Every US President

The office of the American presidency was invented on the fly. In 1787, the founders sat in Philadelphia arguing about whether the executive should be a single person or a committee of three. They settled on one man, gave him powers they were still figuring out, and hoped for the best. What followed was 236 years of trial, catastrophe, reinvention, and occasional greatness - forty-five individuals who have held the job - Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each served two non-consecutive terms, bringing the total number of presidencies to 47. Some bent the republic to their will. Some nearly broke it. A few saved it outright. This is every one of them.

George Washington

He could have been king. After winning the Revolutionary War, Washington’s officers floated the idea - a monarchy, with Washington at its head. He refused so firmly it seems almost to have offended him. That refusal may have been his most consequential act in a life full of them. Born in 1732 on a Virginia plantation, Washington had only an elementary school education yet became, through sheer will and social intelligence, the most important man in America. His military record was genuinely mixed - he lost more battles than he won - but he never stopped fighting, and that turned out to be the thing that mattered most. As the first president, he knew every decision set a precedent that would echo for centuries, which made the job feel like walking on newly poured concrete. He established the cabinet system, the practice of consulting the Senate, and most crucially, the two-term limit - not because the Constitution required it, but because he believed it was right. He left office in 1797, handing power to his elected successor without drama, and changed the world.

John Adams

John Adams had the misfortune of following a legend. Washington’s act was nearly impossible to follow, and Adams - brilliant, prickly, constitutionally incapable of flattery - was perhaps the worst person to try. His one term from 1797 to 1801 was defined by the near-war with France known as the Quasi-War, the deeply controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, and a complete rupture with his vice president, Thomas Jefferson. Yet historians have rehabilitated him considerably. He kept America out of a ruinous full war with France at the cost of his own reelection, a decision he later called his finest act. He was the first president to live in the White House - arriving before the paint was dry, with Abigail using the unfinished East Room to hang laundry. He and Jefferson died on the same day: July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s last words were reportedly “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” He was wrong by about five hours.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson arrived at the presidency in 1801 having already written the Declaration of Independence, served as governor of Virginia, U.S. minister to France, Secretary of State, and vice president. He was also, by most measures, a spectacular contradiction. He wrote “all men are created equal” while enslaving more than 600 people over his lifetime, never freeing them during his life. His presidency doubled the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 - 828,000 square miles bought from Napoleon for roughly three cents an acre - and then sent Lewis and Clark to figure out what he’d bought. He founded the University of Virginia, designed his own house at Monticello obsessively over forty years, collected fossils, spoke multiple languages, and barely slept. He is among the most gifted individuals ever to hold the office, and among the most morally troubled. He died on July 4, 1826, the same day as John Adams, fifty years to the day after the Declaration.

James Madison

He stood five feet four inches tall and weighed perhaps 100 pounds. Contemporaries found him painfully shy. His wife Dolley was everything he was not - charming, social, politically savvy, arguably the more effective politician of the two. Yet Madison was the architect of the United States Constitution, the man who arrived at Philadelphia in 1787 better prepared than anyone else and shaped the document that has governed the country ever since. As president from 1809 to 1817, he presided over the War of 1812 - a conflict the U.S. fumbled so badly that the British burned the White House and the Capitol. It was Dolley who saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington before fleeing. Somehow the war ended in rough stalemate, Americans declared victory anyway, and national pride actually swelled. Madison survived all of it, outliving nearly every other founder to die at 85 in 1836. He was the last surviving framer of the Constitution.

James Monroe

Monroe’s presidency (1817-1825) was called the “Era of Good Feelings” by a Boston newspaper, and the name stuck despite bearing only a passing relationship to reality. But Monroe did preside over a remarkable stretch: no serious foreign threats, expansion into Florida, and the issuance of what became the Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers to stay out of the Western Hemisphere. It was bold to the point of absurdity - the U.S. had almost no navy capable of enforcing it - but backed quietly by British sea power, it held. Monroe was the last president to wear knee breeches and a tricorn hat, a relic of Revolutionary fashion in an era of long trousers. The nation was changing around him, the Missouri Compromise passing in 1820 and revealing the deep fractures over slavery that would split the country four decades later. Monroe managed to win reelection in 1820 with no opposition whatsoever, one of the more anticlimactic elections in American history.

