Rutherford Hayes was the first U.S president to visit San Francisco. Since that 1880 trip most presidents have made it a point to come here at least once. Some, like Bill Clinton, come often. But not every president has had the time of his life here, nor have they always been treated with the respect one holding our nation’s highest office might feel they deserve. A few cases in point are:
Warren G. Harding
Darling of the Teapot Dome scandal, Republican Warren G. Harding is often ranked as the worst president of all time (but let’s give W a few years). Harding died on August 2, 1923 in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. He was 57 years old. While it’s likely a heart attack got him, speculation over the years has run rampant. Food poisoning, stroke, pneumonia, cardiogenic pulmonary edema and even assassination by wife or mistress have been bandied about.
But hands down the most entertaining speculation into Harding’s death is a report by The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency. The report claims that Harding was first bitten by a vampire on a boat ride on the San Francisco Bay and then poisoned to put him out of his misery.
William McKinley
Nothing bad happened to Republican President William McKinley here in San Francisco, but Yellow Pressman William Randolph Hearst took a bit of heat for having published a darkly suggestive ditty written by famed curmudgeon Ambrose Bierce. Riffing off the assassination of Kentucky Governor William Goebel in 1900, Bierce wrote:
“The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.”
The following year McKinley, too, was gunned down.
Gerald Ford
It’s a pretty safe bet that California wasn’t President Gerald Ford’s favorite state — particularly after his double-whammy Sacramento and San Francisco greetings in September of 1975. On September 5, 1975 Manson Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to ventilate Ford in Sacramento. A couple weeks later Sara Jane Moore did the same outside the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square.
Both Fromme and Moore received life sentences for their efforts, and both were released following Ford’s death (from natural causes) in 2006. Interestingly, Moore was less than entirely contrite over her failed assassination attempt. In a 2009 NBC Today Show interview she told anchorman Matt Lauer, “I am glad that I didn’t kill [Ford], but I don’t regret trying.”
Barack Obama
Barack Obama’s San Francisco misadventure occurred at a Gold-Coaster Getty Mansion fundraiser in the heat of his campaign for the presidency. It wasn’t of the physical injury sort, but was an unexpected political guffaw, nonetheless.
Amidst champagne and beluga hand-gladding with donor billionaires, centimillionaires and old fashion heirs and heiresses, Obama was recorded making remarks construed to lack sensitivity to rednecks:
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Personally, I think he pretty much nailed it, but Fox and Limbaugh had a field day with his remarks.
