Origins: Not long after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the above list of amazing coincidences appeared, and it has been widely and continuously reprinted and circulated ever since. Despite the seemingly impressive surface appearance, several of these entries are either misleading or factually incorrect, and the rest are mere superficial coincidences that fail to touch upon the substantial differences and dissimilarities that underlie them.

Let's examine them one at a time:


Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.
This statement is literally true: both Lincoln and Kennedy were first elected to Congress one hundred years apart. Aside from that minor coincidence, however, their political careers bore little resemblance to each other.

Lincoln was an Illinois state legislator who, outside of his election to a single term in the House of Representatives, failed in his every attempt to gain national political office until he was elected President in 1860, including an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 1854, a unsuccessful bid to become the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1856, and another unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in 1858.

Kennedy, on the other hand, enjoyed an unbroken string of political successes at the national level when he entered the political arena after World War II. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, re-elected in 1948, re-elected again in 1950, won a Senate seat in 1952, was re-elected to the Senate in 1958, and was elected President in 1960.

For full text please refer http://www.snopes.com/history/american/linckenn.htm as there is a long list available that tries to look at each and every coincidence critically. A must read, without which this discussion would never finish :-)