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams is one of the few people in history who arguably peaked before becoming president. He had served as ambassador to four countries, negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812, and crafted the Monroe Doctrine as Secretary of State. His presidency from 1825 to 1829 was a frustration - he entered under a cloud (the House chose him in a contested election) and spent four years watching Congress block nearly everything he proposed. He was then soundly beaten by Andrew Jackson in 1828. What followed was the strangest act of any ex-president: he ran for Congress, won, and served for 17 years in the House - longer than any other former president has served in any elected office. He argued against slavery, defended the Amistad captives before the Supreme Court, and collapsed on the House floor in 1848, dying two days later. He was 80. He went out working.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was the first president who actually scared people. Born in the Carolina backwoods, orphaned at 14 during the Revolution, shot at, stabbed, and carrying a British musket ball near his heart for 40 years, Jackson arrived in Washington in 1829 trailing a reputation as a duelist who had killed at least one man and wounded several others. His inauguration party turned into a near-riot, with 20,000 people flooding the White House, standing on furniture, and drinking whiskey punch until glassware was smashed and Jackson had to be spirited out a window. As president, he wielded executive power more aggressively than anyone before him, vetoed more bills than all previous presidents combined, and destroyed the Second Bank of the United States over the protests of Congress. His Indian Removal Act forced Native American nations from their homelands on what became the Trail of Tears - a policy historians now rightly condemn as ethnic cleansing. He was simultaneously the most democratic and the most authoritarian president the country had yet seen.

Martin Van Buren

Van Buren was a genius of political organization who had essentially invented the modern party machine in New York, and he arrived at the presidency in 1837 with every advantage except luck. Within weeks of his inauguration, banks began failing across the country and the U.S. plunged into the Panic of 1837, a severe depression that lasted most of his term. He believed government shouldn’t interfere in the economy - a position historically consistent but politically ruinous. He lost his reelection bid to William Henry Harrison. Van Buren was the first president born after American independence (he was born in 1782), the son of a Dutch-speaking tavern keeper in New York, and the first president who didn’t have English as his first language. He ran for president three times total, failing the last two times. He was 80 years old when he died in 1862, having watched the nation he’d served begin to tear itself apart.

William Henry Harrison

Harrison holds the record for the shortest presidency in American history: 31 days, ending with his death from pneumonia on April 4, 1841. He was 68 years old, the oldest man yet to hold the office, and delivered the longest inaugural address in presidential history - 8,445 words, nearly two hours, delivered on a cold and rainy March day without a hat or coat. He wanted to demonstrate he was vigorous. He developed pleuropneumonia within days and never recovered. The tragedy of Harrison is that he was actually a capable man - a decorated military commander, an experienced politician, a person who could have been a competent president. Instead, he is remembered as a cautionary footnote. His death triggered the first constitutional crisis over presidential succession: Vice President John Tyler refused to be an “acting president” and claimed the full powers of the office, a precedent that held until the 25th Amendment clarified things 126 years later.

John Tyler

Nobody wanted John Tyler to be president. He’d been put on the Whig ticket as a Southerner to balance the ticket, with the expectation he’d be a minor footnote. Then Harrison died, Tyler claimed the full presidency, and promptly vetoed almost every piece of Whig legislation Congress sent him. The Whigs expelled him from the party. His entire cabinet resigned. The House tried to impeach him - the first such attempt against any president. He served the rest of his term in effective political isolation. What Tyler did accomplish was the annexation of Texas, signed into law just three days before he left office. He was also the first president to take office without being elected, the first whose cabinet resigned en masse, and the first against whom impeachment was attempted. He is perhaps the most consequential accidental president in American history. He died in 1862 a Confederate partisan, having been elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, which means technically he died a traitor to the United States. The government did not mark his passing.

James K. Polk

Polk arrived in the White House in 1845 with four specific goals: acquire California from Mexico, settle the Oregon boundary with Britain, reduce tariffs, and establish an independent treasury. He accomplished all four in one term - a record of achievement almost unmatched in presidential history. The method was less admirable. He provoked a war with Mexico, sent troops into disputed territory to generate a pretext, and used the resulting conflict to strip Mexico of more than half its territory, including California and what is now the American Southwest. He worked so hard he declined to seek a second term, returned home to Tennessee after four years of 12-hour days, and died of cholera three months after leaving office. He was 53. His wife Sarah, one of the most politically astute First Ladies in history, outlived him by 42 years. Polk’s acquisitions made the U.S. a continent-spanning nation - and made the question of slavery’s extension explosive enough to crack the country in two within a generation.

Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor had never voted in an election in his life when he ran for president in 1848. He’d spent 40 years as a soldier and had no patience for politics, no known political positions, and no particular desire for the office. He won anyway, largely on the strength of his fame from the Mexican-American War. His presidency lasted only 16 months before he died in office in July 1850, most likely of gastroenteritis. The circumstances were suspicious enough to inspire multiple conspiracy theories, and in 1991 his body was actually exhumed to test for arsenic poisoning. The results were negative. Taylor had been on track to potentially veto the Compromise of 1850, which had been designed to defuse the slavery crisis - his death allowed it to pass under his successor, Millard Fillmore. Whether that made things better or worse in the long run is a question historians still argue. Taylor was the last U.S. president to own enslaved people while in office.

Millard Fillmore

Fillmore is routinely ranked near the bottom of presidential lists, which is perhaps unfair but not entirely wrong. He signed the Compromise of 1850 into law after Taylor’s death, which included the catastrophic Fugitive Slave Act - requiring Northern states to return escaped enslaved people to their Southern owners. The law provoked massive resistance in the North, energized the abolitionist movement, and accelerated the country toward civil war. Fillmore thought he was preserving the Union; instead he was tearing it. His presidency ended in 1853, the Whig Party collapsed shortly after, and Fillmore himself ran for president again in 1856 on the Know-Nothing ticket, a nativist party opposed to Catholic immigrants. He finished third. He lived until 1874, long enough to see the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act play out in blood. His legacy is largely a lesson in how accommodation of injustice rarely averts disaster.

Franklin Pierce

Pierce won the 1852 election in a landslide and entered office under personal tragedy - his 11-year-old son Bennie was killed in a train accident eleven weeks before the inauguration, with Pierce and his wife watching from the same car. Jane Pierce was so devastated she barely appeared in public for years, believing the accident was God’s punishment for Pierce’s political ambition. Pierce brought that grief into an administration that proved catastrophic for the nation. His signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise, reopened the question of slavery’s westward spread, and ignited a guerrilla war in Kansas that previewed the Civil War. “Bleeding Kansas” destroyed Pierce’s party, helped create the Republican Party, and introduced a militant abolitionist named John Brown to national attention. Pierce is consistently ranked among the worst presidents. In his later years, he supported the Confederacy and bitterly criticized Lincoln. He died in 1869, largely friendless and forgotten.

James Buchanan

There is a reasonable argument that James Buchanan was the worst president in American history, and Buchanan himself may have half-known it. As Southern states seceded in the final months of his administration (1857-1861), he did almost nothing, arguing he had no legal authority to stop them but also had no authority to recognize secession as legitimate - a position that satisfied no one and prevented nothing. He had spent years making concessions to Southern slaveholders in hopes of preserving the union, and each concession had emboldened further demands. He was the only bachelor president and the only president from Pennsylvania, and he handed Abraham Lincoln an already-exploding country. Lincoln wrote that Buchanan left him “holding a leaky bag.” Buchanan spent his retirement writing a memoir defending himself. Historians have not been persuaded.

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky in 1809, had perhaps one year of formal education in total, and became president of the United States. That alone is staggering. What he did with the presidency is almost beyond reckoning. He held the country together through a war that killed 620,000 people, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 transforming the war’s moral purpose, managed generals, Congress, and a fractious cabinet with extraordinary political skill, and delivered two inaugural addresses that rank among the greatest speeches in the English language. His second inaugural - “with malice toward none, with charity for all” - was given five weeks before an assassin shot him at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, five days after Lee’s surrender. He had suffered from severe depression throughout his life, yet his letters and speeches crackle with wit, compassion, and clarity of vision. He is the standard against which all other presidents are measured.

Andrew Johnson

Lincoln’s decision to pick Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as his running mate in 1864 was a gesture of national unity. It became one of the most consequential mistakes in American political history. Johnson, a Southern Democrat and defender of states’ rights, took over after Lincoln’s assassination and systematically undermined Reconstruction, pardoning Confederate leaders, vetoing civil rights legislation, and working to restore the former Confederate states to power with minimal conditions. Congress was so alarmed they passed the Tenure of Office Act specifically to limit his power, he violated it, and in 1868 the House impeached him. He survived removal by one Senate vote. His presidency dismantled the chance for meaningful post-war reform, leaving Black Americans in the South subject to Black Codes, violence, and a century of systematic oppression. Johnson’s ghost haunts American history: the path not taken after the Civil War, the reconstruction that never was.

