Every US President

The first American presidency started late because of the weather. The Confederation Congress had scheduled the inauguration for the first Wednesday in March 1789, and then, in the National Archives’ own account, “the early months of 1789 proved to be unseasonably cold and snowy and bad weather delayed many members of the First Federal Congress from arriving promptly in New York City.” Without a quorum there was no government to swear anyone into. George Washington finally took the oath on a second-floor balcony of Federal Hall on April 30.

The office was younger than the title. Men had been styled president of the United States in Congress Assembled since 1781, and there are fourteen men who held the title of president before Washington, but the job the Constitution invented in Article II did not exist until 1789 and none of them had a single one of its powers. That distinction is the reason this list starts where it does.

What follows is every individual who has held that office, in the order each first took it, with the official ordinal or ordinals the government assigns to each. Eight never finished: the presidents who died in office are here in their proper places, not in a separate column. So is the man sworn in by his own father by lamplight, the one who had part of his upper jaw cut out on a borrowed yacht to keep it out of the newspapers, and the one born in 1790 whose grandson was alive in 2025.

George Washington, 1st President

Washington had been shot at for most of a war, and the thing that finally unnerved him was a speech. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania sat watching the first inaugural address on April 30, 1789 and wrote that the new president “was agitated and embarrassed, more than ever he was by the levelled Cannon or pointed Musket.” The hero of the Revolution stood in front of Congress and shook.

The day had already gone slightly wrong. Organizers realized shortly before the ceremony that nobody had arranged a Bible for the oath, and Jacob Morton, Marshal of the Parade and master of St. John’s Lodge No. 1, had to hurry off and fetch the lodge’s own copy. It arrived just in time and was opened at random to Genesis 49:13. Washington swore on it out on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York, the oath administered by Robert R. Livingston, Chancellor of the State of New York, and then went inside to the Senate Chamber to read the address that had frightened him.

He had not wanted any of it. Shortly before the inauguration he told his Alexandria neighbors that “no earthly consideration, short of a conviction of duty, could have prevailed upon me to depart from my resolution, ’never more to take any share in transactions of a public nature.’” The Constitution asks a president for an oath and nothing else. Washington added the speech himself, and every elected president since has been stuck with it.

John Adams, 2nd President

The last words are the problem. Adams died at Quincy on July 4, 1826, a few hours after Jefferson died at Monticello, and the line handed down from that afternoon is “Jefferson still lives.” It comes from newspaper reports rather than from anyone’s transcript, and the Library of Congress passes it along without vouching for it. The poignancy depends entirely on Adams not knowing what had happened in Virginia, and the same source says plainly that neither man knew the other had died.

He would have had opinions about the date, too. Adams never accepted July 4 as the real anniversary, because Congress had voted for independence two days earlier. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” he wrote to Abigail on July 3, 1776. The country went on to celebrate the paperwork instead, and then arranged for him to die on it.

His most durable sentence was written in a letter mostly concerned with the plaster. Arriving at the unfinished President’s House in November 1800, he told Abigail the building was “in a State to be habitable,” and then: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.” Franklin Roosevelt had the line carved into the State Dining Room mantel in 1945. Kennedy’s replacement mantel, cut in 1962, carries it still.

Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President

Jefferson designed his own gravestone and left the presidency off it. The epitaph he specified remembers him as “Author of the Declaration of American Independence [and] of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.” Writing the country’s founding document made the list. Running the country did not.

He was dying as he wrote it, and he knew. On July 1, 1826 his physician Robley Dunglison sent an urgent note to James Madison warning that without “some speedy amelioration my worst apprehensions must soon be realized.” Jefferson had already written his last public letter a week before, declining Washington’s invitation to the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the Declaration because it “adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived...of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day.” He died at 12:50 that afternoon, and the news of what happened in Quincy later the same day took days to reach Virginia.

The famous deathbed line is not the tidy thing it looks. Dunglison remembered Jefferson waking on the evening of July 3 and asking “Is it the Fourth?”, and said those were the last words he heard him utter; Monticello’s own historians add that “Jefferson’s last words are lost.” The last thing anybody wrote down was a refusal of laudanum: “No, doctor, nothing more.” He had spent a lifetime shaping how he would be remembered, and was let down at the very end by a sentence simply too dull to keep.

James Madison, 4th President

On August 24, 1814, with British troops close enough to Washington that the city was emptying, Dolley Madison stood in the President’s House deciding what could be carried out. The instruction she gave about Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington was unambiguous: “Save that picture, if possible...if not possible, destroy it: under no circumstance allow it to fall into the hands of the British.” The canvas came off the wall. The house burned that night.

Her husband was not physically imposing and never pretended otherwise. Washington Irving, watching him at his own inauguration, described him as “but a withered little apple-John.” He had been too small and too often sick to fight in the Revolution; his health kept him out of the militia, so he joined the Orange County Committee of Safety and then the Continental Congress, as its youngest member. As Jefferson’s Secretary of State his written protests against British and French seizures of American ships drew a line from the critic John Randolph that has never been bettered: “a shilling pamphlet hurled against eight hundred ships of war.”

He also refused the title everyone gives him. The Constitution, Madison insisted late in life, was not “the off-spring of a single brain” but “the work of many heads and many hands.” The note he left to be opened after his death in 1836 was shorter: “The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.”

James Monroe, 5th President

Twenty-seven years passed between James Monroe’s funeral in Manhattan and his burial in Virginia. He had given up his Virginia estate to settle debts, and when Elizabeth died in 1830 he moved to New York City at seventy-two to live with his daughter and son-in-law. He died there on July 4, 1831, the third of the first five presidents to go on Independence Day, five years to the day after Adams and Jefferson. Thousands followed the hearse up Broadway while the bells rang, and then he was put in the Gouverneur family vault at New York Marble Cemetery and left there.

Only in 1858 was he brought home to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. The cast-iron Gothic cage that encloses his granite sarcophagus, designed by Albert Lybrock and erected in 1859, is known locally as the Birdcage.

