable richness and documentation, the same matching procedure will produce a comparable list. The Lincoln-Kennedy list is not unique. It is the famous instance of a generic cognitive artifact.

The verdict on each individual claim is recorded in the grading table at the head of the article. The verdict on the list as a whole is that the list is a folkloric curiosity that has been mistaken for evidence. The list illustrates the cognitive mechanisms that produce paranormal belief. The list does not justify the inference that the assassinations were cosmically linked, supernaturally patterned, or causally connected beyond the historical accidents of American politics.

The reader who absorbs only the grading table, with the four-grade rubric and the receipt for each entry, leaves the article with the analytical apparatus needed to dismantle similar lists encountered in the future. This is the article’s primary contribution. The Lincoln-Kennedy list is a particular case. The analytical apparatus is generalizable. The next chain letter or social-media post that proposes a series of “uncanny coincidences” between any two historical figures, any two products, any two events, any two political movements, will yield to the same procedure. Grade each claim. Identify the source. Note whether the claim is true, true-but-meaningless, exaggerated, or fabricated. The list will dissolve in approximately the same proportions as the Lincoln-Kennedy list. The exercise repays the time invested.

Legacy: Why the List Survives

The Lincoln-Kennedy list’s continued circulation, more than four decades after its initial publication and more than two decades after Gardner’s definitive debunking in 1985, reflects three features of the post-1963 American information environment that are larger than the list itself.

The first feature is the deep public distrust of official explanations that emerged from the Warren Commission’s 1964 report and that intensified across the subsequent decades. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot John F. Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission’s findings were challenged immediately by independent investigators and have remained contested. Gallup polling from 1964 through the present has consistently shown a majority of Americans believing that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. The Lincoln-Kennedy list operates as a substitute or supplement for the conspiracy framework: even readers who reject the specific conspiracy theories find the parallels-to-Lincoln framework congenial because it offers an alternative meaning-making structure when the official explanation is felt to be inadequate. The list survives because the underlying distrust survives, and the underlying distrust survives because the Warren Commission’s authority has not been restored.

The second feature is the rise of mass-media folklore as a substitute for verified history in the post-television information environment. Lloyd Shearer’s Parade magazine column of January 1968 introduced the list to fourteen million readers in a single Sunday. Reader’s Digest in 1970 reached a similar audience. In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy reached a comparable audience in 1977. The Lincoln-Kennedy list moved from chain-letter typescript to mass-cultural fact within four years and has remained mass-cultural fact for forty years. The mechanism of its persistence is the same mechanism that propagates other items of post-television folklore: urban-legend warnings about specific products, supposed quotes from historical figures, supposed photograph captions, and so on. Once an item reaches mass-cultural status, the cost of dislodging it exceeds the cost of any individual debunking effort. The list survives because the mass-cultural memory has set.

The third feature is the active use of the parallels framework by paranormal-and-conspiracy publishing. The list has been incorporated into the broader paranormal literature in ways that protect it from debunking. Works on “synchronicity,” “presidential curses,” “numerology,” and “hidden history” have cited the list as evidence for their broader claims. The list’s debunking, when it occurs, is treated by paranormal advocates as evidence of skeptical resistance rather than as evidence of fabrication. The closed epistemology of paranormal-belief communities makes the list immune to the kind of evidence that should dissolve it. The list survives in those communities because the communities have established immune defenses against the kind of evidence the debunking offers.

The historical figures the list pairs are themselves part of why the pairing matters. Lincoln and Kennedy occupy uniquely positioned roles in American national memory. Lincoln is the savior of the Union, the emancipator, the architect of modern executive power, and the martyr of Good Friday 1865. Kennedy is the Cold Warrior who navigated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the civil-rights pivot of June 1963, the moonshot orator, and the slain young leader cut down by Dallas. The two figures are the most-mythologized of the modern presidency. The list operates on the cultural surplus generated by the mythologization. A list between two less-mythologized presidents would lack the emotional resonance that makes the Lincoln-Kennedy version sticky. The trauma is the engine. The mythology is the fuel. The list is the visible byproduct.