Ulysses S. Grant

Grant won the Civil War. That fact tends to overshadow everything else about him, including the extent to which his presidency (1869-1877) was both surprisingly progressive on civil rights and riddled with corruption. He was the first president to push seriously for Black voting rights and civil equality, deploying federal troops against the Ku Klux Klan with enough force to essentially destroy the organization. He was also surrounded by crooked associates - the Credit Mobilier scandal, the Whiskey Ring, the Indian Ring - though Grant himself was never shown to be personally corrupt, only spectacularly naive about the men around him. He had been a failure at almost everything before the war: farming, business, real estate. The war revealed the one thing he was transcendently good at. After the presidency, he was swindled into bankruptcy by a business partner and died of throat cancer in 1885, racing to finish his memoirs before he died so his wife would have income. Mark Twain published them. They remain among the best military memoirs ever written.

Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes may be the president who ended Reconstruction. He came to the White House in 1877 through one of the most disputed elections in American history - he lost the popular vote and the Electoral College outcome was contested, ultimately decided by a congressional commission in a backroom deal that gave Hayes the presidency in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. Those troops had been the primary protection for Black citizens’ civil rights. Their removal allowed Southern states to disenfranchise Black voters and establish Jim Crow with near-impunity. Hayes himself had antislavery convictions and apparently believed Reconstruction had run its course. The consequences lasted nearly a century. In domestic matters, Hayes was a reformer who battled patronage politics, served only one term as promised, and returned to Ohio in 1881 to work on prison reform and education. History has not been entirely kind to him.

James A. Garfield

Garfield served as president for only 200 days, which is barely long enough to figure out where the bathrooms are. He was shot by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker, on July 2, 1881, just four months into his term - and then lingered for 79 days while his doctors killed him. The bullet had lodged in the muscles of his back, not a fatal wound; Alexander Graham Bell invented a metal detector trying to find it. But Garfield’s physicians, refusing to believe in germ theory, probed the wound repeatedly with unsterilized fingers and instruments, causing massive infection. He died of sepsis, not the bullet. Garfield had been an extraordinary man - a self-made scholar who had worked as a canal boy, a general, and a congressman before reaching the presidency. His death inadvertently accomplished something he could not: it so outraged the public that Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, replacing the spoils system with a merit-based civil service. Charles Guiteau was hanged. The doctors were not.

Chester A. Arthur

Chester Arthur took office in 1881 having been placed on the Garfield ticket largely as a favor to New York’s Republican machine boss Roscoe Conkling. He was, by every outward appearance, a machine politician. He was known primarily for his wardrobe - 80 pairs of trousers, reportedly - and his love of fine dining. Then something surprising happened: he became president and actually reformed the spoils system he had benefited from his entire career. The Pendleton Act became law under his signature, establishing civil service exams and ending the practice of rewarding political supporters with government jobs. He also began rebuilding the U.S. Navy, which had decayed badly since the Civil War. Arthur knew he was dying of kidney disease throughout his presidency, a fact he concealed from the public. He died in 1886, a year after leaving office. He was never beloved, but he turned out to be considerably better than anyone expected.

Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland is the only person to have served two non-consecutive terms as president - #22 from 1885 to 1889, and #24 from 1893 to 1897 - and the only president counted twice in the numerical sequence while counting as one individual. A former sheriff of Erie County, New York, he personally participated in two executions (hangings) when the local executioner declined. As president, he was famous for his personal honesty in an era of political corruption - he vetoed more bills in his first term than all previous presidents combined, mostly on principle. His second term was dominated by the Panic of 1893, one of the worst economic depressions in American history, during which he sided with business interests and gold, alienating labor and agrarian Democrats. Eugene Debs led the Pullman Strike; Cleveland sent in federal troops over the governor of Illinois’s objection. That decision helped make William Jennings Bryan the face of Democratic populism and shifted the party’s trajectory for a generation.

