When Joe Biden when a country’s 46th president was sworn in, he joined an exclusive but lesser-known club of those who had come before.
Joe Biden’s full name is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. He is one of ten other commander-in-chiefs throughout history named after their fathers. Others in the group include James Madison Jr., Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Calvin Coolidge Jr.
Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, told CBS News’ Dana Jacobson he was not surprised that presidents did not use the ‘junior’ distinction.
“I’m not surprised that presidents or any politician would choose not to call themselves junior. For what is the word junior, but small? It is to say that you are something less, or at most a copy of something, he said. said. “So we see presidents who have spent most of their lives junior, but if they honestly wanted to get a public career, they wanted their own name and not have to borrow someone else’s.”
The first president to wear the junior suffix was the second to hold the post: John Adams Jr.
There are many club members in the modern era – including the 38th president Gerald Ford who has been named junior twice. Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., but his parents divorced. He would later change his name to honor his stepfather to marry Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr.
Ford’s successor’s name is really James Earl Carter Jr. – but he changed it in his political career to Jimmy Carter.
Former President Barack Hussein Obama also bears the name of his father, but his parents preferred to add the Roman numeral II instead of the suffix junior.
George W. Bush, son of George HW Bush, family members have long been known as ‘junior’, although the various middle initials technically do not keep him out of the presidential junior club.
“There’s really no reason for George Bush 43 to refer to himself as a junior, although people in the natural language naturally looked at the names and said they sound alike,” Engel said. “He is often referred to as a junior through his early part of his life.”
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