Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)
Rhetorically astute and with a brilliant wit, the first president to overthrow an incumbent president (and friend) through an election - self-labeled the "revolution of 1800" - was as sharp as his eight years were revolutionary. Authoring the Constitution of 1789, the oldest currently in practice, the Virginia Francophile and first Secretary of State pioneered the young republic by his Republican Party (now the Democrats) and unduly, in present-day terms, fought for the rights of individual states and citizens against the pressure for anti-civil rights Alien and Seditions Acts and a strong central government. Whereas his qualities in these matters are pondered by his apparent support for slavery - he owned many and bred a child with coloured servingwoman Sally Hemmings but denounced the institution as a "hideous blot" - and the factual that his administration was in fact not as passive and libertarian as he might have argued, he remains the most compelling and important of the Founding Fathers and early leaders of the United States.
The Louisiana purchase of 1803 expanded the still young republic far westward to twice its size, for a very modest price. Jefferson distrusted cities, party politics and concentrated power, and when once asked about the rights to religious worship and protection, he famously remarked there would always be a "wall of separation" between legislation and religion, setting a then-unremarked national standard enforced by the Bill of Rights his Secretary of State James Madison wrote, now an example for secular democracies everywhere (eventually reaching Sweden on January 1, 2000).
Like John Adams, he died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1826. Added together, the two men reached the age 173.
Grover Cleveland (1885-1889 and 1893-1897)
Cleveland would work 18 hours a day, wrote practically all his speeches, and despite a generally Republican-dominated Senate returned a sense of strength and executive authority to the White House after a series of weak administrations. Nevertheless, his conservative and passivist outlook, coined by his outspoken notion that "the people should support the government, the government should not support the people" and steadfast opposition to the egalitarian notion of gold-and-silver currency earned him the same fate as Harrison when the Panic of 1893 dealt a crushing blow to his economic doctrines and blistered all chances for a third term. He was succeeded on the 1896 ticket by former Populist leader (and bimetallist) William Jennings Bryan, who also became (a less successful, but more influential) three-time nominee.
When he left the White House, and politics in March 1897, Cleveland's regenerated Democratic Party had once more been revitalized into a potent political force, if yet under principles were very different from his own. Like Jefferson and much unlike Bryan and most of the succeeding leadership of his party, Cleveland was a slavish constitutionalist with little regard and much scorn for economic and social intervention into common Americans' lives, which during his exile earned him much respect restored only after his death. The end of his second, half-catastrophic term saw rapid economic recovery from the crisis which had ousted him, but nothing could blister the gallant character of principles and integrity which alone which had secured his historic second presidency.
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909)
Roosevelt was never "supposed" to be president. A reformer within the predominant Republican Party, the widowed ex-cowboy and Harvard alumnus, this asthmatic turned boxer and skinnydipper was elected Governor of New York, just as Cleveland, after fleeing his successor McKinley's administration to help liberate Cuba from the Spanish yoke. The far more conservative leadership of the party tried to use Roosevelt's success against him by nominating him for McKinley's Vice President in 1900, only to find a hideous backfire a year after when a gun-wielding anarchist's bullet elevated Roosevelt to the job they had tried to keep him away from. Out with his family on a picnic when McKinley unexpectedly died, Roosevelt was inaugurated during his race home and reigned for a near two full terms, as astute and well-read as he was unyielding in a quest to smash oligopolistic trusts, earning the nickname "Trust-Buster", worked towards federal customer protection legislation (most notably in the meat industry), strengthened the presidency and celebrated the United States' first Nobel Price in 1906 after negotiating peace between Japanese and Russian empires. He coined the terms "White House" and "west wing" and fought the cause of environmental conservation and the "square deal", favouring labour over big business. Abroad, he took equally unorthodox measures when intervening in Panama to secure its independence in exchange for a U.S.-controlled Panama Canal.
Despite massive resistance against his reformist policies, he won a stunning re-election in 1904 against conservative Democrat Alton Parker and might have been the first to see a third term in office had he not chosen to instead nominate his Minister of War William Taft in 1908. Taft was safely elected, but was either usurped or taken willingly by the more conservative elements and less respondent to his purposed mentor's influence. Despite continued anti-trust-legislation and concessions to labour, the pro-tariff Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 and a meek foreign policy caused Roosevelt to seek the nomination again in 1912. He failed, but achieved a bitter vengeance by catalyzing progressive Republicans into a party of his own making, the Progressive Party (nicknamed "Bull Moose" after Roosevelt was infatally shot before a campaign speech in Wisconsin, noting to the audience with blood dripping from his shirt that it took "more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose" and that he did not need immediate medical attention). Roosevelt and Taft ran rather distant second and thirds to Democrat and Klansman Woodrow Wilson, who hence won 40 states, most of the North and the presidency with a stark 40 % of the vote. After retiring to pursue other interests, including climbing Mount Blanc, Roosevelt announced intentions to return before the 1920 election, with a stroke-ridden and nearly mute Wilson was facing retirement, but died in early 1919 due to an infection caused during an expedition in the Amazonas. His son, Theodore Roosevelt Junior, might have planned to follow him when riddled with German bullets on Omaha Beach, Normandy twenty-five years later, ending what might have become a great political dynasty and the future of progressive Republicanism.
Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)
John Kennedy (1961-1963)
Kennedy's promise was to repeat the achievements of Lincoln to consummation, and he succeded - but did not live to see it. Though not as personally stringent; even in the White House, he sported numerous lovers and clotted policymaking by allegations of electoral fraud, supposed relations to organized crime and an undisclosed aching back (treated with amphetamine, amongst other substances), many Americans would bask in the same light when this courageous reformist secured a blodless détente with the Soviet Union in 1962, negotiating the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Cuba and Turkey. Whilst choosing not to act against the erection of the Berlin Wall, he compensated it to the better of his image in famous speech where he humiliously and humorously remarked he was a "Berliner", or a jam cookie, predicting the world would be united once more under a beacon of liberty and free-mindedness. He did not steer through an actual civil war, but could shoulder the flaps of a wartime leader when the union, and the Democratic Party, divided in spirit over his agenda for civil rights. When, like Lincoln, his skull was pierced by one of many an assassin's bullets during an open rally in Dallas in November 1963, the issue was less than a year from painful resolvement upon which Vice President and successor Lyndon Johnson famously remarked that the Democrats had lost the South "for a generation". A further, just as important bill, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, came to passage by massive Republican support in a time of unrepeated Democratic dominance and successful economic growth, all in the shadow of his never-ending flame. Even through massive oppsition to the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, which Kennedy as much as Johnson and Nixon helped to escalate, his legacy would endure. For years the first and only Catholic president was indeed raised to a saint-like status, allegedly as the most admired and celebrated politician of his century.
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