Benjamin Harrison

Harrison occupies the curious middle position between Cleveland’s two terms, which means he is sometimes remembered primarily as the man who lost to Cleveland both times. That does him some disservice. He was competent and principled, signed the Sherman Antitrust Act into law in 1890 - the first federal law to curb monopolies - and oversaw the admission of six states into the Union, more than any other president. He was also the grandson of William Henry Harrison, making the Harrisons the only grandfather-grandson presidential pair. His administration expanded the federal government’s role considerably, alarming fiscal conservatives. In 1892 he faced a rematch with Grover Cleveland and lost, partly because his wife Caroline had died of tuberculosis just two weeks before the election - a fact that kept Cleveland from campaigning actively against him out of respect. Harrison died in 1901, the last Civil War general to serve as president.

William McKinley

McKinley came to the presidency in 1897 as a tariff man - he had spent his congressional career obsessing over trade policy - and left it as the leader of a global empire. The Spanish-American War of 1898 lasted only four months but transformed American history: Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, the U.S. annexed Hawaii, and the country woke up in possession of an overseas empire it had not quite meant to acquire. McKinley was assassinated in September 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. He was shaking hands in a receiving line when he was shot twice at close range. He appeared to be recovering, then died eight days later of gangrene spreading from the wound. Like Garfield before him, his medical care was inadequate and arguably fatal in itself. McKinley’s death elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. “Now look,” an alarmed Republican senator said at Roosevelt’s ascension, “that damned cowboy is President of the United States.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt was 42 years old when McKinley was shot, making him the youngest president in American history. He crammed more into his time in office than most people manage in a lifetime outside it. He busted trusts, built the Panama Canal, won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War, established the modern conservation movement by protecting 230 million acres of public land, sent the Great White Fleet around the world to announce American naval power, and coined the phrase “bully pulpit.” He had been a sickly child with severe asthma, became a rancher in the Dakota Badlands after his first wife died, and charged up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders before politics found him. He expanded the power of the presidency so dramatically that he is considered the first modern president. When his chosen successor Taft turned conservative, Roosevelt ran against him in 1912 - surviving an assassination attempt that put a bullet in his chest, then delivering a 90-minute speech before seeking medical treatment. He lost the 1912 race. He never stopped.

William Howard Taft

Taft was the heaviest president in American history, reportedly tipping the scales at 335 pounds, and almost certainly did not get stuck in the White House bathtub (the story is almost surely apocryphal - though he did have an enormous custom tub installed). He was, however, genuinely more conservative than his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt, which is what broke their friendship and split the Republican Party in 1912. In domestic policy, Taft actually busted more trusts than Roosevelt, but did it quietly, without Roosevelt’s showmanship. His real passion was the law - he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after the presidency, the only person ever to hold both offices, and he considered it the better job. He served on the Court until just weeks before his death in 1930. As president he was outmaneuvered by congressional conservatives on tariff reform. He threw the first presidential opening-day pitch at a baseball game, a tradition that lasted a century.

Woodrow Wilson

Wilson was elected in 1912 partly because Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, and he proceeded to transform the federal government’s scope and ambition. The Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the first direct election of senators, the income tax - these were Wilson’s domestic achievements. Then came World War I. He kept the United States out for three years, won reelection on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” then brought the country in six months later after German submarines resumed unrestricted attacks on shipping. His Fourteen Points and vision for the League of Nations shaped the postwar peace conference; he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. Then he had a stroke in October 1919 while touring the country to build support for the League, leaving him partially paralyzed, and his wife Edith managed access to him so completely that some historians call it a de facto presidency. The Senate rejected the League. Wilson died in 1924 a broken man. His legacy also includes a vigorous re-segregation of the federal government and deeply racist views. The whole complicated record remains.

Warren G. Harding

Harding was handsome, sociable, and seemed to emanate presidential gravity - he looked, it was often said, like a president ought to look. He was elected in 1920 in a landslide on a promise of a “return to normalcy” after Wilson’s wartime government. He died in 1923 before the full consequences of his administration became clear. What emerged after his death was stunning: the Teapot Dome scandal, in which his Interior Secretary secretly leased federal oil reserves to private companies in exchange for bribes; a Veterans’ Bureau chief who embezzled millions from the agency meant to serve WWI veterans; corruption in the Justice Department. Harding himself appears not to have been personally enriched, just spectacularly uninterested in who he appointed. He also pardoned Eugene Debs, whom Wilson had imprisoned for opposing the draft - a genuinely decent act Wilson had refused to perform. Harding’s personal life was equally complicated, featuring at least two extramarital affairs, one of which produced a daughter. His reputation never recovered.

Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge was so famous for saying nothing that the story goes a woman at a dinner bet him she could get him to say more than two words, and he replied, “You lose.” He may not have said it, but it sounds exactly right. Silent Cal became president after Harding’s death in 1923 and won his own term in 1924. His presidency coincided with the roaring prosperity of the 1920s, which he attributed largely to low taxes, minimal regulation, and government restraint. “The chief business of the American people is business,” he said, and he meant it. He declined to seek a second full term in 1928 with characteristic economy: “I do not choose to run.” When the economy collapsed the following year in the Great Depression, critics argued his laissez-faire approach had enabled the speculative bubble. Economists still argue about this. What is undisputed is that Coolidge left a country that felt prosperous, and Herbert Hoover inherited it just as it fell apart. Coolidge said little about this afterward.

Herbert Hoover

Hoover had one of the most impressive resumes of anyone to reach the presidency - mining engineer, brilliant administrator of wartime food relief in Europe, transformative Secretary of Commerce - and then presided over the worst economic disaster in American history. The stock market crashed two months after his inauguration. He believed strongly in voluntarism and associationalism: private charities and business cooperation would solve the crisis without federal intervention. They didn’t. By 1932 there were shanty towns across America called “Hoovervilles.” When veterans camped in Washington demanding early payment of their bonuses, Hoover sent General Douglas MacArthur to clear them out with tear gas and cavalry. Hoover lost in 1932 to Franklin Roosevelt in a historic landslide. He was only 58 when he left office, lived another 31 years, worked on famine relief, and was largely rehabilitated by the time he died in 1964. He remained convinced that Roosevelt’s New Deal had made things worse, not better.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933 with roughly a quarter of the American workforce unemployed, banks failing across the country, and no guarantee the republic would survive intact. He’d had polio since 1921 and was paralyzed from the waist down - a fact the press largely concealed from the public. In his first 100 days, he pushed 15 major bills through Congress and took the country off the gold standard. The New Deal - Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, federal deposit insurance, unemployment benefits, rural electrification - reshaped the relationship between government and citizen permanently. Then came World War II, the largest industrial mobilization in human history. He led the country through both crises, won four presidential elections, and died in office in April 1945, just months before the war he’d done so much to win reached its end. He served 12 years. No one has come close since. The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, made sure of that.

Harry S. Truman

Nobody gave Truman much of a chance. He was a former county judge from Missouri with a haberdasher’s background who had been largely kept in the dark by Roosevelt, and when FDR died after only 82 days of the new term, Truman told reporters he felt like the moon, stars, and planets had all fallen on him. Within weeks he had to decide whether to use the atomic bomb. Within months, he’d made the call to drop both. He then presided over the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the Berlin Airlift, the creation of NATO, the recognition of Israel, and the desegregation of the armed forces - all in a first term he wasn’t supposed to win. He shocked the country by defeating Thomas Dewey in 1948 in one of the greatest upsets in electoral history. His second term included the Korean War and the Red Scare. He left office deeply unpopular. By the 1970s and 80s, historians had moved him into the top tier. “Give ’em hell, Harry” didn’t need their approval, but he got it anyway.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Eisenhower was so wildly popular after World War II that both parties tried to recruit him. He was the Supreme Allied Commander who oversaw D-Day, the liberation of Western Europe, and Germany’s defeat - a man who had organized history’s largest military operation. As president from 1953 to 1961, he ended the Korean War within months, presided over extraordinary economic prosperity, and built the Interstate Highway System, probably the largest public works project in American history. He was also president when the Cold War deepened, when the CIA overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, and when federal troops were required to integrate Little Rock’s schools. In his farewell address - one of the most prescient speeches in presidential history - he warned against the “military-industrial complex.” He was a Republican who could have led either party, and he governed with a pragmatic centrism that looks increasingly rare with each passing decade. He played more golf than he admitted. His approval ratings barely wavered.

