From prophetic dreams of presidents to the foreboding letters of mystics, these are the
stories of politicians who saw their own deaths coming as they worked to change the world.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy has led to some of the most enduring conspiracy
theories in American history.
While the truth of who really shot Kennedy is still widely contested, it turns out that
the man himself spent the last few years of his life haunted by the possibility of his
own demise.
In early 1964, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gave a series of seven undisclosed
interviews that were later released as part of the 50th anniversary of JFK's administration.
In one of them, she revealed that a year prior to her husband's death, the president had
a feeling his first term in office would be fatally cut short.
Due to his involvement with the Cuban Missile Crisis, he told his wife,
"If anyone's going to kill me, it should happen now."
Unfortunately, his worries didn't end there.
The week leading up to his death, he had a conversation with his close friend Dave Powers,
in which he admitted his trepidation about going to Texas.
On the very morning of his assassination on November 22, 1963, Kennedy mused to both his
wife and top aide Ken O'Donnell,
"Last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president."
Later that day, O'Donnell determined that the lack of rain was a good omen, and instructed
the Secret Service to take the bubbletop off of Kennedy's vehicle.
Mere hours later, Kennedy was shot in that same car.
Benazir Bhutto made history as Pakistan's first female prime minister.
Her democratic-leaning politics cultivated many powerful enemies in the Middle East,
including Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Pakistani establishment, and she seemed aware of her
fate long before her assassination.
Her father Zulfikar, a former Pakistani prime minister, had previously been assassinated
by dictator General Zia ul-Haq in 1977.
Under Zia's rule, Bhutto was jailed as a political prisoner, and encouraged to commit suicide
by her guards.
Bhutto was killed while giving a speech in December 2007, just days before the general
election.
The mystery still looms as to who was responsible, but evidence points to Islamic terrorists.
A couple of months before her death, Bhutto had been living in self-imposed exile.
For her own safety, the Pakistani government warned her not to come home, but she traveled
back to try to claim a third term as prime minister.
After surviving a suicide bombing shortly after her return, she remained undeterred.
In fact, at the end of her autobiography, Daughter of Destiny, Bhutto wrote,
"My death will be the catalyst of change."
It seems Bhutto's foresight on this matter
was fairly accurate, as soon after her assassination,
the Pakistan People's Party came into power.
California's first openly gay elected politician, Harvey Milk, was assassinated just a year
after taking office on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors.
Aside from being an LGBTQ trailblazer and an avid gay rights activist, Milk also famously
sponsored an ordinance fining people for not cleaning up after their dogs which is still
in place today.
"Some people are using their pie tins, some people are using The Wall Street Journal,
and other people are using the doggy doos and shovels."
Milk knew that his progressive leadership would likely have consequences, as his very
election threatened the status quo.
Not long before he was assassinated, he recorded a final message to tape and instructed his
associates to only share it if he was killed while in office.
On the tape, Milk directly addressed his wishes for the movements he dedicated his life to
supporting, saying,
"Knowing that I could be assassinated at any moment or any time.
I feel it's important that some people know my thoughts [...] If a bullet should enter
my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country."
In November 1978, Milk was killed in his City Hall office by another San Francisco politician.
He was 48 years-old.
According to Maclean's, a month before his death in March 2011, Pakistani cabinet minister
Shahbaz Bhatti told Canadian politician Jason Kenney that he expected to be killed.
It is likely that Bhatti, who was the only Christian member of Pakistani President Asif
Ali Zardari's cabinet, was killed by Muslim extremists.
Bhatti had been calling for changes to Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which prohibit citizens from
speaking against the prophet Muhammed.
For decades, the laws have been used to persecute hundreds of the nation's religious minorities,
a group Bhatti himself was a part of.
At the time of his death, only five percent of Pakistan's population practiced Christianity.
Bhatti decided to travel to Europe, the United States, and Canada to seek protection for
religious minorities in his country after a governor of one of Pakistan's provinces
was killed by his own bodyguard just weeks before.
While in Canada, Bhatti told Kenney that he'd been denied additional security, and was almost
certain he'd be killed soon.
When Kenney suggested that he not return to Pakistan without additional protection, Bhatti
said that he had no choice, and asked Kenney to look after his family in the event of his
death.
In 2008, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi gave a speech at that year's summit of Arab leaders.
He spoke at length about the fall of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein at the hands of the
American military, despite his former allyship with American leaders.
Gaddafi expressed fear that other leaders at the summit might meet the same fate, saying,
"One of these days, America may hang us."
Gaddafi's concerns were based on the possible seizure of Libyan oil reserves.
They were the largest in the African continent and worth billions of dollars a year.
In 2011, Libyan rebels and NATO jets invaded the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
While Gaddafi called on supporters to band together and defend Libya, he also made it
public that he believed there was an active conspiracy to seize his country's oil supply.
Two months later, he was killed.
"He never did flee, and today he died at the hands of his own people."
What's even eerier about Gaddafi's speech is that Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad was
in the audience, laughing at Gaddafi.
Assad would later be accused of mass torture and crimes against humanity by the international
legal community.
During the bloody and divisive American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln predicted that he would
be killed for his political leadership decisions.
At the time, tensions were astronomically high in the country as the North and South
fought over a conflict that would change the very fabric of the young nation.
