Aug. 9, 1963 - Patrick Bouvier Kennedy is the fifth child of a sitting President to die. Children of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge also died while their fathers were serving as President. Patrick Kennedy, the second son of President and Mrs. Kennedy, was only two days old when he died early today in Boston. The other children who died during a Presidential term were older — in fact, two were adults. The first was Charles Adams. He was married and 30 years old when he died of a respiratory illness on November 30, 1800, toward the end of his father’s second term. Mary Jefferson, known as Polly in childhood and Maria as an adult, also was married when she died in 1804 at the age of 25 during the first term of Thomas Jefferson. She had never recovered physically from her third childbirth. William Wallace Lincoln (pictured), known as Willie, was 11 when he died of typhoid fever at the White House on February 20, 1862, during his father’s first term. President Calvin Coolidge’s 16-year-old son died on July 7, 1924. The boy, Calvin Coolidge — who was not a “junior” because his father’s full name was John Calvin Coolidge — developed a blister on his toe while playing tennis on the White House courts without having put on socks. The resulting infection spread, and young Coolidge died of blood poisoning less than a year after his father had assumed the Presidency on Aug. 3, 1923. President Coolidge blamed himself for his son’s death and is said to have never fully recovered from the tragedy. He wrote in his autobiography: “When he [Calvin] went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”
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