Parallels between murderous events
| Murder of President Lincoln, 4/14/1865 |
Parallel similarity |
Murder of President Kennedy, 11/22/63 |
Lincoln told of a premonitory dream of his murder |
both victims had premonitions of their murders |
Kennedy told his wife, hours before, that someone might want to shoot him with a rifle from the window of a building, according to his aide Kenneth O'Donnell's 1972 book |
Friday evening |
both were killed after noon, on a Friday |
Friday afternoon |
in Ford's Theater |
name similarities |
in a Ford Lincoln Continental |
| died the next morning |
both were killed by gunshot wounds to the back of the head, from which they never regained consciousness |
killed instantly
|
| John Wilkes Booth |
each was killed by a man with 15 letters in his name |
Lee Harvey Oswald
|
| Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee |
each was succeeded in office by a man from the former Confederacy, surnamed Johnson |
Lyndon Johnson, of Texas
|
| Lincoln & Grant had allowed the former Army of Northern Virginia to freely leave
|
each had profound qualms about popular desires to punish large groups of people |
Kennedy intended to withdraw US forces from Vietnam after the 1964 election, and had an order (which was rescinded the weekend after he was killed) in effect to withdraw 1600 troops
|