Thomas “Tad” Lincoln was just 8 years old when he arrived in Washington, D.C., to live at the White House after his father was sworn into office in March 1861. However, the earliest known sparing of a holiday bird can be traced to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was presented with a Christmas turkey destined for the dinner table and his young, precocious son Tad intervened. “He’s been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here.”īush pardoned a turkey in each remaining year of his presidency, as has every president since. “Not this guy,” Bush said when a holiday turkey was presented. Reagan joked that if that year’s turkey had not already been destined for a petting farm, “I would have pardoned him.” Oliver North or any of the other figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Ronald Reagan was the first president to use the word “pardon” in connection with a Thanksgiving turkey, in 1987, in response to media queries about whether he might pardon Lt. Just days before that year’s Thanksgiving, he was assassinated in Dallas. Kennedy simply announced that he would not eat the bird, and newspapers reported that the president had “pardoned” the gobbler given to him by the California Turkey Advisory Board. Kennedy became the first president to see the word “pardon” used with reference to a Thanksgiving turkey, but he did not officially spare a bird in a pre-Thanksgiving ceremony in the Rose Garden. But there’s no evidence that Truman did anything different from his successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, who, with his family, consumed all eight birds the NTF presented them. It's believed that the Thanksgiving tradition of the President pardoning a turkey dates back to 1947, when President Harry Truman, standing outside the White House, was presented with a holiday bird by the National Turkey Federation.
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