robbing the cradle

This is John Tyler, the tenth president of the U.S. (he succeeded "Tippecanoe" William Henry Harrison in 1841).

John Tyler was born in 1790.

His youngest daughter, Pearl Tyler, died in 1947.

That means the lifespans of one father and one daughter covered the presidencies of George Washington to Harry Truman, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Cold War. For the mathematically inclined, that's 157 years.

As Rick Shenkman of the History News Network explains:

Pearl was old, but not extremely old. She was eighty-seven. I’ll do the math for you. She was born in 1860. Tyler at the time was seventy years old.

And how did that happen?

Shenkman:

Here’s the back story. When Tyler was president his first wife died four years after suffering a paralytic stroke. Tyler, still young enough at age fifty two to envision fathering a new family, quickly remarried...His betrothed was the beautiful (and wealthy) Julia Gardiner, the daughter of a New York state senator.
...
The announcement stunned the country. Not only was Tyler remarrying less than two years after his first wife died, his new wife was considerably younger than he was. Age twenty-two, she was thirty years his junior. “Treaty of Immediate Annexation,” bannered the headline in the New York Herald.

Shenkman raises this historical episode in order to defend Fred Thompson from charges of having a trophy wife; I raise it to suggest the brevity of American history. If Pearl had been a man and followed in her father's footsteps (i.e. having a child at 70--unlikely, I know, but obviously not impossible), that kid would likely have lived out most of the 20th century, meaning that only three generations would have covered virtually the entire history of the U.S. up to the present.