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Bill Frist was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1952 into the family that founded the Hospital Corporation of America. During a 1972 internship, Congressman Joe L. Evins advised him to succeed in a career outside politics first. At Harvard Medical School he performed unauthorized procedures on shelter cats, which he later called heinous and dishonest. He trained at Stanford under Norman Shumway, founded the Vanderbilt Transplant Center, performed more than 150 heart and lung transplants, and did Tennessee's first single lung transplant in 1990. In 1991 he operated on Lieutenant Colonel David Petraeus after a training accident.

Encouraged by Howard Baker, Frist beat Senator Jim Sasser in 1994, pledging to serve two terms, and became the first physician in the Senate since 1938. He treated wounded officers in the July 1998 Capitol shooting, became a public voice during the 2001 anthrax attacks, and in 2002 succeeded Trent Lott as Majority Leader. He helped pass PEPFAR, pushed Project BioShield and BARDA, broke with President Bush to expand stem cell funding, and questioned Terri Schiavo's diagnosis from video, which her autopsy did not support. He left in 2007, later partnering with Tom Daschle on health policy and investing in health care companies.

• He told Tennessee voters that while he transplanted hearts and lungs, Jim Sasser had been transplanting Tennesseans' wallets to Washington.
• He resuscitated a constituent having a heart attack in the Dirksen Senate office building.
• He reached Majority Leader with the shortest congressional tenure of anyone before taking that role.
• He attached an internet gambling ban to the SAFE Port Act, leading to the 2011 crackdown poker players call Black Friday.
• He campaigned in South Dakota against Tom Daschle in 2004, then became his close collaborator after both left the Senate.

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Paul Tsongas was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on Valentine's Day 1941, a twin to his sister Thalia, the son of Greek immigrants who ran a dry cleaning business. He swam for Dartmouth, studied at Yale Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia from 1962 to 1964, and was Peace Corps country director in the West Indies. He married Niki Sauvage in 1969, won a seat on the Lowell City Council, and in 1974 took the Fifth Congressional District, Republican since 1895, by 21 points. In 1978 he unseated Senator Edward Brooke by more than 200,000 votes.

In the Senate he was an Atari Democrat, pairing environmentalism, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, with a pro-business, deficit hawk message. A 1983 non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis led him to skip reelection, and he underwent a bone marrow transplant in 1986. Declared clear in 1991, he ran for president, won the 1992 New Hampshire primary, and later won Maryland, Arizona, Washington, Utah, and Massachusetts before withdrawing in March after his chief fundraiser, Nicholas Rizzo, was found to have embezzled over a million dollars. He co-founded the Concord Coalition and died on January 18, 1997, at 55.

• His campaign printed bumper stickers explaining how to pronounce his name.
• He quipped that anyone who thought government and efficiency belonged in the same sentence could get counseling.
• Swimming in YMCA masters meets after his transplant, he said breaststroke was an athletic event and butterfly was the political statement.
• Asked about middle class tax cuts, he said he was not trying to play Santa Claus.
• His widow Niki won his old Fifth District seat in a 2007 special election.

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Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich was born in Foster, Rhode Island, in 1841, the son of a mill hand, and began as a clerk for a wholesale grocery firm, eventually becoming a partner. He served three months as a Union private in the defenses of Washington in 1862, then married Abigail Chapman, who brought wealth and social standing. After losing a child and suffering ill health in 1872, he took a five month tour of Europe and came home focused on power: a bank directorship, the Providence City Council, Speaker of the Rhode Island House, a single term in the U.S. House, and in 1881 the U.S. Senate, where he stayed 30 years under a property and poll tax system that insulated him from urban voters.

As a member of the Big Four and chair of the Finance Committee, Aldrich shaped tariffs and bank regulation, securing the rate the Sugar Trust's Theodore Havemeyer asked for. Marsden J. Perry made him a millionaire through a Rhode Island streetcar consolidation. In 1909 he proposed an income tax amendment to derail a corporate tax, expecting the states never to ratify it, and it became the 16th Amendment. After the Panic of 1907 he chaired the National Monetary Commission, and in November 1910 he led bankers disguised as duck hunters to Jekyll Island, Georgia, to draft the Aldrich Plan that shaped the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. He died in New York in April 1915 at 73.

