That sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it?
Well, it’s not.
Let me make it as easy as I can — by converting it from a fill-in-the-blank to a multiple choice:
Who was the first president born in the twentieth century?
a. John F. Kennedy
b. Lyndon Johnson
c. Richard Nixon
d. Gerald Ford
e. Jimmy Carter
f. Ronald Reagan
g. It’s impossible to say definitively.
BEFORE ANSWERING, READ THE FOLLOWING IF YOU’RE LEERY ABOUT THAT OMINOUS-LOOKING (G): (1) Don’t worry about my exclusion of other presidents. The right answer is on the list. (2) Don’t worry that I’m going to fall back on something weak like we don’t have somebody’s birth certificate available, or that these could have all been figments in our collective national dream or that, indeed, you might be a figment in somebody’s dream. I’m not. (3) And don’t think I’m playing a trick about when the twentieth century began — whether it was in 1900 or 1901. None of these presidents was born in 1900 or 1901.
Okay, so what’s your answer?
Below the fold I’ll score your entry.
Here are the birth years of Presidents Kennedy through Reagan:
Kennedy: 1917
Johnson: 1908
Nixon: 1913
Ford: 1913
Carter: 1924
Reagan: 1917
The obvious answer, then, is (a) Kennedy. Give yourself a pat on the back if that’s what you said.
But don’t make it too hearty a pat.
Let’s review.
Kennedy was the first of America’s presidents to have a twentieth-century birthdate. No question about it.
But what about Johnson? He was born earlier in the twentieth century than Kennedy was — nine years earlier, in fact.
Why does that matter? Well, re-read the question. Johnson was the first person born in the twentieth century who later became president. If that’s how the question is interpreted — and it’s certainly a plausible interpretation — then the correct answer is Johnson (b), not Kennedy (a).
(In fact, the logic that places Johnson first ranks Kennedy fifth of the six: His birthdate was May 29, 1917, two months after Ronald Reagan’s. It’s hard to think of Kennedy as older than Reagan, isn’t it?)
Whether the correct answer is (a) or (b) isn’t resolvable by an appeal to the facts. Rather, it’s a matter for deep thought by linguists about how to interpret an ambiguous question, which is exactly what this question is. The best answer is (g). You get partial credit for (a) or (b), and no credit at all for (c), (d), (e), or (f).
The general issue of ambiguity in language (and particularly in the language of politics — see, e.g., Murray Edelman’s classic The Symbolic Uses of Politics) is obviously one of very long standing, but new manifestations pop up every day. Indeed, the Kennedy v. Johnson issue arose just today in a reader’s comment on an earllier posting about ambiguity on Language Log, one of my favorite blogsites. Here’s a link to that discussion.
If forced to choose between (a) and (b), I suspect that most political scientists, being pretty conventional thinkers, would opt for “(a) Kennedy.” I, being both left-handed and something of a contrarian, would choose “(b) Johnson.” But debate about who is right would be pointless without further clarification of the meaning of the question.