President Obama presided over his sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief Wednesday at the White House.
The annual tradition sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House ceremony.
This year’s duo was “Mac” and “Cheese.” Cheese got to go before the cameras.
The tradition is not a new one — it’s happened every year for the last quarter century. But there has been confusion about how it all got started.
Bill Clinton in his 1997 “pardoning,” cited President Harry Truman as the first.
Truman was actually the first president to receive a turkey from the National Turkey Federation in 1947.
Abraham Lincoln was the first on record to spare a bird, but it was a Christmas turkey his son, Jack, had taken a liking to.
John F. Kennedy was the first president to actually pardon a Thanksgiving turkey. In 1963, despite a sign hanging around the turkey’s neck that read, “Good eating, Mr. President,” Kennedy sent the bird back to the farm.
Richard Nixon also gave the birds a reprieve sending his turkeys to a nearby petting zoo. But the modern incarnation of the turkey tradition was likely spurred by Ronald Reagan.
He was the first to use the word “pardon” relating to turkeys in 1987. But he did so to deflect from hard questions from the press about whether he would pardon anyone involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. He joked that he would pardon that year’s turkey, if he weren’t already headed for the petting zoo.
It became an annual event when Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, became president. In 1989, Bush formalized the event.
The Virginia farm he was sent to, though, was in the ironically named “Frying Pan Park,” which became the home of the future presidential turkeys for the next 15 years.
After that, the birds spent the next five years at either Disney Land or Disney World before retiring to George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate in Virginia.
President Obama pardons “Cheese” the turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
This year, Mac and Cheese will be sent to a park in Leesburg, Virginia, a Washington suburb. The property has been used to grow turkeys in the past. The estate was owned by former Virginia Gov. Westmoreland Davis, who raised hundreds of his own turkeys there in the 1930s and 1940s.
The event has become a lighthearted tradition. A turkey in 2000 wore a White House badge to the event. Former President George W. Bush’s administration held a vote on the White House website to choose which bird would be spared. And he joked in 2004 about it being an election year.
Online voting campaigns have become the norm for picking the turkeys. The Obama White House has taken to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to decide which bird is selected.
But the event is not without controversy. Animal rights groups protest the event because the birds are not exactly “free-range turkeys.” They are industrially grown. And because they are bred to be eaten, and much larger than the average turkey, they don’t live very long after being pardoned.
Last year’s pardoned bird, in fact, died in July of this year.
Crispin Lopez and Rachel Wellford contributed to this report.