How Ronald Reagan Broke the ‘Curse of Tecumseh’ by Surviving an Assassination Attempt

In a 1973 logic class at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, I learned that for over a hundred years, every U.S. president elected in a year ending in zero died in office.

Our professor said that people didn’t just notice the pattern – they gave it a title: “The Curse of Tecumseh.”

William Henry Harrison (1840), Abraham Lincoln (1860), James Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren Harding (1920), Franklin Roosevelt (1940), and John F. Kennedy (1960) – seven presidents in a row, each elected in a zero-year, each dying before finishing the job.

Statisticians who studied long-running patterns like this classify it as a textbook case of the “law of small numbers,” the brain’s tendency to see an ironclad rule in what’s actually a short, coincidental streak.

At a Glance: The Zero-Year Streak

William Henry Harrison – elected 1840, died in office 1841
Abraham Lincoln – elected 1860, assassinated 1865
James Garfield – elected 1880, assassinated 1881
William McKinley – elected 1900, assassinated 1901
Warren Harding – elected 1920, died in office 1923
Franklin Roosevelt – elected 1940, died in office 1945
John F. Kennedy – elected 1960, assassinated 1963

With only a handful of data points and zero plausible mechanism linking election years to assassination or illness risk, mathematicians treat this the same way they’d treat a coin landing heads seven times in a row – memorable, not meaningful.

I waited around after the 1980 election when Ronald Reagan won. Thankfully, he survived an assassination attempt and broke the streak entirely.