He had been reckless once. At eighteen he took what Miller Center’s editor calls a “near fatal wound to his shoulder” leading a charge against enemy cannon at Trenton on December 26, 1776, and the year before that he and his William and Mary classmates raided the abandoned Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg for 200 muskets and 300 swords. A visitor to his last White House reception on New Year’s Day 1825 recorded Jefferson’s verdict on him: “Monroe was so honest that if you turned his soul inside out there would not be a spot on it.” It did not stop the government making him beg for his back pay.

John Quincy Adams, 6th President

On election day, November 6, 1830, the former president of the United States spent the afternoon planting trees. He laid out five rows of chestnuts, oaks and shagbark hickories at the family farm near Quincy, read the returns that evening, and recorded the outcome in his diary almost as an afterthought: “I am a member elect of the twenty-second Congress.”

The House’s own historians write that he “remains the only President elected to the U.S. House of Representatives after his service as chief executive.” He held the seat from 1831 until his death, and used it mainly to make trouble. He fought the gag rule that automatically tabled antislavery petitions, declaring it “a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States,” and kept at it until he had the votes to repeal it on December 3, 1844. In 1841 he argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court and won the captives their freedom and their passage home.

He suffered his fatal stroke on the floor of the House on February 21, 1848. He did not die there, which is the detail most retellings lose. He was carried to the Rotunda for air, then to the Speaker’s Room, where he slipped into a coma and died two days later. A bust carved in 1845, while he was still alive to sit for it, was installed in that room a year after his death. It is still on the wall.

Andrew Jackson, 7th President

The Senate Historical Office records that Jackson “suffered numerous battle wounds and fought at least a dozen duels,” which makes what happened on January 30, 1835 look almost like a quiet day. An unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence stepped out at the Capitol, aimed a pistol at the president’s heart and fired. The cap exploded and the powder failed to ignite. Lawrence drew a second pistol, aimed again, and that one misfired too. It was the first attempt ever made on the life of a sitting American president, and it failed twice in a row. Jackson, leaning on a cane, went straight at him with it raised, shouting “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this came from.”

His other great contribution to White House security was the cheese. A New York dairy farmer named Thomas Meacham had sent him a wheel weighing 1,400 pounds, and in 1837 Jackson simply opened the doors and let the public at it. People were said to have come in through the windows. The whole thing was gone in about two hours and the smell stayed for months. The Vermont Phoenix reported that congressmen skipped a House session to attend, one member moving that the Sergeant-at-Arms go and retrieve them.

Asked at the end of his presidency whether he had any regrets, he named two: “I regret I was unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang John C. Calhoun.”

Martin Van Buren, 8th President

English was Martin Van Buren’s second language. He grew up in a Dutch community in Kinderhook, New York, where, as the Library of Congress puts it, “Dutch was the primary language spoken in the Van Buren household,” and Britannica notes that he is the only president for whom English came second. The National Park Service and the Smithsonian describe him as the first president born a US citizen, which is a polite way of saying that everyone before him had started life as a British subject.

He is also the reason you say OK. The word had first appeared in print as a joke abbreviation of “all correct,” misspelled “oll korrect,” in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, and it would probably have died there. Then Van Buren’s 1840 reelection campaign built itself around his nickname, Old Kinderhook. Supporters founded O.K. Clubs, the slogan “Vote for OK” went up, and Van Buren began signing documents O.K. himself. He lost the election and fixed a word in the language forever, which is not the trade any candidate wants.

The Panic of 1837 had hit less than three months into his term and ground on for years; his answer was an Independent Treasury that took federal money out of private banks and left the rest to sort itself out. He wrote a memoir in retirement, and it was published only after he died. It never reached his own presidency.

William Henry Harrison, 9th President

8,445 words. That is the length of the inaugural address Harrison delivered on March 4, 1841, still the longest in American history, and it is the reason everyone thinks they know how he died. He gave it hatless and coatless, which sounds fatal until you learn the temperature. The National Constitution Center puts the weather that day at an estimated 48 degrees Fahrenheit. It was not a blizzard, and it was not even especially cold.

He also did not fall ill for weeks. The papers first reported him unwell after dinner on March 27, and the physicians’ report published on April 4, 1841 puts the onset shortly before that first report. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1841 and died on April 4, 1841, and what happened in between had far more to do with the capital’s drinking water than its climate. In 2014, Jane McHugh and Philip A. Mackowiak published a reexamination in Clinical Infectious Diseases arguing that enteric fever, not pneumonia, killed him, and blaming the unsanitary conditions of the capital.

His own physician had never been comfortable with the official answer either. “The disease was not viewed as a case of pure pneumonia,” Thomas Miller wrote, “but as this was the most palpable affection, the term pneumonia afforded a succinct and intelligible answer to the innumerable questions as to the nature of the attack.” A doctor reached for a word that would end the conversation, and it ended it for a very long time.

John Tyler, 10th President

For years after he took office, mail addressed to “Acting President Tyler” came back unopened. Tyler had decided the question the Constitution left dangling. When William Henry Harrison died on April 4, 1841, nobody knew whether the vice president became president or merely did the job on loan, and Tyler settled it by behaving as though there had never been a question: he met Harrison’s cabinet, took a fresh presidential oath in front of them, and refused to answer to any other title. John Quincy Adams complained to his diary on April 16 that Tyler “styles himself President of the United States, and not Vice-President acting as President, which would be the correct style.” Critics called him His Accidency. Congress affirmed his status in June anyway, and every one of the vice presidents who inherited the presidency since has done it on Tyler’s terms. The 25th Amendment finally wrote the precedent into the Constitution in 1967.

It cost him. He vetoed the national bank his own Whig party had been elected to build, the entire cabinet resigned except Daniel Webster, and he spent the rest of the term as a president without a party.

He was born in 1790 and had a grandson alive in 2025. Two very late fatherhoods did it: Tyler was 63 when Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born in 1853, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison Ruffin Tyler arrived in 1928. Harrison died on May 25, 2025, aged 96.