According to TeachingHistory.org, just days before his assassination at Ford's Theatre
on April 14, 1865, Lincoln recalled a recent dream he had to a small group that included
his friend and former law partner Ward Hill Lamon.
According to Lamon, in the dream, Lincoln walked into the East Room of the White House
to find a covered dead body surrounded by soldiers and a mourning crowd.
When he asked one of the soldiers who had died, the soldier responded,
"The president.
He was killed by an assassin."
According to a PBS documentary on Lincoln's assassination, he also shared a dream he had
the night before he died, in which he was sailing over an unknown body of water.
Reportedly, this was a recurring dream Lincoln had before important Civil War milestones
occurred.
It's worth noting that all these anecdotes should be taken with a grain of salt, as Lincoln
admitted that he did not believe dreams held any literal significance, and many historians
have questioned the validity of Lamon's account.
In the weeks leading up to his death, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte amended his will.
Seemingly convinced that he would be assassinated, the fifty-one year-old exile wrote,
"I die before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its assassin."
According to the American Museum of Natural History, there's a popular theory that Napoleon
was killed by arsenic poisoning due to the pristine condition of his body years after
his death.
However, to this day, there's no concrete proof that he was actually poisoned.
Furthermore, even if arsenic was the cause of death, his passing may have resulted from
long term exposure to the element through fumes given off by the wallpaper in his prison
home.
"The sad thing is, we may never know the real truth."
Whether his life was ended deliberately or not, the former military commander's edits
to his will provide ample evidence that he sensed the end was coming.
Both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were extremely ambitious and accomplished in their
own right.
They occasionally butted heads on the political stage, and when Burr ran for governor of New
York in 1804, Hamilton made it his mission to keep Burr from winning.
According to PBS, Hamilton's aggressive campaign against his rival propelled Burr to take action
in defense of his own honor.
The common belief is that Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, and that Hamilton was
initially hesitant to accept the call.
Needless to say, the founding father proceeded with the duel in spite of his early reluctance.
After accepting the challenge, Hamilton wrote what some consider a calculated farewell letter
to his wife Eliza, in which he indicated that he hoped to achieve martyrdom as a result
of the confrontation.
Hamilton noted that he opposed dueling, and that taking a life went against his Christian
principles.
According to History Net, he even claimed that he didn't intend to fire at Burr when
the time to draw came, effectively committing suicide.
"I think there could have been an easy way out of it, but he decided that he needed to
defend his honor."
In spite of this claim, evidence suggests that Hamilton may have indeed fired his gun,
but the exact truth behind the events of that fateful day may never be known for sure.
Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin was a mysterious presence who held great influence over the
last Romanov family headed by Tsar Nicholas II . Rasputin terrified Russian nobles and
members of the royal family because of his strong favor with Nicholas and his wife Alexandra,
and many were plotting to get rid of him.
Rasputin was ultimately assassinated by a group of nobles in December 1916.
According to his secretary Aron Simanovich, Rasputin wrote a letter the month he was killed,
and his predictions would prove eerily accurate.
Having survived a previous assassination attempt, the second one would prove fatal, not only
for him, but for the Romanovs as well.
He wrote,
"If it was your relations who have wrought my death, then none of your children will
remain alive for more than two years."
Less than two years later, Nicholas II's family was executed.
"Your reputation precedes you."
If Rasputin's prophetic letter was indeed real, it may have been a major reason why
Nicholas II feared for his and his family's lives leading up to their ultimate demise.
After all, in spite of Rasputin's prediction, a member of the royal family had killed the
holy man.
Nicholas' abdication in 1917 was another clear sign that he feared for his and his family's
future.
Revolution was on the horizon, and threats of a forceful transference of power were in
the air.
After giving up his birthright as Tsar, Nicholas wanted to travel to the United Kingdom to
go into exile.
However, he could not find asylum there.
On the day of his abdication, he wrote in his diary,
"All around is treason, cowardice and deceit."
A little over a year after abdicating, Nicholas, his wife and children, their family doctor,
and various servants were all escorted down to the cellar of the building in which they
were being held by Soviet guards.
A statement of condemnation was then read aloud.
Countless gunshots, stabbings, and beatings immediately followed, killing the entire family
and their staff.
Two of America's Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both died on the
nation's 50th Anniversary, July 4, 1826.
Their simultaneous passings weren't exactly predicted, but there is cause to believe that
they were planned to some extent.
Both men had been very ill leading up to their deaths.
83-year-old Jefferson reportedly refused his usual medication the night before he passed
and, according to History, future president John Tyler later eulogized that Jefferson
had repeatedly expressed his desire to die on the Fourth of July.
Adams and Jefferson were polar opposites, though later in life they became great friends
in spite of their rivalry.
In fact, before Adams died, his last words were,
"Thomas Jefferson still survives."
Curiously, Jefferson had passed away just hours before.
Many explanations have been posed for this unlikely coincidence.
Then-senator Daniel Webster claimed divine intervention.
In his eulogy for Jefferson and Adams he observed,
"Who is not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as in their long
continuance, proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care?"
It's also legitimately possible that both men simply managed to hold on for the sake
of witnessing their country's anniversary.
In the centuries since the founding fathers died, lots of people have theorized that humans
may have the power to stay alive for a specific event or holiday.
While this may just be an overly romanticized American origin story, it's still worthy of
speculation.