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Leland Stanford was born in New York in 1824 and practiced law in Port Washington, Wisconsin until an 1852 fire destroyed his property, including a prized law library. He followed five brothers to California, opened a store for miners in Placer County and then a wholesale business in Sacramento. In 1861 he joined Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, the Big Four, and engineer Theodore Judah to form the Central Pacific Railroad, with Stanford as president. Backed by Pacific Railway Act land grants and bonds, and contracting with a construction company the partners secretly owned, they met the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah in May 1869. Stanford later took control of the Southern Pacific as well.

As California's first Republican governor he cut the state debt in half, pushed forest conservation and founded the normal school that became San Jose State, yet also denounced Chinese immigrants while his railroad depended on Chinese workers, and funded the Bald Hills War against Native tribes. As a U.S. senator from 1885 to 1893 he proposed worker cooperatives and land backed currency. After his only son, Leland Jr., died of typhoid in Florence in 1884 at age 15, Stanford and his wife Jane gave about $40 million to found Leland Stanford Junior University on their Palo Alto stock farm. Collis Huntington ousted him from the Southern Pacific presidency in 1890, and he died in 1893. Jane Stanford died of strychnine poisoning in Hawaii in 1905, and the killer was never identified.

• During California's Great Flood of 1862 he rowed a boat through Sacramento's streets to his inauguration.
• Chinese laborers were lowered in baskets down Sierra Nevada cliffs to drill and pack explosives.
• To settle whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground, he hired Eadweard Muybridge, whose tripwire rigged cameras produced the Sallie Gardner at a Gallop sequence.
• His 55,000 acre ranch in Tehama County held what was then the largest vineyard in the world.
• Future president Herbert Hoover was the university's first student in 1891.

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Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was born on December 24, 1946 in Selma, Alabama, named for his father and grandfather and, through them, for Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard. He grew up in Camden, where his father ran a general store and later a farm equipment dealership, became an Eagle Scout, served as student body president at Huntingdon College in 1969, attended the University of Alabama School of Law and was a captain in the Army Reserve. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan named him U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, where his office helped bring federal charges in the Klan murder of Michael Donald in Mobile and, in 1985, prosecuted three Black Belt organizers known as the Marion Three, including Albert Turner, who were acquitted after about three hours.

Reagan's 1986 nomination of Sessions to a federal judgeship was blocked by a Republican controlled Judiciary Committee after Justice Department colleagues testified about his remarks, making him only the second nominee in 48 years stopped that way. He became Alabama attorney general in 1994 and won a U.S. Senate seat in 1996, where he used procedure to slow legislation and opposed comprehensive immigration reform. He was the first sitting senator to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 and became attorney general in 2017, but after reports of two 2016 meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak he recused himself from the election interference investigation. He resigned at the president's request in November 2018 and lost the 2020 Senate runoff to Tommy Tuberville.

• The civil suit that followed the Michael Donald case bankrupted the United Klans of America.
• Assistant U.S. attorney Thomas Figures testified about a remark on the KKK and marijuana that Sessions called a joke and later apologized for.
• In the Senate he relied on holds, quorum calls and waves of amendments to stall bills.
• As attorney general he ordered prosecutors to seek maximum penalties and moved to cut federal grants to sanctuary cities.
• His zero tolerance border policy required prosecution of every illegal crossing and led to family separations.

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Clifford P. Case was born in 1904 in Franklin Park, New Jersey, the eldest of six children of a Dutch Reformed minister so partisan that he canceled a newspaper subscription in 1912 when it endorsed Woodrow Wilson. After his father died in 1920, Case paid his way through Rutgers partly by playing the pipe organ in churches, earned Phi Beta Kappa, and finished Columbia Law School in 1928, the year he married Ruth Miriam Smith. He served on the Rahway Common Council and in the New Jersey General Assembly, then won a U.S. House seat in 1944, never dropping below 55 percent over five elections and outpolling Dwight Eisenhower in his district by 10,000 votes in 1952. In 1953 he resigned to lead the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic.

