Here we are. It's possibly the most anticipated episode of the podcast. We're going to talk

about William Henry Harrison, who's the president who gave us the longest inaugural address.

It was nearly two hours long, and then had the shortest presidency. He was in office for

32 days, and then he died. And the story goes that he died from pneumonia because it was

a cold rainy day when he gave that speech, and he refused to wear a coat. I died a month later.

William Henry Harrison's tragedy has become the laughing stock of presidential history.

And so I knew exactly who to ask to be the main guest for this week's episode, and that's

Alexandra Petri, who is the Washington Post's opinion writer and humor columnist.

And I feel like presidential history would have suffered a great loss if Harrison hadn't died.

Harrison's death is kind of ironically one of the things that really brings

presidential history to life. Yeah, I agree. I think he also serves as a valuable cautionary tale,

because the trend towards longer and longer inaugural speeches can only be stopped when somebody

literally dies 32 days into office. Whether or not that's actually correlated to his speech,

it's a good thing to point to and say, you know, don't want to wind up like William Henry Harrison here.

Well, in this episode, we're going to debunk that classic story that his long speech

is what did him in. And the other thing we're going to investigate is the backstory of his catchy

campaign slogan, Tipeek Knew and Tyler II. I'm Lillian Cunningham at the Washington Post, and this

is the ninth episode of presidential.

William Henry Harrison was president from 1841 to 1841.

A Fintil Ronald Reagan, Harrison was the oldest man to ever be elected president. He was 68

years old when he took the oath of office. He was also the first president to ever die on the job,

raising a ton of questions that the founding fathers hadn't quite thought through about what's

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