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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Ulysses S. Grant enters American life as a contradiction that grows truer the closer one looks: shy but unflinching, ordinary in bearing yet relentless in execution, a man who disliked blood and became the general who ended the bloodiest American war, a president whose name is still dragged through the mud of scandals and still stands under the clean architecture of civil rights written into law and enforced by federal will. He begins as Hiram Ulysses in Ohio, the son of a tannery owner whose vats taught a boy the smell of hides cured with acid and labor. The family moves to Georgetown, and the boy learns horses as if he were learning a language—balance, patience, the quiet command that persuades a nervous animal to lower its head. When a local congressman obtains an appointment to West Point, a clerical error prints “Ulysses S.” on the papers; the letter S, borrowed from his mother’s maiden name, never stands for anything and ends up standing for everything. At the Academy he is neither scholar nor swashbuckler; he ranks high in horsemanship, low in demerit points, and middle in reputation. He is smallish, spare, averse to boast, and possessed of two talents that will not announce themselves until the world is ready to listen: the ability to see the essential position on a map and the ability to keep moving toward it when other men’s nerves begin to tremble.

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because of bad carpentry when, in truth, the frame has shifted with the building. He is not a creature of salons or law schools; he is a tailor from Raleigh, apprenticed at ten, run away at sixteen, a self-taught reader who learned syllables from a wife who had more book in her fingers than in her family’s purse. Eliza McCardle placed a primer and a grammar on the table the way other brides lay out a dowry; the young husband bent over vowels and consonants at night, and a life began to take a different shape. In Greeneville, Tennessee, he pieced coats by day and pieced arguments by evening, slipping from workbench to stump with a craftsman’s confidence that if you know how to measure, you can make things fit. He entered town government, then the statehouse, then Congress, bringing with him a certainty that democracy must be a ladder wide enough for men who begin with nothing. He distrusted bankers, monopolies, and aristocracies with the fury of a poor boy who had watched well-dressed men pass laws like mirrors. He championed the homesteader and the mechanic, despised the planter’s condescension, and cultivated a Jacksonian stubbornness that placed the “plain people” in his mouth like a vow.

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Abraham Lincoln enters the American story as a silhouette before he becomes a figure—long-limbed, awkward, moving through a world of stumps and distances, carrying books as if they were tools and ideas as if they were debts. He is born in a Kentucky cabin that later generations will remake into a shrine and, later still, into a contested metaphor; his childhood is a short ledger of hard labor, thin schooling, and a frontier that measured intelligence by the quality of a fence. The family walks—first to Indiana, then to Illinois—because poverty is not merely a condition, it is an address, and sometimes the only way to improve it is to change the map. He grows in that American way: borrowing other men’s books, arguing with himself, turning chores into calisthenics for endurance, and discovering that his mind prefers the architecture of sentences to the arithmetic of acres. He reads the law the way a starving man reads menus, memorizes poetry to find rhythms stronger than weather, and learns in the rough legislature at Vandalia and Springfield that politics, for all its theatrical rage, is a patient craft built out of listening. The rail-splitter carpenter’s gift is not muscle; it is perspective. He can see through timber to the beam inside it, through crow

James Buchanan enters the presidency like a lawyer walking into a burning building with a leather briefcase and a belief that precedent can outshout fire. He is, by the time the oath touches his lips in March 1857, the most experienced public servant in the country: state legislator, congressman, senator, minister to Russia, secretary of state, minister to Great Britain, confidant to party captains on both sides of the Appalachians, a Pennsylvanian with Southern friends and Northern clients. His résumé reads like the ledger of a republic that still believed patience would always be rewarded, and his temperament is exactly the sort that ledger trains: courteous to a fault, attentive to forms, allergic to improvisation, convinced that if every clause is carefully read and every channel of consultation respected, even the angriest currents can be coaxed into a harbor. He is unmarried, which his enemies will later use as a hook for gossip and his friends as a sign that the country can be his household. He is careful with money, protective of reputation, and persuaded that moderation is not merely a tactic but a philosophy. This combination—skill, caution, confidence in law—would have made him an admirable administrator in a quiet decade. He is not given a quiet decade. He is given the hinge on which the nineteenth century swings, and he tries to oil it with memoranda.

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Franklin Pierce enters the presidency like a man who has already used up his share of good fortune and would spend his mandate trying to keep the country from noticing the same thing about itself. He is small-boned, soft-spoken, vain about a certain smoothness that reads, to friendly eyes, as grace and to suspicious eyes as glaze. He is born in New Hampshire, schooled at Bowdoin among minds that will leave long shadows—Hawthorne, Longfellow—and trained in the old New England art of becoming important without frightening the neighbors: read law, memorize names, master the grammar of local gratitude. He rises quickly because he is attentive rather than brilliant, convivial rather than doctrinaire, and because his politics fit a moment when northern Democrats discovered that loyalty to the Union could be rented out as sympathy for the South. In the legislature he learns how to pass favors through committees; in Congress he learns the schedule by which outrage softens into votes; in the Senate he learns that position is not the same as power and that resignation can sometimes look like character when the truth is simply weariness. He marries Jane Appleton—delicate, devout, at war with the worldly noise that nourishes politics—and tries to stitch together a domestic peace stout enough to withstand the winds that follow ambition. Three sons are born; two die early; the third, Benjamin, will be taken from them in a wreck that drops a railcar down a snowy New England embankment between election and inauguration. The president-elect carries his child’s body out of the shattered carriage; the papers do not print the sounds he and Jane made in the snow. Jane becomes a shade moving quietly through the White House, her grief a permanent winter; Pierce becomes, in the eyes of those who knew him before and after that day, a man who could never again speak loudly enough to be heard over the noise inside himself.

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