Presidential links with car deaths are revealed ahead of World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims on Sunday the 16th by an organization dedicated to providing support to victims of car crashes in the United Kingdom.
Obama, McCain, Clinton, and Biden are a few names connected with death and injury in motor vehicles, according to the UK's RoadPeace.
President-elect Obama and the last democratic President, Bill Clinton, lost their fathers in single car accidents.
“My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had,” Bill Clinton wrote in the first chapter of his autobiography My Life. “Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.”
Three months before he was born, Bill Clinton’s father was thrown out of his car into a ditch where he drowned after his front tire blew. Clinton was given the name of his stepfather.
Obama was 21 when his father died while driving under the influence of alcohol in Nairobi, Kenya.
Most children bereaved by car crashes do not gain parent substitutes. Nor are they helped by organisations for victims of crime.
The wife of the Vice President-elect, Joe Biden, was killed with their daughter when a tractor-trailer hit their family car. Biden’s two sons were seriously injured.
The fatal accident happened the week before Christmas 1972 when Biden’s wife and children were on their way to buy a Christmas tree. He had just been elected to the Senate. Due to the unfortunate circumstance, Biden took his oath at his sons’ bedsides in the hospital.
He does not work on the anniversary of the crash.
John McCain’s first wife, Carol, was disabled after skidding on ice on Christmas Eve and being thrown out through the windshield. She was hospitalized for six months and 26 operations have left her five inches shorter.
At the time, John McCain was a POW in Vietnam. During his five years of captivity, she raised their three children and campaigned for his release. She spent three of those years in a wheelchair.
A Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims was first introduced in 1993 by RoadPeace, a UK charity supporting victims of car crash bereavement and injury. In October 2006, the United Nations General adopted the third Sunday in November every year as the World Day of Remembrance.
