Happy 50th Birthday, Mr. President!

President Obama turned 50 today. He is now one of three presidents to turn 50 in office - who were the other two?

So what was Obama's birthday like?
After spending the morning of his milestone birthday working in the Oval Office, the president headed to the Blue Room of the White House for a celebration with top aides. White House chefs were spotted cooking chicken and burgers on outdoor grills.

Later, Mr Obama was celebrating with family and friends, including some who came in from his hometown of Chicago, in the Rose Garden. The president's oldest daughter, Malia, also made it home from summer camp in time to celebrate her dad's 50th.

Even on her husband's birthday, Michelle Obama couldn't resist poking fun at his greying hair.

...During a video conference with some of the more than 1000 birthday-theme house parties his supporters held coast-to-coast yesterday, Mr Obama got a serenade from a group in North Carolina, while supporters in Ohio held up signs wishing the president a happy 50th.

The Obama family will cap their birthday celebrations with a weekend trip to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.

Check out this site for other presidential birthdays. Here's a fun tidbit on FDR's birthday:

At one of the 6,000 parties thrown in honor of Franklin Roosevelt's birthday in 1934, 52 young girls — one for each year of the President's life — paraded through New York City's Waldorf-Astoria hotel wearing frothy white satin-and-chiffon gowns topped with hats shaped like triple-tiered birthday cakes. Each carried in her right hand a long pink electric candle. Clumping into the shape of a birthday cake, they held the candles over their heads, switched on their battery-powered flames and sang "Happy Birthday to You." (Roosevelt also received numerous real cakes among the hundreds of gifts sent to the White House; one, from Los Angeles, weighed 250 lb.)

McKinley Presidential Library and Museum

So this place is a bit of a misnomer. There is a research library here if you are interested in actual research (of course, call ahead to make sure they have what you are particularly interested in, just like any research library). This is also where McKinley is buried (as is Ida and their daughters) in a huge, very Victorian, mausoleum.

But a museum on McKinley? Let's say that's a stretch. There IS a gallery devoted to McKinley, but that's it. This is a kids' museum, complete with dinosaurs and live animals. There is nothing wrong with it, but be warned! We actually took my three year old to this last month to give you an idea. I was very surprised when I first went a few years ago (I was also not personally impressed by the gallery, but I probably know too much).

If you want a good museum on McKinley, either go to the Saxon House, which is devoted to First Ladies and Ida McKinley, or go to Niles, Ohio, and tour the Birthplace Museum. I have not actually been the birthplace museum (on my list) even though it is less than an hour away because it has terrible hours so call ahead if you want to go.

What did Adams' say?

Okay, so we all know that Adams and Jefferson died the same day and I've seen those pieces that argue that it is a myth that Adams said "Jefferson survives." While I've read that Adams mentioned it, so I decided to investigate as those bugged as all the rest of the "myths" I knew and this one just grated at me. So I actually looked up the citation in McCullough's tome and requested the letter from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Susan Boylston Adams Clark wrote a letter to Abigail Louisa Smith Adams Johnson (dated 9 July 1826), which which she describes John Adams' last hours. This was among the remembrances:
The family was all assembled in the Chamber, and as Thomas and myself were sitting on the bed we heard him whisper “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

That's my transcription of the photocopy they sent me, but her handwriting is actually pretty easy to read (it says don't reproduce, hence I'm not scanning in my photocopy, which would be pretty poor anyway with the double copy). So those as some of his last words have their basis in fact. Just saying.....

Now why they died on the same day...there are lots of possible reasons for that, even just coincidence. This is an interesting piece on that topic:
Each of these six explanations for the same-day deaths of Adams and Jefferson is inadequate on its face: the coincidence is too great; divine intervention requires background theological assumptions beyond the scope of rational explanation; “hanging on” and “giving up” require pathophysiological assumptions not well understood; and the various forms of direct-causation explanations, including inadvertent or deliberate allowing to die, physician or family-performed euthanasia, and suicide, all suffer from a lack of compelling evidence. It isn’t necessary that the explanation of the cause of death be the same for both Adams and Jefferson; yet whatever each explanation involves, it must attend to the remarkable synchrony of their deaths.

Furthermore, the issue of synchrony—whatever the individual explanations for their deaths—also leaves us with the further question of coordination. Did Adams and Jefferson think alike but act independently? Could they have had some joint understanding, reached perhaps in 1813—when each had been corresponding with a physician, Adams with Benjamin Rush about a horse’s deliberate stumble and Jefferson with Samuel Brown about lethal drugs—that they then recalled later on? Did their physicians or families think alike but act independently, or perhaps in concert? Could their families and caregivers have lied about the precise dates of their deaths, seeking to lend their demises a greater grandeur? Or was there a more orchestrated plan here, known only to these two men or to their physicians and families, that accounts for the extraordinary “coincidence” or “grand design” of their deaths? Could it have been the mode, so to speak, to die on the 4th if at all possible, by whatever means? After all, not just Adams and Jefferson, but three of the first five presidents of the young United States died on the 4th of July. In 1831, just five years after the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, James Monroe, the fifth president, did so as well.

Given the insufficient historical evidence available, we can’t know the truth about why Adams and Jefferson died on the same day. But we can reflect on whether it would make a difference to us if one or another of these explanations turned out to be true. After all, the six possibilities these explanations raise are central to the very questions about death and dying that are so controversial today: disputes over withdrawing and withholding treatment, allowing one to die, the overuse of morphine, terminal sedation, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia.

Two quite different postures are in competition in these disputes. One insists that the patient play a comparatively passive role in accepting death when it comes—whether it is explained as the product of divine intervention, sheer coincidence, or failure to hang on. The other casts the patient in a potentially active role, as the intender or designer or cause of his own death, whether he deliberately gives up or actively brings about death. Where we stand with respect to these two basic postures may influence how we explain the deaths of Adams and Jefferson.