Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. As you know, President's Day is celebrated on the third Monday in February. While it was originally established to honor the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln,

it's now popularly viewed as a day to honor all U.S. presidents.

The deaths of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and other presidents

plunged the nation into grief and left a lasting mark on us as a country.

Our guest on this episode is grief crisis

consultant Harold Ivan Smith, who's written many books on grief and is an expert on the topic

of presidential and White House grief. Harold, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Thank you for inviting me. Tell us how you became interested in this topic of presidential grief.

I was an undergraduate major, was in history, primarily American history.

And then when I went through mortuary school and then my graduate studies,

I became very interested in how presidents grieve and how particularly presidents grieves

and American public grief for that president impacted events.

For example, if you look at the great Theodore Roosevelt, who was one of the five or six

greatest presidents, yet he only became president after McKinley was assassinated.

And that really thrust him into greatness.

And he was an incredibly take charge man.

You know, he wasn't big on mourning and grief because, after all, you know, he was vice president.

Now he was president.

And he was trying to get on and run the country and to dispel any doubt that he was fully capable of being president.

Matter of fact, you know, he'd only been put on the ticket to get him out of New York, where he was the governor.

And it was funny because when McKinley died, a guy named Mark Hanna, who was a big political boss, said, you know, the damn cowboy is now president.

And they were all, the country is going to go down the tube, and they were all the country is going to go down

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