John F. Kennedy

Kennedy spent 1,036 days in office - less than three years - and left an imprint larger than many men who served twice as long. He was the first Catholic president, the youngest elected, and the first born in the 20th century. He faced down the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the closest the world has come to nuclear war, and found a solution through back-channel negotiation that preserved the peace while saving face on both sides. He proposed the Civil Rights Act, committed to putting a man on the moon, launched the Peace Corps, and navigated the Berlin crisis. He was also glamorous in a way no previous president had been - handsome, witty, married to a former debutante who spoke four languages and redecorated the White House with genuine artistry. He was shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was 46. The grief was global. What he might have done with a second term remains one of history’s most tantalizing hypotheticals.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Johnson wanted to be remembered for the Great Society. He has been remembered instead primarily for Vietnam. Both are fair, which is the particular cruelty of his legacy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, federal education funding, the Clean Air Act - Johnson’s domestic program was the most transformative since the New Deal and arguably more specific in its benefits to ordinary Americans. He was also a virtuoso of Senate politics, a man who could browbeat and charm and deal his way to outcomes that seemed impossible. Then Vietnam consumed him. He escalated the war, kept escalating, and watched the Great Society be buried under $30 billion a year in military spending. The country turned against him so completely he didn’t seek reelection in 1968. He died in 1973, one day before the Senate voted to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He reportedly wept over the combat deaths. The scale of what he built, and what he wrecked, remains almost unequal in presidential history.

Richard Nixon

Nixon is the only president to resign. But the full arc of his story is considerably stranger than that single fact suggests. He grew up poor in California, won a congressional seat in 1946, made himself famous hunting communists, became vice president at 39, lost to Kennedy by the narrowest margin of the 20th century, lost the California governorship in 1962 and told reporters they “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” then came back from political oblivion to win the presidency in 1968. As president he opened relations with China, negotiated arms treaties with the Soviet Union, created the EPA, and ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Then Watergate. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in June 1972 led to a cover-up, to tape recordings that proved Nixon’s involvement, to the Saturday Night Massacre, and finally to his resignation in August 1974 before he could be impeached. He pardoned himself? No - but Gerald Ford pardoned him. Nixon died in 1994 having partially rebuilt his reputation as an elder statesman. He never admitted he was wrong.

Gerald Ford

Ford is the only person to become president without being elected to either the presidency or vice presidency. Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency in a bribery scandal; Nixon appointed Ford, then Nixon resigned and Ford became president. He then granted Nixon a full pardon a month into his term, destroying his own approval ratings in an instant. He believed the country needed to move on; the country felt cheated of a reckoning. Ford served out Nixon’s term and was narrowly defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976. He was decent, straightforward, and deeply underestimated - a solid football player at Michigan, an Eagle Scout, a Navy veteran, a man who had served 25 years in Congress. Lyndon Johnson once said Ford had played too much football without a helmet, but by most accounts Ford was smarter and more thoughtful than his stumbling public image suggested. He lived to 93, the longest-lived president in history. He was also, according to Betty Ford, a genuinely good husband during the years her alcoholism and addiction required it. That counts.

Jimmy Carter

Carter remains one of the most complex assessments in presidential history. His single term from 1977 to 1981 was defined by stagflation, an energy crisis, and the 444-day Iran hostage crisis - which ended the day Reagan was inaugurated, in a timing that was either dramatic coincidence or something more, depending on your politics. He brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, which has held for over four decades and remains perhaps the greatest diplomatic achievement by any modern president. At home he deregulated the airline industry, created the Department of Energy, and put solar panels on the White House (Reagan removed them). He lost to Reagan in a landslide. What followed was the most consequential ex-presidency in American history: the Carter Center monitored elections worldwide, eradicated guinea worm disease from the planet, built houses with Habitat for Humanity, and mediated international disputes. He continued doing this until well past his 90th birthday. He died in December 2024 at 100 years old.

Ronald Reagan

Reagan became president at 69, was shot in the chest two months into his term, and joked with surgeons as they prepared to operate. That composure - genuine or performed, it was unshakeable - defined his presidency. He came to office promising to reduce government, cut taxes, and confront the Soviet Union, and he pursued all three with conviction. His tax cuts in 1981 were the largest in American history to that point; his defense buildup was enormous; his rhetoric toward the Soviet Union was combative to the point of alarming allies. He also presided over significant deregulation, a near-tripling of the national debt, and the Iran-Contra affair, in which members of his administration secretly sold weapons to Iran and used proceeds to fund Nicaraguan rebels. Whether he knew the details remains disputed. The Cold War ended on his watch and shortly after - Gorbachev’s role was at least equally large, but Reagan’s pressure contributed. He developed Alzheimer’s disease after leaving office. His optimism was not entirely a performance.