The counterfactual question, asked in the if-Kennedy-lived counterfactual analysis, is whether a Kennedy who survived November 1963 would have been mythologized to the same degree as the slain Kennedy. The answer is almost certainly no. The mythologization is a function of the assassination, which is a function of the trauma, which is a function of the unanswered questions, which create the demand for meaning-making structures, of which the Lincoln-Kennedy list is one comparatively gentle example. Without the Dallas event, no Lincoln-Kennedy list. Without the demand for meaning, no list. Without the list, the cognitive mechanisms of selection bias and elastic criteria would still operate, but they would operate on different raw material. The mechanisms are independent of the raw material. The list is a single instantiation.

The most important legacy of the list is therefore meta-historical. The list demonstrates that the cognitive mechanisms that produce paranormal belief are not peripheral curiosities of fringe cultures but central features of mainstream American cognition. Millions of mainstream Americans, across forty years, have found the list compelling. The compelling quality is not a defect of marginal readers but a property of normal human pattern-recognition exposed to high-quality raw material under conditions of unresolved trauma. The list is the cleanest demonstration available of how the modal American mind processes the question of cosmic meaning in the post-Dallas era. Understanding the list is therefore understanding a feature of the era itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who actually wrote the original Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences list?

The earliest documented publication of the list is in the GOP Congress Committee Newsletter of August 13, 1964, edited at the time by John A. Curtis. Curtis later told the journalist Edwin O. Guthman that the list arrived in the office mail from an unnamed reader and was published because the newsletter needed copy and the submission seemed harmless. The unnamed reader has never been identified. Scholars who have examined the early versions of the list (Martin Gardner in 1985, David Mikkelson at Snopes in 1999) have not been able to trace the list to a specific named author. The most likely scenario is that an amateur historian or chain-letter author compiled the list privately in early 1964, sent copies to several newsletter editors in the months following Kennedy’s assassination, and one editor (Curtis at the GOP newsletter) printed it. The list’s pre-1964 prehistory, if any, is unknown.

Q: Are any of the fifteen coincidences exactly true with no qualifications?

Three claims are exactly true without qualification: that Lincoln was elected president in 1860 and Kennedy in 1960, that both were shot on Fridays, and that both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson. A fourth claim is true with a minor qualification: that both wives lost a child while living in the White House (Willie Lincoln died of typhoid in February 1862; Patrick Kennedy died of infant respiratory distress syndrome in August 1963). A fifth claim is technically true but rhetorically misleading: that Kennedy was shot in a Lincoln-brand vehicle made by Ford. The remaining ten claims are either true-but-meaningless (selection bias artifacts), exaggerated (true cores polished for rhetorical effect), or fabricated (no documentary basis). The list’s fifteen claims do not all stand at the same level of evidentiary support.

Q: What is the most fabricated single claim on the list?

Two claims are wholly fabricated. Claim Seven, the assertion that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, has no documentary basis in the White House staff records of 1861 through 1865. Lincoln’s secretaries were John Nicolay and John Hay; no Kennedy appears in any administrative record. Claim Fifteen, the assertion that Lincoln visited Monroe, Maryland the week before his assassination and that Kennedy was with Marilyn Monroe the week before his, is fabricated in both halves. No town named Monroe, Maryland exists in the U.S. Geological Survey records, and Marilyn Monroe had been dead since August 1962, fifteen months before the Kennedy assassination. The Monroe-place claim and the Marilyn-Monroe-person claim were paired by a chain-letter author who valued rhetorical symmetry over factual accuracy. Both fabrications continue to circulate in chain-letter and social-media versions of the list despite four decades of debunking.

Q: Did Kennedy actually have a secretary named Lincoln?

Yes. Evelyn Lincoln (born Evelyn Norton in Polk County, Nebraska on June 25, 1909) served as Kennedy’s personal secretary from his entry into the U.S. Senate in 1953 through the day of his assassination in November 1963. She had married Harold “Abe” Lincoln in 1930, which is how she acquired the Lincoln surname. Her memoir, My Twelve Years With John F. Kennedy, was published in 1965 and contains her account of urging Kennedy to reconsider the Texas trip on November 21, 1963 on grounds of crowd-security concerns. The half of Claim Seven that asserts Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln is true. The reverse half of the claim is the fabrication: there was no Lincoln-administration secretary named Kennedy.

