In 1887, President Grover Cleveland welcomed an old friend to the White House. Weary of the office, he said to the man’s 5-year-old son, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”

The boy was President Franklin Roosevelt.

The Strawfoot, a “New Yorker’s American History blog” notes,

Grover Cleveland once had some advice for James Roosevelt’s much younger son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Franklin was five his father took him to meet the outgoing president. Cleveland looked down and gravely said, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”