Presidents who have visited Idaho, and what you may not know about America’s former leaders
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IDAHO FALLS – For 133 years, Idaho’s abundance of national parks and historical sites have made it a popular place for people to visit, including U.S. leaders.
President Joe Biden visited Idaho in September 2021 to survey wildfire damage in the west. That trip was Biden’s second visit to the Gem State, according to Boise NBC affiliate KTVB. His other visit to Idaho happened in 2009 as vice president when he attended the Special Olympics Winter Games.
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Obscure facts about U.S. Presidents
Note: All presidential facts come from Mashable and LegendsofAmerica.com, unless otherwise specified.
- The fourth president, James Madison, is the shortest president to date. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall. At 100 pounds, he was also the lightest.
- Martin Van Buren was the eighth president and the first one to be born an American citizen. Prior to him, all presidents were born in Britain.
- The 15th president, James Buchanan, was the only bachelor to hold office.
- During Rutherford B. Hayes’ presidency, the 19th president, Alexander Graham Bell installed the first telephone at the White House. The phone number was 1.
- William Taft was the largest U.S. President. At 332 pounds, he got stuck in the White House bathtub the first time he used it. A larger one was later ordered.
- Warren Harding, the 29th president, had the largest shoe size. Harding wore a size 14. He was also the first president to speak over the radio.
- Thirty-fifth President John F. Kennedy was the first president to hold a press conference on television. At age 43, he was also the youngest man to serve as president.
- In China, the most well-known Western names are Jesus Christ, Elvis Presley, and Richard Nixon, who was the nation’s 37th President. Nixon, the first U.S. president to visit the Asian country, spent a week there in February 1972.
- When Ronald Reagan was elected as the nation’s 40th president, he was 69-years-old. At that time, he was the oldest person elected to the office. This distinction will eventually fall upon Joe Biden, who will be 81 at the end of his term.
- Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan have two things in common, aside from their political affiliation. They are the only presidents who have been divorced and worked in the entertainment industry.
Idaho had been a territory for nearly 30 years when President Benjamin Harrison officially made Idaho the nation’s 43rd state on July 3, 1890. He later paid a visit to the Gem State and planted a tree at the Statehouse in Boise.
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“Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft also visited Idaho while in office, and planted trees near Harrison’s tree,” KTVB reports.
Then in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson visited the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho. Since then, every sitting president has visited Idaho at least once while in office — except one.
Cormac O’Brien, author of “Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents,” tells EastIdahoNews.com it was Donald Trump who broke that streak. He’d never set foot in Idaho when he left office in January 2021.
“In Trump’s calculation, he thought he didn’t have to (visit Idaho) during his presidency because so much of what was important to Trump was his popularity and image. He, or his staff, felt he wasn’t going to lose anything by not going,” O’Brien says. “I think he would’ve gone if he felt his numbers slipping in Idaho.”
But America’s 45th president did meet with former Idaho Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin in November 2021 at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. He officially endorsed McGeachin for Governor five days later. Voters ultimately re-elected Brad Little for a second term, who earned 60% of the vote in the November election.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, also came to Idaho in 2019 to visit Yellowstone National Park.
‘Ordinary and weird just like the rest of us’
O’Brien’s book highlights the “strange stories and shocking trivia from inside the White House,” providing readers “hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright wacko facts” about America’s Commanders-in-chief.
His book was originally published in 2004 but is updated every time a new president takes office. In researching for the book, O’Brien says it’s been interesting and ironic to learn how much the American people “rely on very ordinary people to be our head of state.”
“They bring with them all these foibles and baggage, sometimes violent pasts,” says O’Brien. “What I love is that these guys are ordinary and weird just like the rest of us and yet they’re elevated to the highest office in the land, the most powerful position in the world, despite all those things.”
O’Brien says the way Americans view the presidency has evolved over the years. William McKinley, whom O’Brien considers to be the most underrated president, established what O’Brien terms “the beginnings of the American empire.” At that time, America went to war with Spain after a mysterious explosion of the U.S.S. Main in the Havana harbor in Cuba.
This conflict, now known as the Spanish-American War, resulted in the U.S. acquiring Cuba, the Philippines and other territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.
McKinley’s role in leading the charge in this conflict established what O’Brien describes as an “Imperial Presidency.”
“Instead of just the Chief Executive who is the guy who sits in the White House and signs bills and has generals answer to him, now he’s the face of the nation, and in many ways, the most important of the three branches of government. He’s out front and he’s leading affairs in a way that would’ve been uncomfortable to the founders,” O’Brien explains.
As a result, O’Brien says McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, had more executive power than any previous president.
Presidential campaigns are another way the office of the President has evolved over the years. What once was considered a dignified office not to be flaunted on the public stage to earn votes now has a ubiquitous public presence, he says.
Campaign season for the 2024 presidential election is already underway. Former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley announced her White House bid last week, becoming the first Republican challenger to former President Donald Trump. Trump kicked off his second presidential campaign in November. If re-elected, Trump would be the second commander-in-chief to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
President Biden has also said he intends to seek re-election.