Running for the Senate in 1954, he pledged to vote to keep Joseph McCarthy off investigative committees. Opponents falsely tied his sister Adelaide to communist front groups, confusing her with a deceased professor of the same name, and pushed a write-in for Fred Hartley, but with support from Eisenhower and Nixon he won by just over 3,500 votes. Over 24 years he backed the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, was one of 13 Senate Republicans to vote for Medicare, and co-sponsored Ted Kennedy's 1971 Health Security Act. In 1978 he lost the Republican primary to tax cut advocate Jeffrey Bell, who then lost to Bill Bradley. Case taught at Rutgers' Eagleton Institute until his death in 1982.

• His high school yearbook predicted he would become vice president.
• Conservative groups scored his record at zero, and he described himself as a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke.
• The Case Zablocki Act of 1972 required the executive branch to report international agreements to Congress within 60 days.
• The Case Church Amendment of 1973 barred further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
• At the 1968 convention, his favorite son bid to stop Nixon collapsed when 18 New Jersey delegates defected.

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Thomas Kuchel was born in Anaheim, California in 1910, the son of a local newspaper editor. As Anaheim High School's student body president and yell leader, he beat a Whittier High debater named Richard Nixon. After undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Southern California, he served in the California Assembly and state Senate from 1937 to 1945, took leave as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve during World War II, and was state controller from 1946 to 1953. When Nixon became vice president in 1953, Governor Earl Warren appointed Kuchel to Nixon's Senate seat, and he won it outright in 1954, 1956 and 1962.

A Rockefeller wing Republican, Kuchel was Senate minority whip from 1959 to 1969. He voted to repeal the right to work section of the Taft Hartley Act, was one of a small group of Republicans to vote for Medicare, and served as a floor co-manager of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He refused to endorse Nixon for governor in 1962 and backed Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1966 he declined to run for governor against Ronald Reagan and publicly condemned the party's rising right wing, and in 1968 he narrowly lost the Republican primary to Max Rafferty, who then lost to Democrat Alan Cranston, a former state controller. He practiced law in Beverly Hills and died in 1994.

• Working with Hubert Humphrey, he helped hold a bipartisan coalition together through a 60 day filibuster to reach cloture on the 1964 civil rights bill.
• In 1962 he carried all 58 California counties, and he remains the last person to do so.
• A forged affidavit falsely claiming he had been arrested in 1949 circulated during the 1964 campaign.
• Four men, including a former Los Angeles police officer, a bar owner, a PR executive and a newsletter publisher, were indicted for criminal libel over the forgery.
• Leon Panetta, later CIA director and Secretary of Defense, began his career as Kuchel's legislative assistant.

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Pat McCarran, the Nevada senator who helped inspire the corrupt Senator Pat Geary in The Godfather Part II, was born in Reno in 1876 to Irish Catholic immigrants Margaret and Patrick McCarran. The 1897 Reno High School valedictorian left Nevada State University to run the family sheep ranch after his father was injured, read law on his own and passed the bar in 1905. He served in the state assembly, as Nye County district attorney and on the Nevada Supreme Court, becoming chief justice in 1917. After losing Democratic Senate primaries in 1916 and 1926, he won in 1932 and became Nevada's first native born senator, feuding with fellow Democrat Key Pittman over New Deal patronage and taking control of the state party by 1938.

As Judiciary Committee chairman, with roughly 40 percent of Senate bills passing through his committee, he held other senators' bills until they backed projects in Nevada. He sponsored the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, the Federal Airport Act of 1945, the McCarran Ferguson Act and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which he called a bill of rights for people regulated by federal agencies. He also led the 1950 Internal Security Act past President Truman's veto, pursued Owen Lattimore through his Internal Security Subcommittee until a judge dismissed the perjury charges, and co-authored the 1952 McCarran Walter immigration act. He died in 1954 after a speech in Hawthorne, Nevada, and in 2021 Clark County renamed the Las Vegas airport Harry Reid International.

• He intervened for a Nevada teenager who stole 150 volumes from the Library of Congress.
• He pressed the State Department for a prisoner exchange to free a Reno couple's son captured by Japan at Wake Island.
• Beginning in 1933 he pushed legislation to separate the Air Force from the Army.
• A 1949 trip to Spain, where he sought U.S. aid for Francisco Franco, drew Truman's anger over a senator running his own foreign policy.
• His record on immigration, including efforts to keep out Jewish Holocaust survivors, fueled the reassessment that removed his name from the airport.