• The Jekyll Island travelers used only first names while boarding a private rail car in New Jersey.
• Around 1906 he invested in mining and rubber in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold II.
• He helped win Senate approval of the 1898 Treaty of Paris and helped frame the Platt Amendment on Cuba.
• His daughter Abby married John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1901, and their son Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller became vice president.
• William Howard Taft served as an honorary pallbearer at his Providence funeral.

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Thomas Slade Gorton III was born in Chicago in 1928 and grew up in Evanston, heir to the seafood family behind Gorton's of Gloucester, but chose law and public life instead. After Dartmouth and Columbia Law, he served in the Army and the Air Force and stayed in the Air Force Reserve until 1980, retiring as a colonel. He entered the Washington State House of Representatives in 1958 and became attorney general in 1969, personally arguing the state's cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. When the Seattle Pilots left for Milwaukee after one season, he filed an antitrust suit against Major League Baseball, with trial lawyer William Lee Dwyer handling day to day litigation, and dropped it only after the league granted Seattle the expansion team that became the Mariners in 1977.

Gorton unseated Warren Magnuson for the U.S. Senate in 1980 with 54 percent, lost in 1986 to Brock Adams, and returned in 1988 to the seat Dan Evans vacated, becoming the last Republican to hold a Washington Senate seat. His campaigns relied on a doughnut strategy that conceded King County. In 1999 he voted against the perjury article in Bill Clinton's impeachment but for obstruction of justice. His push to limit tribal sovereignty drew organized opposition from Washington's tribes, and he lost to Maria Cantwell in 2000 by 2,229 votes. He later served on the 9/11 Commission and died in 2020 at 92.

• When the Mariners threatened to move to Tampa, he helped persuade Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi to buy a majority stake.
• He helped broker the deal with King County for the stadium now called T-Mobile Park.
• His lawsuit over the SuperSonics' move to Oklahoma City won Seattle a $45 million settlement.
• He was the only Armed Services Committee member of his time to have reached senior command rank in uniform.
• In 2016 he wrote in Evan McMullin for president and later urged Republicans to support Donald Trump's first impeachment.

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Charles Curtis was born in 1860 in the Kansas territory, of Kaw, Osage, and Potawatomi descent on his mother's side and a descendant of Chief White Plume of the Kaw and Chief Pahuska of the Osage. He spoke French and Kansa before English, lost his mother at three, and was raised by grandparents who split his childhood between the Kaw Reservation and white Topeka. In 1868, at eight, he rode 60 miles across the prairie with an interpreter to seek help when about a hundred Cheyenne warriors entered the reservation. Both grandmothers pushed his schooling; he passed the bar in 1881, served as Shawnee County prosecutor, and in 1892 won a U.S. House seat as a Republican.

In Congress he tracked constituents on an ever growing card index and sponsored the Curtis Act of 1898, which extended allotment to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole and abolished their tribal courts after Congress revised it five times. Chosen for the Senate in 1906, he won popular elections in 1913, 1920, and 1926, served as whip and majority leader, and in 1921 introduced the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment. After opposing Herbert Hoover's nomination, he joined the 1928 ticket and became the first Native American and first multiracial vice president. His 1930 remark that good times were just around the corner followed him, and the ticket lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. He died in February 1936.

• William Borah called him a walking political encyclopedia and one of the best political poker players in America.
• His inauguration featured a Native American jazz band, and he was the first vice president sworn in on a Bible.
• He named his widowed sister Dolly as official hostess and hired Lola M. Williams as secretary, giving her regular Senate floor access.
• He opened the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
• Presiding over the 1932 electoral count, he gaveled down jeering Democrats and led applause for his successor, John Nance Garner.