Q: Was Lincoln warned not to go to Ford’s Theatre that night?

Lincoln received several warnings of various reliability across the days leading to April 14, 1865, but none specifically from a secretary named Kennedy. William H. Crook, one of Lincoln’s bodyguards (not a secretary), reportedly urged Lincoln earlier in the day to take additional security precautions for the evening’s outing. Lincoln declined. The general atmosphere of warning around Lincoln in early 1865 was high; he had received numerous death threats throughout his presidency and had told his cabinet on April 14 of a dream in which he had seen his own funeral. The chain-letter version of Claim Seven that asserts a secretary named Kennedy warned Lincoln is fabricated. The general truth of which the fabrication is a distorted echo is that Lincoln did receive warnings, from various sources, that he disregarded.

Q: Was Kennedy warned not to go to Dallas?

Yes, by multiple advisers. Evelyn Lincoln urged reconsideration on November 21 on security grounds. Kenneth O’Donnell and Lawrence O’Brien, Kennedy’s political advisers, had reservations about the Texas swing because of the political tensions within the Texas Democratic Party between Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Senator Ralph Yarborough. Senator J. William Fulbright had warned Kennedy in early 1963 that Dallas in particular was a hostile city, citing the October 1963 incident in which Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been struck with a placard by an anti-United Nations protester. Kennedy went anyway because the political calculation of needing to reconcile the Texas Democratic factions for the 1964 reelection campaign outweighed the security concerns. The historical reality of the warnings is real; the specific claim that “Kennedy’s secretary named Lincoln warned him not to go to Dallas” is a true-on-the-secretary-name but selective on the warning details version of a broader true story.

Q: How did Booth’s birth year get changed from 1838 to 1839 in the list?

The misstatement of Booth’s birth year as 1839 traces to several possible sources. The 1964 GOP Congress Committee Newsletter version gave 1839, possibly because the author was working from an unreliable secondary source, possibly because the author noted the 1838 date and rounded for the sake of the exact-century parallel with Oswald’s 1939 birth, or possibly because the author’s notes were imprecise. Once the 1839 figure entered the list, subsequent reprints inherited it without verification. By the late 1960s, the 1839 figure was so widespread that even readers who knew Booth was born in 1838 sometimes assumed they had misremembered. The actual Booth birth date of May 10, 1838 is documented in the Booth family Bible held in the Folger Shakespeare Library and in the genealogical records reproduced in Stanley Kimmel’s The Mad Booths of Maryland (1940). The interval between Booth’s 1838 birth and Oswald’s 1939 birth is one hundred and one years, not the exactly one hundred that the list claims.

Q: Is there any way the Lincoln-Kennedy parallels could indicate something supernatural?

No reasonable interpretation of the documentary record supports a supernatural inference. The parallels are a mixture of forced-by-circumstance facts (both shot in the head from behind, because the geometry of presidential assassination requires this), genuine but unremarkable coincidences (both succeeded by Johnsons born a century apart), exaggerated claims (Booth and Oswald birth interval), and fabrications (the Lincoln secretary named Kennedy, the Monroe Maryland visit). The cognitive mechanisms that make the list feel uncanny (birthday-paradox logic, selection bias, elastic criteria, repetition, post-traumatic pattern-seeking) are well-understood features of human cognition and are documented across many other folkloric coincidence lists between unrelated historical figures. A supernatural framing of the list requires ignoring the documented mechanisms by which lists of this kind are generated. The supernatural framing is not supported by the receipts.

Q: Why does the Marilyn Monroe claim persist when she died over a year before Kennedy’s assassination?

The Marilyn Monroe claim persists because the rhetorical elegance of the parallel (Monroe place name in 1865, Monroe person name in 1963) is satisfying enough that the dates are overlooked. Readers who pick up the list assume that the documentary basis must exist somewhere and do not verify the dates. Once a sufficient number of readers have accepted the claim without verification, the claim achieves the status of common knowledge that subsequent readers do not feel the need to check. The mechanism is the illusory-truth effect described in cognitive psychology since the 1977 Hasher-Goldstein-Toppino study. The Marilyn Monroe claim is also useful as a diagnostic: a reader who flags the Monroe-Kennedy date impossibility (Monroe died August 5, 1962; Kennedy was assassinated November 22, 1963) has the critical apparatus to dismantle the rest of the list. The claim’s persistence reflects the absence of such critical reading across the broad audience that has encountered the list.