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In 1854 Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas wanted the eastern terminal of a transcontinental railroad in Chicago, but the northern route ran through unorganized Louisiana Purchase land west of Iowa and Missouri, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery for more than 30 years. Southern senators, led by a bloc living together in a Washington boardinghouse known as the F Street Mess, refused to organize any territory that barred slavery, and a House bill to organize Nebraska died in the Senate in 1853. Douglas turned to popular sovereignty, agreed to Kentucky Whig Archibald Dixon's demand to repeal the Missouri Compromise outright, and split the land into Kansas and Nebraska.

After four months of bitter debate, including the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, the bill passed the Senate 37 to 14 and the House 113 to 100, and President Franklin Pierce signed it on May 30, 1854. The Whig Party split along sectional lines and dissolved, while anti-slavery Whigs, Democrats and Free Soilers met in places like Ripon, Wisconsin and Jackson, Michigan to form the Republican Party. Kansas became Bleeding Kansas as border ruffians from Missouri and East Coast funded Jayhawkers fought over the vote, and Native nations who had been relocated there lost land to new treaties, squatters and disease. Pierce was denied renomination in 1856, and the Dred Scott decision followed in 1857.

• Missouri Senator David Atchison declared he would rather see Nebraska sink in hell than be overrun by Free Soilers.
• On Sunday, January 22, Douglas and his allies pressed Pierce at the White House and had him write out his support by hand.
• During a House filibuster, a drunk and armed Henry A. Edmondson of Virginia tried to attack Ohio's Lewis Campbell and was arrested by the sergeant at arms.
• Squatters built Leavenworth illegally on Delaware land and cut the timber, lowering the appraised value on which tribal payments were based.
• The Osage population in the territory fell from an estimated 8,000 in 1850 to about 3,500 by 1860.

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John F. Kennedy was born in 1917 into great wealth, descended from Irish immigrant families who rose through Boston ward politics but met the prejudice of the Yankee establishment. His father, Joseph Sr., made a fortune in banking, Hollywood and real estate, moved the family to New York and sent his sons to Protestant prep schools such as Choate, where John led a group of pranksters called the Muckers Club. Sickly and overshadowed by his brother Joe Jr., he found his footing at Harvard, where his thesis on Britain's slow response to a dictatorship's rearmament broke with his isolationist father and became a bestseller. In the Pacific his boat, PT-109, was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, and he towed a burned crewmate to an island, but the ordeal ruined his back.

After Joe Jr. died when his bomber exploded over England in 1944, their father's ambitions shifted to John, who won a 1946 House race with a publicity campaign funded by the family. Elected president in 1960 as the youngest ever elected and the first Catholic, he adopted a flexible response doctrine, then suffered the Bay of Pigs failure and saw the Berlin Wall go up. In the Cuban Missile Crisis he resisted calls for airstrikes, imposed a naval quarantine and used a back channel through Robert Kennedy, trading a no invasion pledge and the quiet removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Privately he lived with Addison's disease and severe pain, while the press largely kept his health and affairs out of print until his assassination in Dallas in November 1963.

• The crisis led to the Moscow-Washington hotline and the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
• In Vietnam he increased U.S. advisers and backed the Strategic Hamlet program, which relocated rural villagers into fortified compounds.
• He launched the Apollo program and the Peace Corps and, after hesitation, backed the civil rights movement.
• His regimen included corticosteroids, painkillers, amphetamine injections from a doctor nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, barbiturates and testosterone.
• His widow tied his presidency to Camelot in an influential interview, and Lyndon Johnson used the nation's grief to pass stalled legislation.

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Claude Pepper was born in rural Alabama, the fourth child of farming parents whose first three children died in infancy, and worked cleaning hats, teaching school and in a steel mill in Ensley. In the Student Army Training Corps at the University of Alabama during World War I he suffered a double hernia lifting ammunition crates, and the resulting veterans' benefits paid for Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1924. He practiced in Perry, Florida, won a Florida House seat in 1928, opposed Governor Doyle Carlton's austerity cuts, and lost renomination in 1930. In 1936 he won a special election to the U.S. Senate, where he became a leading New Deal ally of Franklin Roosevelt, fought the poll tax, yet joined the 1937 filibuster of an anti-lynching bill.