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Albert B. Fall was born in Kentucky in 1861 and was working in a cotton factory by age 11, an experience that left him with lifelong respiratory problems. He moved west through Oklahoma and Texas to the New Mexico Territory, taught himself law, and became a landowner in the Tularosa Basin, where he allied with rancher Oliver M. Lee. When attorney Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-year-old son Henry vanished near White Sands in February 1896, Fall defended Lee and two of his men, William McNew and Jim Gilliland, and won acquittals because the bodies were never found. In 1908 he won another acquittal for Jesse Wayne Brazel, accused of killing lawman Pat Garrett.

Fall became one of New Mexico's first U.S. senators in 1912 through a contested alliance with Thomas B. Catron, and in 1918 he lost his son Jack and daughter Caroline to the Spanish flu within a single week, then won reelection without giving a speech. In March 1921 Warren Harding named him Secretary of the Interior. After Navy Secretary Edwin Denby transferred control of naval oil reserves at Elk Hills, Buena Vista, and Teapot Dome, Fall leased drilling rights without competitive bidding to Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny. Convicted in October 1929, he became the first cabinet official sent to prison for crimes committed in office, and he died in poverty in El Paso in 1944.

• Visiting the bedridden Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Fall said he had been praying for him, and Wilson replied, Which way, Senator?
• He justified skipping bids by claiming nearby private wells were draining the Navy's oil underground.
• Doheny gave him $385,000 in cash, delivered in a little black bag.
• A jury acquitted Doheny of offering the bribe, and Doheny's company later foreclosed on Fall's ranch to collect the money as a loan.
• Sinclair served six months for contempt of Congress and jury tampering after hiring the Burns Detective Agency to shadow his jurors.

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Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884 and grew up in Independence, where he practiced piano at five in the morning and worked as a Shabbos goy for Jewish neighbors. He was a bank clerk, a farmer, and a railroad timekeeper living in work camps, and his ventures in zinc and lead mining, oil, real estate, and a Kansas City haberdashery all failed. Bess Wallace turned down his 1911 proposal. With 20/400 vision in his left eye, he memorized the eye chart to enlist in World War I and became captain of Battery D in the 35th Division, an unruly unit he held together with blistering profanity during a night attack in the Vosges Mountains.

Back home he joined Tom Pendergast's Kansas City machine and reached the U.S. Senate, where the Truman Committee investigated waste and fraud in wartime defense contracts. He served 82 days as Franklin Roosevelt's vice president before FDR died on April 12, 1945, and only then learned of the Manhattan Project. He authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, launched the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, oversaw the Berlin airlift, recognized Israel, and entered the Korean War. Executive Order 9981 desegregated the armed forces, the Dixiecrats walked out in 1948, and he still beat Thomas Dewey. He left office in 1953 with a 22 percent approval rating.

• He was the only 20th century president without a college degree.
• In the Meuse-Argonne offensive he fired outside his assigned sector to destroy a German battery aimed at the 28th Division, and a threatened court martial never came.
• As a senator he dropped his probe of a hidden budget after the Secretary of War asked him to, not knowing it funded the atomic bomb.
• Reports of Black veterans beaten after returning home in uniform pushed him toward desegregating the military.
• His whistle stop campaign drew crowds shouting give 'em hell, Harry, and he held up the Chicago Daily Tribune headline Dewey Defeats Truman.

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William Edgar Borah was born in 1865 in rural Illinois, the seventh of ten children. His father sent him to a Presbyterian academy in Enfield to train for the ministry, but he was expelled for riding an Illinois Central train to spend a night in a neighboring town, and he briefly ran off with a traveling Shakespearean troupe. He left the University of Kansas after contracting tuberculosis, read law with his brother-in-law, and passed the bar in 1887. In 1890 he boarded a train in Omaha and settled in Boise, Idaho, on the advice of a professional gambler. In 1907 he prosecuted Big Bill Haywood for the bombing murder of a former Idaho governor, losing to Clarence Darrow, and weeks later was acquitted on his own federal land fraud indictment.

