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Judah P. Benjamin was born in 1811 on St. Croix in the Danish West Indies to Sephardic Jewish parents and raised mainly in the Carolinas. He entered Yale at 14 and left at 16 amid unproven rumors, arriving in New Orleans in 1828 with no money. He traded English lessons for French lessons, learned Louisiana's civil law, and married his pupil, Natalie St. Martin, from a wealthy Creole family; she spent most of her life in Paris. He bought the Bellechasse sugar plantation and became a wealthy enslaver. In the 1842 Creole insurance case he argued that enslaved people had a natural desire for liberty, a brief abolitionists reprinted, then served as a U.S. senator from Louisiana from 1853 to 1861 defending slavery as a property right.

Jefferson Davis made him the first Confederate attorney general, then secretary of war and secretary of state. After the fall of Roanoke Island in 1862, he took public blame rather than reveal that there was no powder to send. In 1864 he proposed freeing and arming enslaved men to win European recognition. After Richmond fell he split from Davis and escaped to England, arriving in August 1865 at 54. He enrolled at Lincoln's Inn, became a Queen's Counsel, and died in Paris in 1884.

• He was the first Jewish person to hold a cabinet post in North America and was called the brains of the Confederacy.
• He endured anti-Semitic attacks while shielding Davis over Roanoke, and Davis promoted him.
• He fled disguised as a Frenchman who spoke no English and later posed as a cook on a blockade runner.
• One boat carrying him exploded and a ship bound for England caught fire.
• His Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property, known as Benjamin on Sales, became a classic, and he burned his papers before he died.

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In January 1970 Army intelligence officer Christopher Pyle revealed that the military was spying on civilians, and in December 1974 Seymour Hersh reported in The New York Times on Operation CHAOS, a CIA program collecting information on Americans' political activity. The Senate voted 82 to 4 to create a select committee chaired by Frank Church of Idaho. It examined the CIA's internal compilation known as the family jewels, including MKUltra, in which unwitting subjects were given drugs such as LSD in mind control experiments; the FBI's COINTELPRO operations against civil rights and political groups; and the alleged media program known as Operation Mockingbird. The committee also publicly confirmed the existence of the National Security Agency.

It uncovered Project Shamrock, under which telegraph companies shared traffic with the NSA from 1945 into the 1970s, and HTLINGUAL, which opened and photographed more than 215,000 pieces of mail before ending in 1973. An interim report covered alleged plots against Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, Rene Schneider and Fidel Castro, and a review of the Kennedy assassination found the FBI and CIA had failed in their duties, helping lead to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence followed, along with Gerald Ford's Executive Order 11905 banning political assassinations.

• A watch list indexed in a rhyming dictionary included Joanne Woodward, Gregory Peck, Ralph Abernathy, Walter Mondale and Frank Church himself.
• Ford's team wanted acting CIA Director William Colby to give only a general briefing, but Colby testified in 1975.
• On Meet the Press on August 17, 1975, Church warned that the NSA's capabilities could enable total tyranny with no place to hide.
• Critics later blamed the reforms for weakening human intelligence before 9/11, while chief counsel Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. disputed that view.
• Carl Bernstein wrote in 1977 that the committee had played down the CIA's ties to journalists.

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In May 1856, with Bleeding Kansas in full swing after the Kansas-Nebraska Act replaced fixed lines with popular sovereignty, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner delivered a two day speech he had largely memorized, running over a hundred pages. He targeted the act's authors, Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, mocking the speech impediment Butler had after a stroke and describing slavery as Butler's chosen mistress. Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, Butler's relative, first considered a duel, but after consulting Representative Laurence Keitt on the code duello he decided Sumner was no gentleman and deserved a beating instead.

On May 22, 1856, Brooks entered the Senate chamber with Keitt and Henry Edmundson, waited for the women in the gallery to leave, and struck Sumner at his desk with a gutta-percha cane topped with gold. Pinned by the bolted desk, Sumner tore it from the floor, staggered blindly up the aisle, and was beaten until the cane shattered and he fell unconscious. He was absent for three years, and Massachusetts left his seat empty. Brooks paid a $300 fine, survived an expulsion vote, resigned, and was reelected before dying of croup. Sumner returned in 1859.

• Keitt drew a pistol and waved a cane to keep senators from reaching Sumner.
• Southern supporters mailed Brooks hundreds of replacement canes, one inscribed Hit him again.
• Northerners held mass rallies and printed more than a million copies of Sumner's speech.
• Republicans campaigned on Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Sumner, and groups like the Wide Awakes followed.
• The attack and Brooks' light punishment helped push John Brown toward violence in Kansas and later Harpers Ferry.

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William H. Seward was born in 1801 in rural New York to a slave-owning farmer and was so bookish that he ran away from home to go to school. At 17, after a quarrel with his father over money, he left Union College to teach in Georgia, where he saw slavery at full scale. A broken carriage wheel in Rochester in 1824 introduced him to newspaper publisher Thurlow Weed, who became his political manager. Elected governor of New York in 1838, Seward backed school access for Catholic immigrants and jury trials for accused fugitive slaves. In 1846 he defended William Freeman, a Black man who killed four members of a white family, with an early insanity defense.