After meeting Joseph Stalin in 1945 and praising Soviet leadership, and trying in 1948 to replace Harry Truman on the ticket with Dwight Eisenhower, Pepper faced a 1950 primary against George Smathers, whom Truman encouraged. Smathers circulated a 49 page pamphlet, The Red Record of Senator Claude Pepper, and Pepper lost by more than 60,000 votes. He moved to Miami and in 1962 won a new House seat, becoming a strong opponent of Fidel Castro and the only Florida House member to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As chairman of the House Select Committee on Aging from 1977, he fought health fraud aimed at seniors and helped end most mandatory retirement ages.

• A 1943 British intelligence assessment called him a "thoroughly opportunist politician" used by Roosevelt to float trial balloons.
• His 1984 committee report exposed a $10 billion health fraud industry selling fake arthritis and cancer cures.
• He worked with Alan Greenspan on the 1980s Social Security compromise that gradually raised the retirement age.
• In 1988 he sponsored the law creating the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
• George H. W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May 1989; he died four days later at 88 and lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

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Jim Bunning, born in Southgate, Kentucky, in 1931, earned an economics degree from Xavier University in 1953, married his wife Mary in 1952 and raised nine children. He reached the Detroit Tigers in 1955, led the American League with 20 wins in 1957, threw a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox in 1958 and struck out the side on nine pitches in 1959. With the Philadelphia Phillies he pitched a perfect game against the New York Mets at Shea Stadium on Father's Day 1964, the first regular season perfect game since 1922, and retired in 1971 with 2,855 strikeouts, second only to Walter Johnson. As a pension representative for the players' association, he and Robin Roberts brought in Marvin Miller of the United Steelworkers, paving the way for the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968.

Bunning won a seat on the Fort Thomas city council in 1977, became Republican minority leader as a freshman state senator, lost the 1983 governor's race and entered the U.S. House in 1986. In 1998 he narrowly beat Scotty Baesler for Wendell Ford's Senate seat. He voted against Robert Gates for defense secretary and was the only Banking Committee member to oppose Ben Bernanke. In 2010 he blocked a 30 day extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits by objecting to unanimous consent, demanding it be paid for from unspent stimulus money. After a public feud with Mitch McConnell over fundraising, he dropped his 2010 reelection bid and endorsed Rand Paul. He died in 2017.

• He is the only person elected to both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the U.S. Senate.
• In his perfect game only two Mets batters reached a three ball count.
• In 2004 he debated Daniel Mongiardo by satellite using a teleprompter.
• He apologized after saying Mongiardo looked like one of Saddam Hussein's sons.
• He called McConnell a control freak and said party leaders dried up his fundraising.

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This episode traces how the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 became the legal basis for the Vietnam War. Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to protect his Great Society agenda and feared being branded soft on communism, as Democrats had been after China fell in 1949, while Barry Goldwater attacked the administration as weak. A formal declaration of war risked Chinese intervention, so in May 1964, months before any incident, officials including William Bundy and Walt Rostow drafted a resolution modeled on the 1955 Formosa Resolution. Offshore, South Vietnamese commandos ran Operation 34A raids under American support while DeSoto patrols such as the USS Maddox mapped the radar signals they provoked. On August 2, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the Maddox and were heavily damaged.

On the stormy night of August 4, sonar and radar operators on the Maddox and Turner Joy reported another attack, and the Turner Joy fired more than 200 shells while pilots overhead saw no enemy boats. Captain John Herrick cabled Washington urging caution, but Robert McNamara pressed for confirmation and told senators the Navy knew nothing of the commando raids. Johnson courted J. William Fulbright, who championed the measure on the Senate floor. It passed the House 416 to 0 and the Senate 88 to 2, with only Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening opposed. Johnson used it to launch Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965, Congress repealed it in 1971, and the War Powers Resolution followed in 1973.

• Johnson later privately suggested the sailors may have been shooting at flying fish.
• Herrick concluded that propeller cavitation and weather effects likely produced false sonar and radar contacts.
• Johnson hinted that Fulbright could become his secretary of state after the 1964 election.
• Morse had been tipped off by a Pentagon source about the covert raids and called the resolution an unconstitutional transfer of war powers.
• Johnson called the resolution "grandma's nightshirt" because it covered everything.