Entering the U.S. Senate in 1907 in a ten gallon hat, Borah served until 1940. He championed the 16th and 17th Amendments yet voted against the 19th and fought federal anti-lynching bills as intrusions on state authority. He led the irreconcilables against the Treaty of Versailles, working with Henry Cabot Lodge to keep the U.S. out of the League of Nations, then chaired the Foreign Relations Committee and pushed ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. He declined Calvin Coolidge's vice presidential offer in 1924 and lost the 1936 Republican nomination. He fathered a daughter, Paulina, with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and after Munich hoped to talk with Hitler personally. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 1940.

• In an 1899 mining strike murder trial, he rode the roof of a moving train and jumped to the platform to prove the prosecution's theory to the jury.
• He met suffragist Alice Paul and resisted pressure from Theodore Roosevelt but would not back a federal suffrage amendment.
• He feared Article 10 of the League charter would send U.S. troops to war without the consent of Congress.
• Idaho sent him back to the Senate six times.
• About 23,000 people attended his viewing in Boise, nearly the city's entire population.

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John Quincy Adams was born in Massachusetts in 1767 to John and Abigail Adams and raised to embody the ideals of the new republic. As a boy he translated Virgil and Plutarch, studied at Leiden University, and at 14 served as secretary to an American diplomat in St. Petersburg, Russia. He graduated second in his class at Harvard, struggled with depression throughout his life, and defied his parents by marrying Louisa Catherine Johnson even after her father went bankrupt and her dowry vanished. Elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 1803 as a Federalist, he backed the Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson's embargoes, and the angry state legislature chose his successor months early. James Madison then made him the first U.S. minister to Russia.

Adams led the delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, and as Secretary of State under James Monroe he secured Florida from Spain through the Adams-Onís Treaty and designed the Monroe Doctrine. His 1824 presidential win in the House, followed by Henry Clay's appointment as Secretary of State, was branded the corrupt bargain, and Andrew Jackson defeated him in 1828. Instead of retiring, he won a seat in the U.S. House, fought the gag rule on antislavery petitions, opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War, and at 73 argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court. On February 21, 1848, at 80, he collapsed on the House floor and died in the Capitol two days later.

• He urged Monroe to issue the doctrine alone, saying the U.S. should not look like a cock boat in the wake of the British man of war.
• At Ghent he held firm until Britain dropped its demand for a Native American barrier state near the Great Lakes.
• He wrote an exhaustive report urging the United States to adopt the metric system.
• As president he proposed a national university, a naval academy, an astronomical observatory, and federal roads and canals.
• He read antislavery petitions into the record by claiming he needed to read them to see whether the gag rule applied.

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George Graham Vest was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1830, graduated from Centre College in 1848, and earned his law credentials from Transylvania University in 1853. Bound for California, he stopped in Pettis County, Missouri, and won an acquittal for a young Black man charged with murder, but a mob seized his client and burned him at the stake and threatened Vest. He stayed, settled in Georgetown, and married Sallie Snead in 1854. By 1860 he was in Boonville, a member of the Missouri House and a Democratic presidential elector. He wrote the Vest Resolutions denouncing federal coercion and in October 1861 drafted the ordinance by which the legislature voted to secede.

He served as judge advocate under General Sterling Price, sat in the Confederate House from 1862, and moved to the Confederate Senate in 1865. Back in Sedalia after the war, he took the 1870 trial of Burden v. Hornsby over a foxhound named Old Drum, killed on the land of sheep farmer Leonidas Hornsby, brother-in-law of owner Charles Burden. Vest ignored the evidence and delivered a closing tribute to canine loyalty. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879, he served 24 years, fought monopolies in Yellowstone National Park, and died in Sweet Springs on August 9, 1904.

• He promised Burden he would win or apologize to every dog in Missouri.
• His closing contrasted fickle human friends with a dog that guards its master's grave, and the jury awarded $50.
• Hornsby appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and Vest won there too.
• A bust of Old Drum stands at the Missouri Supreme Court, and a 1958 statue marks the Warrensburg courthouse.
• From 1882 he required Interior Department contracts in Yellowstone to go to the Senate for review, and he was the last surviving Confederate senator.