Q: Did anybody other than Martin Gardner and Snopes seriously debunk the list?

Yes, several. The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, edited at the time by Kendrick Frazier, conducted a reader contest in 1992 inviting readers to construct equivalent coincidence lists between any two unrelated American historical figures. The contest demonstrated that the Lincoln-Kennedy list’s parallels are not unique but are reproducible at comparable strength between many other pairings. The journalist Gerald Posner, in Case Closed (1993), addressed the list in the context of his broader treatment of the Kennedy assassination. The historian James Loewen, in Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), used the list as a case study in the kinds of folkloric history that crowd out documented history in popular memory. The cognitive scientist Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So (1991) treated the list as a paradigmatic example of selection-bias artifacts in popular reasoning. The list has been comprehensively debunked across multiple disciplines and has continued to circulate regardless of the debunkings.

Q: What were the actual political circumstances of each assassination?

Lincoln was assassinated five days after the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Booth, a Confederate partisan, killed Lincoln in revenge for the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery. The motivation was explicitly political and explicitly Confederate. Kennedy was assassinated during a Texas reelection tour in November 1963. Oswald, a confused Marxist and Soviet defector, killed Kennedy for reasons that have been intensively studied and remain contested in their precise mixture of personal grievance, ideological commitment to Castro’s Cuba, and the desire for historical significance. The Warren Commission’s 1964 finding was that Oswald acted alone and that no conspiracy could be established. Subsequent investigations have challenged this conclusion to varying degrees. The two assassinations are politically dissimilar in their causes despite the parallels in their methods. The list elides the political dissimilarities.

Q: How does the Lincoln-Kennedy list compare to other presidential coincidence lists?

It is the most famous example of a class of folkloric artifacts that propagate through chain-letter and mass-media channels. Other examples include the “Tecumseh’s Curse” or “Zero-Year Curse” claim that presidents elected in years ending in zero die in office (which held from William Henry Harrison through Kennedy but was broken by Reagan surviving his 1981 shooting), the various Roosevelt-Eisenhower parallels lists that circulated briefly in the 1950s, and the Reagan-Lincoln parallels that surfaced briefly in the 1980s after Reagan’s shooting. None of these other lists achieved the cultural penetration of the Lincoln-Kennedy version. The reason is the combined factors of the post-Dallas information environment, the Parade magazine and Reader’s Digest mass-cultural reach in the late 1960s, and the inherent mythological weight of the Lincoln and Kennedy figures in American national memory. The Lincoln-Kennedy list is the canonical case but not the only case.

Q: What is the “Tecumseh’s Curse” and is it related?

The Tecumseh’s Curse is a separate folkloric claim that presidents elected in years ending in zero die in office, supposedly because Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa pronounced a curse on William Henry Harrison after Harrison’s military defeat of Shawnee forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811. Harrison, elected in 1840, died in office in 1841. Lincoln, elected in 1860, died in office in 1865. Garfield, elected 1880, died 1881. McKinley, elected 1900, died 1901. Harding, elected 1920, died 1923. Roosevelt, elected 1940, died 1945. Kennedy, elected 1960, died 1963. The pattern held for seven consecutive zero-year-elected presidents across one hundred and twenty years. Reagan, elected 1980, survived his March 1981 shooting and broke the pattern. The Tecumseh’s Curse and the Lincoln-Kennedy list share the supernatural-framing structure but operate on different parallels. Both rely on the same cognitive mechanisms of selection bias and pattern-seeking. Neither carries supernatural force on examination.

Q: How long did the original 1964 GOP newsletter list of coincidences run?

The August 13, 1964 GOP Congress Committee Newsletter version of the list contained sixteen items, of which fifteen have survived into the canonical modern version. The sixteenth item, which has been dropped from most modern reprints, concerned the supposed parallel that both Lincoln and Kennedy received the news of their election victories late at night in their homes. This item was either exaggerated (both did receive the news late, but the parallel is forced by the historical fact that telegraph and television technologies of the respective eras delivered election results in the evening of the election day) or fabricated (depending on the version), and modern reprints have generally dropped it. The list grew rather than shrank in subsequent decades, with the Marilyn Monroe claim, the warehouse-to-theater claim, and several other items added in chain-letter copying across 1965 through 1968. The modern fifteen-item version is the result of selection pressures favoring rhetorically elegant claims and disfavoring claims whose factual basis was easily checked.

Q: Could you construct a similar coincidence list between any two presidents?

Yes, easily, and the 1992 Skeptical Inquirer reader contest demonstrated the principle. Take any two American presidents with well-documented biographies, search across at least a dozen categories of similarity (election years, birth years, family details, military service, education, religion, geographic origin, vice presidential succession, surname letter counts, inauguration dates, signature legislation, foreign-policy crises, cabinet members, spouse details, child details), and the search will yield approximately fifteen parallels of strength comparable to the Lincoln-Kennedy list. The pairing of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson yields a fifteen-item list. The pairing of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt yields twenty-one items. The pairing of Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt yields thirteen. These alternative lists are not famous because no traumatic event has motivated their compilation. The Lincoln-Kennedy list is famous because the trauma of the two assassinations created the demand for meaning-making structures of which the list is one example.

Q: What is the cognitive mechanism that produces lists like this?

Several mechanisms operate together. The birthday paradox describes how readily two members of a small group will share a feature when the criteria for sharing are loose. Selection bias describes how chain-letter authors search across categories until they find matches and then report only the matches. Elastic criteria describes how the matching standard expands and contracts to accept different facts as parallels (Maryland-Confederate-partisan and Louisiana-Marxist-defector both count as “Southerners” for purposes of the list). Repetition or illusory-truth describes how repeated assertion creates the impression of independent verification even when all assertions derive from a single source. Post-traumatic pattern-seeking describes the heightened demand for meaning-making structures following traumatic public events. The five mechanisms together produce a list that feels uncanny in proportion not to the strength of any individual claim but to the cumulative format of fifteen claims presented as if equally true.

Q: Does the list count as a conspiracy theory?

The list occupies a position adjacent to conspiracy theory rather than within it. The list does not claim that any specific actor (a foreign power, a domestic cabal, a hidden organization) caused the parallels. The list claims only that the parallels exist and invites the reader to draw whatever inference suits the reader. Some readers infer divine patterning, some infer fate or destiny, some infer numerological order, some infer hidden conspiracy, some infer cosmic absurdity. The list itself is silent on the inference. This silence is a feature rather than a bug: the list reaches the widest audience by committing to no particular metaphysical framework. Conspiracy theories proper require a named perpetrator and a specific concealed action. The Lincoln-Kennedy list requires neither. The list is therefore a kind of pre-conspiracy or proto-conspiracy framework that operates on the same cognitive substrate as full conspiracy theories without committing to their specific claims.

Q: Are there academic sources that treat the list seriously?

A few academic works have used the list as a case study in folkloric history, popular cognition, or paranormal-belief epistemology. James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995) treats the list as an example of folkloric items that displace documented history in popular memory. Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So (1991) uses the list to illustrate selection-bias artifacts in popular reasoning. Martin Gardner’s The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix (1985) provides the canonical numerological-debunking treatment. No serious academic work treats the list as evidence of supernatural patterning, and no historian of either the Lincoln or Kennedy administrations has integrated the list into mainstream scholarly accounts of either assassination. The list lives entirely in the popular, journalistic, and paranormal-literature corners of American letters. Mainstream history regards the list as folklore and treats it as such.

Q: What happens if you remove the fabricated claims from the list?

The list contracts to thirteen items, of which approximately five remain genuinely striking (the Johnson-Johnson alignment, both wives losing children, the Friday shootings, both shot from behind, both succeeded by Johnsons of similar Southern background). Five striking parallels between two presidents over the course of their lives and assassinations is roughly what the birthday-paradox mathematics predict for any two well-documented presidential biographies. The remaining items are either true-but-meaningless or exaggerated. The contracted list does not generate the uncanny feeling that the canonical fifteen-item list generates. The uncanniness is a property of the fifteen-item format. Once the format is contracted, the format-effect dissipates. This is the strongest evidence that the cognitive mechanism producing the uncanny feeling is the list format itself, not the underlying parallels.