James K. Polk, 11th President

Three months. That is how long Polk had between handing over the White House and dying of cholera on June 15, 1849, and his own presidential museum puts the record plainly: “His is the shortest retirement of any Commander in Chief.” The superlative is about retirement, which quietly excludes every president who died still in office, and there have been eight of those. He had promised during the campaign to serve a single term, which is the sort of pledge candidates make and then discover they cannot honor. Polk honored it.

He also got almost everything he wanted, which is rarer still. Congress declared war on Mexico in May 1846; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended it on February 2, 1848 and handed the United States most of the modern Southwest. The Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846 drew the northern boundary at the 49th parallel, which is still where the Canadian border mostly runs, and he got it by negotiating rather than by fighting, despite supporters who had campaigned on “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight.”

Texas was the piece he inherited. Tyler had signed the annexation resolution on March 1, 1845, three days before Polk was sworn in; Polk signed Texas into the Union on December 29, 1845 as the twenty-eighth state, one of four states that were independent countries first. The last entry in his diary is dated Friday, June 1, 1849.

Zachary Taylor, 12th President

Forty years in the Army, and Zachary Taylor had never voted in a presidential election before he won one. He was known as Old Rough and Ready for living the way his soldiers did, and he had been so careful about politics that Miller Center records it flatly: he “had never revealed his politics, nor had he even voted prior to 1848.” The first ballot he is known to have cared about was the one that made him president.

He owned hundreds of enslaved people across plantations at Baton Rouge and Rodney, Mississippi, and went on owning them in office, which puts him among the presidents who owned enslaved people while in office. The 1842 purchase of Cypress Grove came with 81 named men, women and children. His 1850 will left roughly 131 people to his wife and children and called them slaves for life. He also told southern leaders threatening secession that he would hang rebels with less reluctance than he had hanged deserters in Mexico.

He attended ceremonies at the unfinished Washington Monument on a blistering July 4, 1850, fell ill, and was dead five days later. The suspicion of poison lasted so long that his casket was opened on June 17, 1991 and samples sent to Oak Ridge. Kentucky’s medical examiner announced nine days later that the arsenic was hundreds of times below a lethal dose, and that “a cause of death cannot be ascertained from the body of Zachary Taylor.”

Millard Fillmore, 13th President

Apprenticed as a boy to a cloth-dresser who worked him nearly into an early grave, Millard Fillmore could barely read. He was born in 1800 on lean, rocky New York farmland, and he bought himself out of that childhood for thirty dollars. He bought a dictionary and taught himself letters by stealing looks at it when his master was not watching, then borrowed the money to buy his release from the apprenticeship outright.

He became president on July 10, 1850, the day after Taylor died, and Taylor’s entire cabinet resigned on the spot; Fillmore appointed Daniel Webster Secretary of State. The most durable thing he did in the house was quieter than any of that. Many of the presidents before him had brought their own books to the White House and taken them away again, so Millard and Abigail Fillmore assembled the first permanent library there in 1850, about 200 volumes plus periodicals and government documents, paid for by a congressional appropriation of $2,250.

Later administrations scattered it. Of those original volumes, only about ten are known to survive, and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, closing a Library of Congress symposium on the rediscovered catalog in 2010, observed that today’s White House library “bears only the most generic resemblance” to the collection the Fillmores assembled. Fillmore ran again in 1856 for the nativist Know Nothing party, was handily beaten by Buchanan, and still took more than 20 percent of the vote.

Franklin Pierce, 14th President

The presidential oath has been sworn by every president but one. Franklin Pierce affirmed it instead, saying “I do solemnly affirm” where all the others have said swear, and he remains the only one who has. The Constitution permits the substitution and nobody else has ever reached for it.

The reason was eight weeks old. On January 6, 1853, the train carrying the president-elect, his wife Jane, and their only surviving child derailed near Andover, Massachusetts when an axle fractured. The car went down an embankment. Eleven-year-old Benny Pierce was killed in front of both parents, the only death in a crash that injured several others. Jane did not attend the inauguration. Pierce, Boston Magazine reports, had concluded that God was punishing him for past sins by taking his son, which is a hard thing to carry to a swearing-in and a harder thing to swear on a Bible about.

What followed was worse for the country than for him. He signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, reopened the question of slavery in the West, and produced the killing remembered as Bleeding Kansas. His own party then refused to renominate him in 1856, making him the only elected sitting president ever denied his party’s nomination. He delivered that 1853 inaugural address entirely from memory, in falling snow, and opened it: “We have been carried in safety through a perilous crisis.”

James Buchanan, 15th President

“My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.” That is what Buchanan said to Abraham Lincoln in the carriage on the way to the inauguration on March 4, 1861, and he meant every word of it. Seven states had already gone. He was leaving.

He is the only president who never married. His fiancee Ann Coleman broke off their engagement in 1819 amid rumors he was seeing someone else and died a few days later, and he vowed afterward never to marry anyone. For years in Washington he shared lodgings with Senator William Rufus King of Alabama, a household contemporaries nicknamed the Bachelor’s Mess and gossiped about at length; when King left for New York, Buchanan wrote to a friend, “I am now solitary and alone, having no companion in the house with me.” The historian Thomas Balcerski calls it an intimate male friendship of a kind common in the nineteenth century.

He had also known how Dred Scott would come out before he was sworn in, having been tipped off by the Court, and used his inaugural address to tell the country to accept whatever the justices decided. When secession came he sent one ship, the Star of the West, to relieve Fort Sumter, and on January 9, 1861 it was fired on and turned back. It never got there. Neither did he.

Abraham Lincoln, 16th President

On the night he was shot Lincoln was carrying two pairs of spectacles, one of them mended with string, an ivory pocketknife, a handkerchief embroidered with his name, eight newspaper clippings, and a Confederate five-dollar bill. The Library of Congress still has all of it, catalogued in the flat language of an inventory, and it is the most human object in American history: the pockets of a man who had no idea he was about to become a monument.

