A Brief History
On November 5, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his third term as US President, and would win yet another presidential election in 1944, ending up serving a record 12+ years as US President. Some other nations have had much longer serving heads of state or government of various titles, and here we list a few that exceeded our own FDR in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Digging Deeper
Queen Elizabeth II of the UK, 1952-2022
Hirohito of Japan, 1926-1989
Fidel Castro of Cuba, 1959-2008
Malietoa Tanumafili II of Samoa, 1962-2007
Josef Stalin of the USSR, 1922-1952
Mao Zedong of China, 1949-1976
Vladimir Putin of Russia, 1999-Present (2022)
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir of Iceland, 1980-1996
What American President would you have liked to serve longer than he actually did?
Question for students (and subscribers): Can you think of other long tenured national leaders that we did not list? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. Knopf Doubleday, 2018,
Kaye, Harvey. FDR on Democracy: The Greatest Speeches and Writings of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Skyhorse, 2020.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Kheel Center of the stage and backdrop of the American Labor Party re-elect Roosevelt rally, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