George H.W. Bush

Bush had the best foreign policy resume of anyone who ever took the office: director of the CIA, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, vice president for eight years. He managed the end of the Cold War with extraordinary diplomatic care, oversaw German reunification without catastrophe, expelled Iraq from Kuwait in the Gulf War with a coalition of 35 nations, and navigated the collapse of the Soviet Union without humiliating Gorbachev. His domestic record was more complicated. He broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge in 1990 to close the deficit, a decision that was economically sound and politically fatal. The economy slipped into recession, Pat Buchanan challenged him from the right, and Ross Perot split the vote in 1992. He lost to Bill Clinton. His son would later win the presidency twice. Bush died in 2018 at 94, and the eulogies were genuinely warm - he was, by general agreement, a gracious man who wrote personal notes in longhand and kept his word to friends. He jumped out of airplanes on his birthday into his 90s.

Bill Clinton

Clinton grew up poor in Hope, Arkansas, met JFK as a teenager on a class trip and decided then to enter politics, won a Rhodes Scholarship, attended Yale Law School, and became governor of Arkansas at 32. He was a prodigy of ambition and charm with a self-destructive streak that ran equally deep. His presidency oversaw the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history, budget surpluses after years of deficits, welfare reform, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. He also bombed Iraq, intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, failed to intervene in Rwanda (a decision he later called his greatest regret), and in 1998 was impeached by the House for lying under oath about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate did not convict. He left office with approval ratings above 60%, higher than when he entered. His wife Hillary served as senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential nominee. For better or worse, “Clintonism” - centrist, pragmatic, obsessively triangulating - defined the Democratic Party for decades.

George W. Bush

Bush came to the presidency having lost the popular vote in 2000 and won the Electoral College only after the Supreme Court stopped a Florida recount. Eight months later, September 11 happened. His response - the invasion of Afghanistan to pursue Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the PATRIOT Act - had broad initial support. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, justified by claims about weapons of mass destruction that proved false, did not. The Iraq War became the defining question of his administration, dividing the country and the world. Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in 2005 and the financial crisis of 2008 further damaged his standing. He left office with approval ratings around 22%. In subsequent years, his standing partially recovered - he became known for his landscape painting, his warmth toward veterans, and his blunt criticisms of the direction his party took after him. History’s verdict is still forming.

Barack Obama

Obama walked into the White House in January 2009 as the first Black president of the United States, inheriting the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and two ongoing wars. His administration passed the $787 billion stimulus package, the Affordable Care Act - the most significant expansion of health coverage since Medicare - and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform. He ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. He wound down the Iraq War and escalated drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He normalized relations with Cuba and negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year, before most of his presidency had happened, which created an awkward standard to live up to. He was reelected in 2012 and left office with strong approval ratings. His election and his presidency cracked open questions about race, identity, and American possibility in ways that are still being debated. He was the 44th president. His election was the thing that some Americans never accepted, which cast a long shadow over everything that followed.

Donald Trump

Trump is both the 45th and 47th president, the second person in American history - after Grover Cleveland - to win non-consecutive terms, and the first since the 19th century to do it. His first term, from 2017 to 2021, was defined by an aggressive immigration crackdown, tax cuts, the renegotiation of trade deals, a historically unusual relationship with traditional allies, and the COVID-19 pandemic that killed over a million Americans during his administration. He was impeached twice - first for attempting to pressure Ukraine into investigating a political rival, then for his role in the events surrounding the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was acquitted both times. He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, challenged the result through courts and other means, and was nonetheless convicted of 34 felony counts in New York in 2024 - the first former president convicted of a crime. He then won the 2024 election, becoming the first convicted felon elected president, and was inaugurated for the second time on January 20, 2025. He is, by any measure, a president unlike any other in American history.

Joe Biden

Biden had been trying to become president for 36 years. He ran in 1988 and dropped out after a plagiarism scandal. He ran in 2008 and dropped out before the first primary. He finally won in 2020, becoming at 78 the oldest person ever inaugurated as president. He came from Scranton, Pennsylvania, took the train to Washington every day as a senator, and buried a wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972 and a son to cancer in 2015. Grief was the through-line of his life. His presidency oversaw the largest infrastructure investment since Eisenhower, the CHIPS Act to re-shore semiconductor manufacturing, the Inflation Reduction Act investing heavily in clean energy, and significant job growth. He also presided over a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and soaring inflation that defined his public standing. In July 2024, following a poor debate performance, he announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. He was the first incumbent president to step aside in over 50 years. He left office in January 2025, having served one term and, by his own account, having done what he set out to do.