President Richard M. Nixon

Richard Nixon’s presidency begins, in most people’s minds, with an ending: a man in a dark suit stepping onto a helicopter on an August morning in 1974, giving a stiff, awkward double V-sign, and flying away from the White House he had just resigned in disgrace. The rotor wash blows across the South Lawn; aides stand watching, some stunned, some grim. It is the first time in American history that a president has left office not because his term expired or because death claimed him, but because the machinery of law and politics has forced him out.

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James A. Garfield steps onto the national stage with the air of someone who has already worn half a dozen lives and is suspicious of fame because it looks too much like a costume. He is born in a one-room cabin in Orange Township, Ohio, the last child of a widowed mother who has nothing to offer but work and the belief that work is convertible into dignity. The boy is small, eager, and afflicted with a restlessness that in a harsher age might have been called fate: he runs away to the canal, becomes a mule driver, learns the night-rhythm of towpaths and the profanity of men who live by weather. He nearly dies of fever, returns to the cabin chastened and taller, and confronts the unglamorous truth at the heart of the American promise: books are ladders and ladders do not climb themselves. At the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute—later Hiram College—he reads languages until his tongue aches and logics until the world begins to show its hinges. He is so hungry for instruction that the line between student and teacher blurs; soon he is both, lecturing by day, cramming by night, graduating to Williams College and bringing back to Ohio a method and a polish that never extinguish the frontier candor in his voice. He marries his fellow student and quiet counterpart, Lucretia Rudolph—“Crete”—whose devotion to order, texts, and understatement will later be the only gravity strong enough to anchor a life pulled by politics. He enters the Disciples of Christ ministry because faith, to him, is not theater but grammar: sentences about duty that you live or you do not deserve to speak.

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Rutherford B. Hayes enters national memory under gaslight—calm voice, careful eyes, a lawyer’s temper tucked into a soldier’s frame—and for more than a century the shorthand that follows his name is a quarrel about legitimacy. The most contested election in American history lifted him into the presidency by a whisker measured in affidavits and midnight negotiations; the story’s machinery is so noisy that it can drown out the person who had to live with the noise. Yet to see Hayes whole is to watch an unshowy reformer try to keep his footing on a floor that was still shaking from war. He did not speak like a prophet. He did not perform the office like a general returned to his parade. He worked, and he tried to make the government work better, while persuading a country tired of virtue’s cost that reform was not a luxury but the only way republican government could continue to deserve consent.

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