Elected to the Senate in 1849, he invoked a higher law than the Constitution in 1850 and spoke of an irrepressible conflict in 1858. The favorite for the 1860 Republican nomination, he lost to Abraham Lincoln, campaigned for him, and became secretary of state. He defused the Trent affair and oversaw early wartime arrests. On April 14, 1865, Lewis Powell stabbed him in bed, and a surgical neck brace from a carriage accident helped save him. He stayed on under Andrew Johnson, bought Alaska in 1867, and died in Auburn in 1872.

• Early in the Lincoln administration he sent a memo offering to take over policy, and Lincoln firmly declined.
• When Seward said Washington gentlemen did not black their own boots, Lincoln asked whose boots he blackened.
• In the Trent affair he argued the captain erred by seizing the envoys instead of bringing the ship before a prize court.
• He reportedly boasted he could ring a little bell and have any citizen arrested.
• The Alaska treaty cost $7.2 million, and his last words to his family were love one another.

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Thomas Pryor Gore was born in Mississippi in 1870 and lost his sight in two separate accidents, one to his left eye at eight and another to his right eye three years later, becoming fully blind by 20. He kept his childhood goal of reaching the U.S. Senate, built a near perfect memory, worked as a page in the Mississippi Senate, earned a law degree in Tennessee, and campaigned for the Farmers' Alliance, the Populists in Texas and William Jennings Bryan in 1900. His wife, Nina, whom he married that year, read documents aloud and described the rooms he worked in. The couple moved to Lawton in Oklahoma Territory, he won a territorial Senate seat in 1902, and at statehood in 1907 he became one of Oklahoma's first two U.S. senators.

An early backer of Woodrow Wilson, Gore broke with him over World War I, warning Americans off merchant ships, opposing the draft, proposing a national referendum before any declaration of war, and fighting the League of Nations. He lost the 1920 primary, returned in 1930, and soon turned on the New Deal. In 1935 he cast the lone vote against the Works Progress Administration, and in 1936 he took only 18 percent in the primary. He died in 1949 without a personal fortune, according to his grandson Gore Vidal.

• Colleagues tried to slip papers under his pen to trick him into signing, and he turned the trick back on them, earning the nickname the blind cowboy.
• In 1910 he publicly accused a lobbyist of trying to bribe him.
• A 1914 civil suit accusing him of misconduct in a hotel room ended with a jury siding with him.
• Amid the Dust Bowl, he told constituents begging for WPA jobs that he would not buy their votes with taxpayer money.
• Vidal quoted him saying that if there were any race other than the human race, he would join it.

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William A. Clark was born in Pennsylvania in 1839, moved to Iowa, taught school and studied some law before heading to Montana in 1862. After a short stint of mining he made his first money supplying miners, driving mule teams between Salt Lake City and the boom towns and carrying mail with his brothers. He opened a bank in Deer Lodge, foreclosed on struggling mines during busts, and became one of Montana's three copper kings, adding power companies, newspapers, timberland and railroads. In the 1870s he moved his family to New York to study mineralogy and assaying at Columbia so no expert could cheat him. Mark Twain called him the most putrid human being under the flag.

Clark used his Butte Miner newspaper in politics and fought rival Marcus Daly over the state capital, backing Helena against Anaconda. In 1899 he bribed Montana legislators for a U.S. Senate seat, and after weeks of Senate hearings he was not seated. He later served one term. He built a 121 room Fifth Avenue mansion and died there of pneumonia in 1925 with a fortune near $300 million. Clark County, Nevada, grew from land he subdivided for a railroad stop that became Las Vegas.

• When the governor left for San Francisco, the lieutenant governor appointed Clark to the vacant seat, and the governor rushed back to revoke it.
• He reportedly said he never bought a man who was not already for sale, and the scandal helped drive the 17th Amendment.
• For the mansion he bought a stone quarry in Maine and a bronze factory, and it burned seven tons of coal a day.
• At 62 he married 23 year old Anna La Chapelle, his former ward, and his nephew Walter died on the Titanic.
• Son William Jr. founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic, while daughter Huguette lived as a recluse in a hospital room until dying at 104 in 2011.

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Robert Morris was born out of wedlock in Liverpool in 1734, raised by his grandmother, and at 13 joined his father in Maryland. His father died after being struck when a ceremonial bottle bounced off a ship's hull at a christening, leaving Morris an inheritance. In Philadelphia he apprenticed with merchant Charles Willing and became a partner of Thomas Willing, building Willing, Morris and Company into a global shipping firm with pooled maritime insurance. The firm also traded in enslaved people during the French and Indian War, lobbying against Pennsylvania's import tariff and buying the ship Nancy, which carried about 170 people to auction in Delaware. Morris was one of only two men to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

He voted against independence on July 1, 1776, then stayed away with John Dickinson on July 2 so Pennsylvania could vote yes. On the Secret Committee of Trade he traded American goods for European arms and backed privateers. As Superintendent of Finance from 1781 he founded the Bank of North America, issued Morris Notes backed by his own credit, and raised money for the Yorktown campaign. Later, leveraged land speculation collapsed in the Panic of 1797, and he was jailed for debt in 1798.