He had patented something, too. Letters Patent No. 6,469, granted May 22, 1849, covers a manner of buoying vessels over shoals using inflatable chambers strapped to a hull, an idea he had after watching a grounded boat being worked free. The model he whittled is in the Smithsonian.

John Wilkes Booth shot him at point-blank range at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, leapt to the stage shouting “Sic semper Tyrannis,” and got away for twelve days before being cornered in a Virginia tobacco barn and shot through the slats. Booth’s plan that night had also included Secretary of State Seward, Vice President Johnson and General Grant. Major Henry Rathbone, sharing the box, was stabbed trying to stop him. The National Park Service notes that much of the blood at Ford’s Theatre and across the street belonged to Rathbone. Lincoln’s wound barely bled at all.

Andrew Johnson, 17th President

Seven years after the Senate came within a single vote of throwing him out of the presidency, Andrew Johnson walked back into that chamber as a member of it. The House had impeached him in 1868 over the removal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton; the trial climaxed on May 16, 1868, when the decisive article fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict, with seven Republicans breaking ranks and Johnson’s own son-in-law among those voting to acquit. The Tennessee legislature then spent 56 ballots in January 1875 deciding to send him back, and he took the Senate oath on March 5, 1875 in front of the men who had nearly removed him.

He was frank about what it meant. “I’d rather have this information than to learn that I had been elected President of the United States,” he said when the result came through. “Thank God for the vindication.”

The Smithsonian states the distinction carefully, and it is worth copying exactly, because the sloppy version of it is everywhere: John Quincy Adams was the only former president to serve in the House, and Andrew Johnson the only one to serve in the Senate. Johnson gave one major speech in his return term, on the wreckage of Reconstruction in Louisiana, went home to Tennessee, and died of a stroke on July 31, 1875.

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President

Ferdinand Ward was known around New York as the Young Napoleon of Finance, and what he was actually running was a Ponzi scheme. Grant had put nearly everything he owned into the firm. When it collapsed he borrowed $150,000 from William Vanderbilt on May 4, 1884 in a failed attempt to prop it up, and came out of it with essentially nothing, having already been president of the United States.

Then the throat cancer arrived, and he started writing. Mark Twain talked him out of a magazine contract and into a deal with his own nephew’s firm at a seventy percent royalty, and Grant moved to a borrowed cottage at Mount McGregor in June 1885 and worked five to seven hours a day on a book he knew he was racing. He finished the Personal Memoirs three days before he died on July 23, 1885. The first check to Julia Grant was for $200,000, which is not the same thing as what the book eventually earned, though it is routinely reported as if it were.

A million and a half people turned out in New York to watch the funeral procession. Then his body went into a temporary vault and stayed there twelve years while the money was raised for the permanent one. The tomb that eventually went up on Riverside Drive is the largest mausoleum in North America.

Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President

On the evening of Saturday, March 3, 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes took the oath of office in the Red Room of the White House with the doors shut, two days before anyone watched him do it in public. The electoral count had not finished until the early hours of March 2, and nobody was confident the country would still be calm on Monday.

The 1876 election had been decided by a commission of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, which voted along party lines every single time and handed Hayes every disputed electoral vote. The final tally was 185 to 184. He had lost the popular vote. Critics spent the next four years calling him Rutherfraud and His Fraudulency, and the arithmetic behind the nickname was not really in dispute: in Louisiana alone the state returning board threw out 15,000 ballots, 13,000 of them Democratic, before certifying for Hayes.

The independent seat on that commission should have gone to Justice David Davis, and would have, except that Tilden’s own nephew tried to buy his vote by getting him elected to the Senate from Illinois. Davis took the Senate seat and disqualified himself from the commission. The Republicans got his replacement. Hayes then governed as though none of it had happened, insisting on merit appointments, putting an ex-Confederate in his cabinet, and keeping his pledge to serve only one term.

James A. Garfield, 20th President

Before any of the rest of it, Garfield spent six weeks working the canal boats between Cleveland and Pittsburgh and fell overboard fourteen times. He was sixteen, fatherless and nearly penniless. He caught a fever bad enough to send him home, decided on an education instead, worked as a janitor to pay his way through the Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, and came back to the same institute as an instructor and then its president. He was ordained a minister along the way. He raised the 42nd Ohio Infantry, beat a larger Confederate force at Middle Creek in January 1862, and rode under fire at Chickamauga.

Charles Guiteau shot him in the back at a Washington railroad station at 9:20 in the morning on July 2, 1881, with a revolver he had chosen partly because he thought it would look good in a museum.

Garfield did not die until September 19. Alexander Graham Bell built an induction-balance metal detector and swept him with it on July 26 and again on August 1, and found nothing, because Dr. Willard Bliss had insisted the bullet was on the right side of the torso and the autopsy would find it on the left. The National Park Service is blunt about the outcome: “Bell’s device had worked, even if it was not clear at the time.” It was pointed at the wrong half of the president.

Chester A. Arthur, 21st President

How a British Subject Became President of the United States was a real booklet, written by a New York attorney named Arthur P. Hinman, and every word of its central claim was false. Hinman had begun in 1880 by alleging that the Republican candidate for vice president was secretly born in Canada, and he kept elaborating the theory for years afterward. The New York Sun published a refutation the day after Arthur took the presidential oath. Arthur was born on October 5, 1829 in Fairfield, Vermont.

He did lie about his birth, though. Not the place, the year. For most of his adult life he told people he had been born in 1830, shaving off a year for no reason anybody has ever improved on beyond vanity.

The larger surprise was what he did with the office. Arthur had run the New York Custom House as a spoils machine for Roscoe Conkling’s faction, which is precisely why his party had put him on the ticket, and his own White House biography calls him “a man of fashion in his garb and associates.” Then in 1883 he signed the Pendleton Act, which created competitive examinations for federal jobs and protected employees from being fired over politics. He dismantled the system that had made him. He also knew by then that he had a fatal kidney disease, and told nobody.

Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President

The fishing trip was not a fishing trip. On July 1, 1893, six surgeons boarded the yacht Oneida in the guise of a holiday party, sedated the president of the United States with ether, and in about ninety minutes removed part of his upper left jaw and five teeth entirely through his mouth, so that no scar would show and his moustache would be undisturbed. Cleveland’s own dentist had spotted the tumor. His physician, Joseph Bryant, had written to a confidant with the least reassuring second opinion in medical history: “It is a bad looking tenant. Were it in my mouth I would have it removed at once.”

The secrecy was not vanity. The country was in the middle of a severe financial panic and Cleveland was convinced that a president with a tumor in his mouth would make it worse.

The part everyone gets wrong is what happened next. Two months later, on August 29, 1893, a Philadelphia Press reporter named E. J. Edwards published the story under the headline “The President is a Very Sick Man,” having confirmed it with one of the doctors on board. The White House denied it flatly and Edwards was destroyed for it, called a disgrace to journalism. He was right, and he waited roughly a quarter of a century to be told so, when the surgeon W. W. Keen finally published the whole account in 1917.

Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President

Ike Hoover, the electrician who wired the White House in 1891, is the source of the story that has attached itself to Benjamin Harrison ever since, and Hoover is also its hero, which is worth knowing before repeating it. By his account the family would not touch the new switches for fear of a shock, so he turned the lights on in the halls and parlors each evening and came back the next morning to turn them off again. The account comes from his memoir, which NARA’s own historian notes he did not live to finish; he died in 1933 having drafted only as far as Taft, and the editor admitted adapting the remaining notes rather freely.

The wiring itself is not in doubt. An Edison Company generator powered both the White House and the State, War and Navy Building next door.

Harrison had arrived in the job by the narrowest of routes and never entirely escaped the impression that others had arranged it. He was the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration. He signed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, hosted the first Pan-American Congress, and presided over the first Congress in peacetime to appropriate a billion dollars. When critics coined the billion-dollar Congress as an insult, Speaker Thomas Reed replied that this was a billion-dollar country.

William McKinley, 25th President

There were two X-ray machines available and nobody used either one. The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo had one on display as a marvel of the age, and after the shooting an aide wired Thomas Edison to rush a second to the city. No X-ray was ever taken of the president. Surgeons operating in the fair’s own emergency hospital simply could not find the second bullet, closed the wounds, and declined to drain the damaged kidney over one surgeon’s objection.

Leon Czolgosz shot him twice at close range in the Temple of Music at seven minutes past four on September 6, 1901. Doubled over, McKinley’s first coherent words were about his wife: “My wife, be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her – oh, be careful.” His second thought was for the man who had shot him. “Go easy on him, boys.”

He had married Ida Saxton two years after his first run for office, and their two small daughters both died in childhood, and Ida developed what the National Park Service describes as what is thought to have been petit mal epilepsy. To spare her having to shake hands at events, she carried a bouquet instead. McKinley’s doctors predicted recovery for nearly a week. Gangrene set in around the abdominal wound and he died on September 14, 1901.

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President

A folded fifty-page speech and a metal eyeglass case are the reason Theodore Roosevelt survived Milwaukee. He was campaigning for a third term in 1912 when John Schrank shot him in the chest. The paper and the case slowed the bullet enough that it lodged without reaching anything vital, and Roosevelt, having established that he was not bleeding from the mouth, went and delivered the speech with the bullet still in him.

He had come into the office by the worst possible route, taking the oath at a private house in Buffalo on September 14, 1901, in the same city where McKinley had been shot. The White House’s own biography records his age with unusual precision: “Theodore Roosevelt, not quite 43, became the 26th and youngest President in the Nation’s history.” Nobody has taken the office younger since.

What he did with it is mostly known. What gets forgotten is the Nobel Peace Prize he won in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, which the Nobel committee credits with ending a war between two great powers. It was contentious the moment it was announced. Critics called him an imperialist, and some suspected Norway of trying to charm the United States. He also liked to march foreign ambassadors on hikes through Rock Creek Park.

William Howard Taft, 27th President

“I don’t remember that I ever was President,” Taft wrote years after leaving the White House, and he was not being modest. He had wanted the Supreme Court all along. In 1911, while still president, he said it out loud: “I love judges, and I love courts. They are my ideals that typify on earth what we shall meet hereafter in heaven under a just God.” In 1910 he had the chance to name himself Chief Justice, elevated Edward White instead, and then told his own attorney general there was nothing he would have loved more.

Warren Harding gave it to him on June 30, 1921. The Senate confirmed him within a day, and he sat as Chief Justice until February 3, 1930, which makes him the only person in American history to have run both the executive and the judicial branch. He used the job to build things: the Judicial Conference, which still administers the federal courts, exists because Taft asked Congress for it.

The story everyone knows about him is the one that is not true. The writer Howard Dorre, going through the newspaper record for Smithsonian Magazine, found that contemporary papers never mentioned the president getting stuck in a bathtub. There was a famous tub, a one-ton fixture over seven feet long, but it was built for the battleship USS North Carolina. He died on March 8, 1930, a month after he stepped down from the Court.

Woodrow Wilson, 28th President

Senator Albert Fall was shown into the bedroom on December 5, 1919, and everything in it had been arranged: the blanket over Wilson’s paralyzed side, the chairs, the lighting, a report placed within reach so the president could appear to be working. Fall had come to satisfy a Senate that had begun to wonder what exactly was wrong, and he left telling reporters Wilson “seemed to me to be in excellent trim, both mentally and physically.” Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, privately called the whole performance a dress rehearsal.

A stroke had paralyzed his left side that October. It came about a week after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado left him with a crushing headache and his doctor cancelled the rest of the tour. Edith Wilson then controlled what reached him, telling callers he was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and officials found themselves conducting their business in writing. She called it her stewardship. The White House’s own account is precise about its limits: “she did not initiate programs or make major decisions, and she did not try to control the executive branch.”

The 1919 Nobel Peace Prize went to him a year late, awarded in 1920, for a League of Nations his own country never joined. Presenting the Versailles Treaty to the Senate he asked, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” The Senate rejected it, by seven votes.

Warren G. Harding, 29th President

In Birmingham, Alabama, in October 1921, Harding stood in front of a crowd of more than 100,000 and told them Black men should be allowed to vote. His formula was hedged in the way of its time – “let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote” – and the Black section of the audience cheered while the white section managed applause once or twice, scattered both times.

He had come to politics from a newspaper. He and two partners scraped together $300 for the nearly defunct Marion Star in Marion, Ohio, and he ran his 1920 campaign from the front porch of his own house. He won by more than seven million votes. In December 1921 he pardoned Eugene Debs, who was serving a federal sentence for an antiwar speech, and timed the release for Christmas.

What followed was Teapot Dome, and then Harding was dead. His physicians announced at 7:51 in the evening on August 2, 1923 that he had died of apoplexy in a San Francisco hotel. Florence Harding refused an autopsy and had him embalmed within the hour, which fed rumors for decades. Ray Lyman Wilbur, one of the doctors at his bedside, put the position plainly: “We shall never know exactly the immediate cause of President Harding’s death.”

Calvin Coolidge, 30th President

At 2:47 in the morning on August 3, 1923, a notary public in Plymouth Notch, Vermont swore in his own son as president of the United States. Colonel John Coolidge administered the oath in the family parlor by the light of a kerosene lamp, because word of Harding’s death had reached the homestead in the middle of the night and there was nobody else to do it.

There is a second oath, and it is a separate event with a separate reason. Attorney General Harry Daugherty worried that a state notary could not lawfully swear in a national officer, so the whole thing was quietly done again on August 21, 1923, at the Willard Hotel in Washington, before a judge. The National Archives records it without ceremony, which is roughly how Coolidge treated most things.

He was not silent by accident. “Many times I say only ’yes’ or ’no’ to people,” he told Bernard Baruch. “Even that is too much.” The newspapers called his annual message to Congress on December 6, 1923, carried by six stations, the first presidential broadcast, and still do; Harding’s had been on the air the December before. Coolidge was the first president in a sound film, on the White House lawn in August 1924. Grace Coolidge kept a raccoon named Rebecca, sent from Mississippi to be eaten at Thanksgiving and adopted instead. On August 2, 1927 he handed reporters identical typed slips announcing he would not run again, and answered no questions.

Herbert Hoover, 31st President

By August 1922, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration was feeding nearly 11 million people a day in Soviet Russia out of 19,000 kitchens, in a famine that had threatened 16 million with starvation. He had been doing this sort of thing for years by then. He organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium in 1914 with his own money and the money of wealthy friends, before the United States was in the war at all, and Wilson put him in charge of the Food Administration in 1917.

He got there by way of mining. An orphan from West Branch, Iowa, raised partly by a Quaker uncle in Oregon, he graduated in Stanford’s pioneer class of 1895 and went to work as an engineer in the goldfields of Western Australia and then in China.

The presidency went badly and the rehabilitation came from an unlikely quarter: within weeks of taking office Truman wrote to him about the European food crisis, and later handed him a commission to reorganize the executive branch. As for the story that he and Lou Henry Hoover spoke Chinese in the White House to stop the staff understanding them, his own presidential library has looked into it and disagrees. “This is untrue,” the library says, adding that Hoover “was neither fluent in Chinese nor any other foreign language.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President

Weeks before the inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt was shot at in Miami and somebody else died. Giuseppe Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer, opened fire on the president-elect at Bayfront Park on February 15, 1933; a bystander deflected his hand, and the man hit worst was Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, who lingered until March 6.

Roosevelt was first inaugurated on March 4, 1933 and died in office on April 12, 1945, which is the whole basis of every claim made about the length of his presidency. He was elected four times, and it was that run that produced the 22nd Amendment in 1951 to stop anyone doing it again. His fireside chats began with one on the banking crisis on March 12, 1933, and his own library says even the total is disputed.

The familiar story that the press agreed never to photograph his wheelchair is tidier than the truth. Newspapers wrote about his paralysis repeatedly. What actually worked was the Secret Service taking film out of cameras, and the result is that only a handful of photographs of him in the chair exist out of hundreds of thousands taken. He was sitting for a portrait at Warm Springs on the morning he died, and told the artist he could give her fifteen more minutes.

Harry S. Truman, 33rd President

The S in Harry S. Truman does not stand for anything. When he was born in Lamar, Missouri on May 8, 1884, his parents could not choose between his two grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young, so they wrote down the initial both names shared and left it at that. Truman explained this himself on more than one occasion. Whether the letter takes a period has never been settled and is officially considered optional.

He had failed at business before politics. He and his army friend Eddie Jacobson opened a men’s clothing store in Kansas City in November 1919, in a storefront eighteen feet by forty-eight, at $350 a month. It got by for a while and then it did not.

His presidency included the two things everyone knows and one nobody does: the White House was falling down. By 1948 engineers had found trembling floors and swaying chandeliers, and Truman is said to have nearly gone through the bathroom floor while bathing, into a tea party below. The building was gutted to its shell and rebuilt around a steel frame while he lived across the street at Blair House, where on November 1, 1950 two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to shoot their way in. The desk sign a friend had made for him at a federal reformatory read: The Buck Stops Here.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.” Eisenhower wrote that by hand on June 5, 1944, the night before the largest amphibious invasion in history, to be released only if it went wrong, and he took the blame in advance and alone. The most human thing about the note is the date on it. Writing under that much strain, he put July 5. He was a month out.

He had never voted in an election in his own name when both parties began trying to recruit him. Before the 1948 race, Harry Truman privately proposed that they run together on the Democratic ticket, with Eisenhower at the top and Truman dropping down to run for vice president. Eisenhower said no, went off to run Columbia University, and was back in uniform commanding NATO in Europe by the time the 1952 maneuvering started.

He signed the Federal Aid Highway Act on June 29, 1956, and the interstates came from two things he had seen personally: a miserable Army truck convoy across the country in 1919, and the German autobahns. On January 17, 1961, three days before he left, he warned the country in a farewell address to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,” by what he called the military-industrial complex. It is the phrase he is now quoted for most.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President

In a Fort Worth parking lot, in light rain, on the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy opened his remarks with a joke about his wife. She was running late. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he said. “It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.” The remarks survive in the Public Papers of the Presidents, where anyone can still read them. He was shot dead that afternoon.

He had spent the campaign answering a question no candidate had faced in that form. Addressing the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, he told a room of Protestant clergy that he was not the Catholic candidate for president, and went further than the famous excerpt usually runs: if the office ever demanded he act against his conscience, he said, then he would resign it.

In office the crisis that defined him lasted, in his own library’s phrase, thirteen days in October 1962. Part of the settlement stayed secret for more than twenty-five years, because alongside the public pledge not to invade Cuba the United States quietly agreed to pull its own missiles out of Turkey. And on May 25, 1961, less than three weeks after Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute hop had put the first American in space, he committed the country to landing a man on the moon.

Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President

Sarah T. Hughes is the only woman who has ever administered the presidential oath of office. She did it aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field at 2:38 in the afternoon on November 22, 1963, with Kennedy’s body already loaded onto the plane. Kennedy had put her on the federal bench himself two years earlier. The scramble to find her was recorded by the U.S. Attorney who took the call from the plane: the instruction was “Find Sarah Hughes.”

Johnson had spent a decade learning how to make people agree with him. As Senate majority leader he developed what everyone called the Johnson treatment, a mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats and reminders of past favors, best preserved in a 1957 photograph of him leaning down into Senator Theodore Green until Green is bent backward. Ben Bradlee said being on the end of it felt like a St. Bernard had licked your face for an hour.

He used it on the Civil Rights Act, which he signed on July 2, 1964, two days before the anniversary of the Declaration, and on the Voting Rights Act, signed in the Capitol Rotunda on August 6, 1965 to remedy what he called a clear and simple wrong. Then Vietnam took it all back, and on March 31, 1968 he ended a televised address by saying he would not seek and would not accept his party’s nomination.

Richard Nixon, 37th President

A resignation from the presidency takes one sentence, and by a law dating from 1792 it is addressed not to the country but to the Secretary of State. Nixon’s read in full: “Dear Mr. Secretary: I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.” Alexander Haig brought it to him to sign on the morning of August 9, 1974, and it became effective the moment Henry Kissinger initialed it at 11:35 that morning.

At 9:36 he had stood in the East Room in front of the staff and talked about his parents. His father had run what he called the poorest lemon ranch in California and sold it before anyone found oil on the land. His mother, he said, was a saint, and would never have a book written about her.

The tapes had done it. One recording of a meeting with H. R. Haldeman in the Executive Office Building on June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in, turned out to have eighteen and a half minutes missing from it. Two years earlier he had gone to Beijing, arriving February 21, 1972 for the week his own library still calls the week that changed the world. One month after the helicopter lifted off the South Lawn, Gerald Ford granted him a full, free and absolute pardon covering everything he had done or might have done in office.

Gerald Ford, 38th President

Born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha in 1913, the man who became president reached the office without ever appearing on a national ballot for it, or for the vice presidency either. The National Archives states the distinction carefully, and the care matters: he was “the first (and so far only) President who was never actually elected to the office of the Presidency or Vice Presidency.” Nine men have become president without winning a presidential election. Only Ford also arrived at the vice presidency without an election, appointed under the 25th Amendment after Spiro Agnew resigned in October 1973. He was also the first president to change his last name, which he did on December 3, 1935.

He had been a serious athlete before any of it, playing on Michigan’s national championship teams in 1932 and 1933, voted the team’s most valuable player in 1934, and turning down professional offers.

One month into the presidency, on September 8, 1974, he pardoned Richard Nixon for every offense Nixon had committed or might have committed in office. His approval rating collapsed. He went before a House subcommittee on October 17 that year to answer questions about it under oath, the first sitting president to testify to Congress. Two women tried to shoot him in California within seventeen days of each other in September 1975. He lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter by two points.

Jimmy Carter, 39th President

One hundred years and eighty-nine days is the longest any American president has lived, and Jimmy Carter is the one who did it. The record has a lineage worth getting right: he did not overtake Gerald Ford, who died at 93. He overtook George H.W. Bush, whose 94 years and 171 days had stood since 2018.

The presidency itself ran into a wall. Iranian students seized 52 American diplomats and citizens in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and held them 444 days, and Miller Center describes what followed for Carter as a term defined by inflation, an energy crisis, a war in Afghanistan and hostages in Iran. Before that came the thing he is likeliest to be remembered for, when he shut Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in at Camp David from September 5 to September 17, 1978 and would not let them leave without an agreement.

Then he had four decades to do something else with. He founded the Carter Center at Emory in 1982, built houses with Habitat for Humanity, and took on guinea worm disease, which in 1986 was infecting an estimated 3.5 million people a year across 21 countries. The provisional count for 2025 was ten cases in the world. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. His state funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral on January 9, 2025, in a building he had chosen himself.

Ronald Reagan, 40th President

From 11:28 in the morning until 7:22 that evening on July 13, 1985, the powers of the American presidency belonged to George Bush. Reagan was having a malignant colon polyp removed and signed the authority over before going under. What nobody can quite agree on is what he had done, constitutionally speaking. His letter named Section 3 of the 25th Amendment and then explained why he was not exactly using it, saying he did not believe “the drafters of this Amendment intended its applications to situations such as the instant one.” Cornell’s constitutional annotation splits the difference and says he “implicitly invoked” it. His own counsel thought he clearly meant to invoke it. A Miller Center commission on presidential disability concluded he had decided not to invoke it officially while using its form anyway.

Four years earlier the question had been far less academic. On March 30, 1981, outside the Washington Hilton, John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots as Reagan left an AFL-CIO conference; one ricocheted off the limousine and went into the president’s chest. In the confusion, with Bush still in the air from Dallas, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told reporters at the White House, “I’m in control here.”

Reagan, by the accounts that have come down, stayed wry throughout. He is supposed to have told Nancy he forgot to duck, and to have asked the surgeons whether they were all Republicans.

George H.W. Bush, 41st President

A torpedo bomber went down off Chichijima on September 2, 1944 and only the pilot got out. George Bush was twenty, flying a mission against a Japanese radio installation, and both of the men in his aircraft were killed. He flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific over the course of the war. A submarine picked him out of the water.

Forty-six years later he was assembling what his own foundation calls a grand coalition of 32 nations after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The air campaign opened on January 17, 1991 and the ground war lasted days rather than months, and he then declined to march on Baghdad, a decision argued over ever since.

The promise that undid him he had made himself, at the 1988 convention. On June 26, 1990 he said publicly that tax increases might be necessary after all, and on November 5 he signed the budget law that raised them. His own party never forgave it and he lost in 1992.

He and his son are one of two father-and-son pairs to have both held the presidency; the other is John Adams and John Quincy Adams, which means the arrangement has happened twice in two and a half centuries and both times the son had to hear about the father. Bush died on November 30, 2018.

Bill Clinton, 42nd President

Forty-five senators voted to convict on the first article and fifty on the second, and it takes two-thirds of the chamber. That was February 12, 1999, closing a trial that had begun when the House impeached Clinton on December 19, 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice. The second article split the chamber exactly in half, fifty to fifty, which is as close as the arithmetic came and still nowhere near.

The rest of the presidency is a ledger of the 1990s. He signed a deficit-reduction package on August 10, 1993 projected to cut $496 billion through 1998, signed a bill on August 22, 1996 that restructured American welfare around a requirement to work, and spent the winter of 1995 in a budget standoff that shut down much of the federal government from December 16 and furloughed more than a quarter of a million people.

His best day was probably the one on the South Lawn. On September 13, 1993, after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles, Clinton stood between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat as they shook hands, a photograph that seemed at the time to have settled something. He also gave sustained American attention to Northern Ireland, where Catholic and Protestant leaders signed the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998. He was the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to be reelected to a second term.

George W. Bush, 43rd President

Standing on the rubble at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, with a retired firefighter named Bob Beckwith beside him and a bullhorn, Bush was told by someone in the crowd that they could not hear him. “I can hear you,” he answered. “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you.” He had learned of the attacks three days earlier in a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida, where an aide leaned down and told him the country was under attack.

He had arrived in the office by the narrowest route available. The Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000, ending the Florida recount; Miller Center records the Court dividing 7 to 2 on whether the recount process violated equal protection and 5 to 4 on whether there was any fair way to finish it.

The most consequential thing he signed had nothing to do with any of that. In his 2003 State of the Union he announced PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program, and signed its five-year, $15 billion authorization later that year. He also signed the Medicare prescription drug law on December 8, 2003 and, on October 3, 2008, the emergency stabilization act that created the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Twice, on June 29, 2002 and July 21, 2007, he signed his own powers over to Dick Cheney for a colonoscopy.

Barack Obama, 44th President

Less than nine months into his first term, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. He said in the Rose Garden that he did not deserve it. The committee had announced it that morning, citing what it called his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy. His reaction came at 11:16, and it was that he did not feel he belonged “in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.” He collected the prize in Oslo that December anyway.

He had been elected on November 4, 2008 with 53 percent of the vote and 365 electoral votes, becoming the first African American to hold the office. Four weeks in he signed the stimulus. A year later, on March 23, 2010, he signed the Affordable Care Act, which is the law his presidency is measured by.

On the night of May 1, 2011, at 11:35 in the evening in Washington, he went on television to say that an American operation had killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad. The Treasury’s auto rescue, less remembered, committed roughly $80 billion; of the $51 billion that went to General Motors, $39.7 billion came back when the government sold out in December 2013.

Donald Trump, 45th and 47th President

Two numbers belong to Donald Trump, and that is the unusual thing about him. He was the 45th president from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021, and he became the 47th on January 20, 2025, which makes him the second man ever and the first since the nineteenth century elected to two non-consecutive terms. Grover Cleveland was the other.

He was born on June 14, 1946, which made him 70 years and 220 days old at his first inauguration. That was itself a record at the time; no one had taken the office older. Eight years later, on the same calendar day, he was 78 years and 220 days, and the record was his again, this time from Joe Biden.

He is also the only president to appear twice on the Senate’s own list of presidential impeachment trials, a list that runs to four entries in all. The House impeached him on December 18, 2019 on two articles, passed 230 to 197 and 229 to 198; the Senate acquitted him on February 5, 2020 by 48 to 52 and 47 to 53. The House impeached him again on January 13, 2021 by 232 to 197, and the Senate acquitted him on February 13 by 57 to 43, short of the two thirds a conviction requires.

Joe Biden, 46th President

Weeks after he was first elected to the Senate in 1972, Joe Biden’s wife Neilia and his one-year-old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident, and his two young sons were badly injured. He was sworn in as a senator in a chapel at the Wilmington hospital where his sons were being treated. He was twenty-nine when he won that seat, too young by law to take it until his thirtieth birthday, and he held it for 36 years before spending eight more as Barack Obama’s vice president.

He was inaugurated on January 20, 2021, at 78 years and 61 days old. He signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on November 15, 2021, the CHIPS and Science Act on August 9, 2022, which put $52.7 billion behind semiconductor research and manufacturing, and the Inflation Reduction Act on August 16, 2022, a week after that.

Then he did something no president had done in more than half a century. On Sunday, July 21, 2024, having already been nominated in all but formality, he announced in a letter posted at 1:46 that afternoon to his own account that he would not seek reelection, and endorsed his vice president before the day was out. He left office on January 20, 2025.