• He explained his signature by saying a good citizen should follow when he cannot lead.
• He raised more than $1.4 million for Washington's march to Yorktown, working with broker Haym Salomon.
• Rhode Island blocked his federal tariff under the Articles, and he resigned in 1784.
• He turned down Washington's offer to be the first Treasury secretary and recommended Alexander Hamilton.
• His unfinished mansion by Pierre Charles L'Enfant was mocked as Morris's Folly, and he spent over three years in Prune Street prison before the Bankruptcy Act of 1800 freed him.

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William Henry Harrison, born in Virginia in 1773, was the last president born a British subject and the son of Benjamin Harrison V, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He studied medicine in Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush, but after his father died in 1791 and the family money ran short, he became an Army ensign within 24 hours of meeting Governor Henry Lee III. He served under Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers in 1794, was present for the Treaty of Greenville, and eloped with Anna Symmes over her father's objections. He left the Army around 1798, became the Northwest Territory's first congressional delegate at 26, and pushed the Land Act of 1800, which let settlers buy small parcels with 5 percent down and four years to pay.

As governor of the Indiana Territory he built the 26 room Grouseland mansion in Vincennes, acquired about 51 million acres through treaties, and pushed to legalize slavery. In 1811 he marched on Prophetstown while Tecumseh was away recruiting, and the Battle of Tippecanoe became his brand. He won at the Thames in the War of 1812, later fell deep into debt, and worked as a county court clerk. The Whigs revived him for 1840, and after the longest inaugural address in history he died 31 days into his term.

• Thomas Jefferson secretly funded an anti-slavery organizer to work against Harrison's slavery push in Indiana.
• At Tippecanoe his force lost about 62 dead and more than 120 wounded before Prophetstown was burned.
• As minister to Gran Colombia in 1829 he wrote Simon Bolivar a 10 page letter on republican government.
• The log cabin and hard cider campaign handed out whiskey in log cabin bottles from the E.C. Booz distillery and used the slogan Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.
• His death led John Tyler to claim the full presidency, and Anna received the first presidential widow's pension, $25,000.

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Elihu Root was born in 1845 in Clinton, New York, the son of a mathematics professor, and studied law at New York University, staying an extra year for private tutoring when most students rushed to the bar. Early work for the Bank of North America on its charter reorganization led him into the Tammany Hall trials, where he helped defend James Ingersoll and later worked on the defense of Boss Tweed, drawing a warning from Judge Noah Davis about conscience. President Chester A. Arthur made him U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted the Grant and Ward fraud and won a 10 year sentence for James C. Fish. He went on to represent J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and the Havemeyer sugar interests.

In 1899 William McKinley made him secretary of war to govern Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Root abolished the post of commanding general after clashing with Nelson A. Miles, created a general staff and the Army War College, and with adviser Charles Edward Magoon developed the incorporated and unincorporated territory framework behind the Insular Cases. As Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of state from 1905 he reformed the consular service and negotiated arbitration treaties, winning the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize. He died in 1937 at 91.

• William Randolph Hearst's papers later falsely claimed Root had inherited Tweed's fortune.
• Root spent six weeks auditing Marine National Bank ledgers and deposed a dying Ulysses S. Grant at home.
• As chairman of the 1912 Republican convention he secured the nomination for Taft over his old friend Roosevelt.
• On his 1917 mission to Russia he told the Kerensky government, in effect, no fight, no loans.
• He opposed women's suffrage from the 1894 New York constitutional convention onward and became founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Brien McMahon was born James O'Brien McMahon in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1903, graduated from Fordham in 1924 and Yale Law School in 1927, and changed his name the year he joined the bar. After serving as a local judge he joined the Justice Department in 1933 under Attorney General Homer Cummings and was running its criminal division by 1935, prosecuting associates of Baby Face Nelson and the lawyer who had harbored John Dillinger. His prosecution of Harlan County coal operators for denying miners their union rights ended in a mistrial, but it made his name. In 1944 he won a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut, beating isolationist incumbent John A. Danaher.

Months later the Trinity test changed his career. Named chairman of the Senate's Special Committee on Atomic Energy, he offered his own bill against the military-backed May-Johnson bill and framed the fight as civilian versus military control. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act on August 1, 1946, and McMahon became the first chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. After the Soviet test in 1949 he became a leading advocate of the hydrogen bomb. He entered the 1952 presidential race, fell ill with lung cancer, and died on July 28, 1952, at 48.

• He called the atomic bomb the most important thing in history since the birth of Jesus Christ.
• He dismissed ethical objections to the H-bomb by comparing it to the firebombing of Hamburg and Tokyo.
• His 1952 slogan was The Man Is McMahon, and he also proposed sending young Americans abroad in an early version of the Peace Corps idea.
• From his sickbed he promised that as president he would order thousands of hydrogen bombs, and Connecticut still cast its 16 convention votes for him.
• A 1962 stamp honored his work on peaceful atomic energy, and he appears in the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe.