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John Edwards was born Johnny Reid Edwards in South Carolina in 1953 and grew up in a North Carolina mill town, where his father worked in a textile mill and his mother ran an antique business and carried mail. The first in his family to attend college, he studied textile technology at North Carolina State and law at the University of North Carolina, where he met Elizabeth. As a trial lawyer he won a multimillion dollar verdict over the drug Antabuse, set a North Carolina precedent on informed consent in a cerebral palsy case, and in 1996 secured a $25 million settlement for Valerie Lakey, a 5 year old injured by a defective Sta-Rite pool drain cover. That year his 16 year old son Wade died when strong winds swept his Jeep off a highway.

Edwards left law and in 1998 unseated Senator Lauch Faircloth by more than 80,000 votes, deposed Monica Lewinsky during the Clinton impeachment trial, and became John Kerry's running mate in 2004. His 2008 campaign centered on poverty and his Two Americas theme, while he also held a reported $500,000 a year consulting job with Fortress Investment Group. In 2007 tabloids reported an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter; aide Andrew Young falsely claimed to be the father of her child, and Edwards admitted paternity in early 2010. Indicted in 2011 over more than $1 million from donors used to hide Hunter, he called himself a sinner but not a criminal; a 2012 jury acquitted him on one count and deadlocked on the rest, and prosecutors dropped the case.

• Wade had been honored at the White House as a finalist in an essay contest about voting with his father.
• Edwards publicly apologized for his Senate vote authorizing the Iraq War.
• Fortress held stakes in subprime lenders foreclosing on Hurricane Katrina victims, and Edwards divested and set up a rescue fund.
• The trial turned on whether the primary purpose of the donors' money was to influence the election.
• After the case he founded a medical malpractice law firm in North Carolina with his daughter Kate.

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John J. Crittenden was born in Kentucky in 1787 to a Revolutionary War veteran, became attorney general of the Illinois Territory at 22, and served as an aide at the Battle of the Thames in the War of 1812. Governor Isaac Shelby appointed him to the U.S. Senate in 1814 at 27, below the constitutional minimum age, so he returned to the Kentucky legislature and became speaker. In the Old Court and New Court fight over debt relief after the Panic of 1819, he defended the old Court of Appeals, and after the killing of Attorney General Solomon P. Sharp he proposed a $3,000 reward and refused to defend the killer, Jereboam Beauchamp. John Quincy Adams nominated him to the Supreme Court in December 1828, but Andrew Jackson's allies stalled the nomination.

A loyal ally of Henry Clay and a pillar of the Whig Party, he became Attorney General under William Henry Harrison in 1841 and led the cabinet resignation against John Tyler. In 1848 he backed Zachary Taylor over Clay, left the Senate to run for governor, and then declined Taylor's offer to be Secretary of State. As Attorney General under Millard Fillmore he wrote the opinion that let Fillmore sign the Fugitive Slave Law, and in 1854 he won an acquittal for Matt F. Ward in the killing of principal William Butler, after which he was burned in effigy. In 1860, at 73, he proposed the Crittenden Compromise, six unamendable constitutional amendments, which Republicans blocked on Lincoln's instructions.

• In one deadlocked Senate election he declined to vote for himself so that Clay could take the seat.
• The 1850 census records him owning 44 enslaved people.
• His Fugitive Slave Law opinion called the commissioner's hearing an extradition proceeding rather than a final trial.
• The July 1861 Crittenden-Johnson Resolution declared the war was being fought to preserve the Union, not to interfere with slavery in the Southern states.
• His son George became a Confederate major general and his son Thomas a Union brigadier general, and he died in July 1863.

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John Lester Hubbard Chafee (1922 to 1999) was born in Providence into a Rhode Island political family that included governors, senators and his uncle Zechariah Chafee, a Harvard Law free speech scholar. He left Yale after Pearl Harbor to enlist as a Marine private, turned 20 during the battle of Guadalcanal, fought at Okinawa, and after Harvard Law was recalled for Korea, where he commanded a rifle company in the Chosin Reservoir campaign. Author James Brady, who served under him, called him the only truly great man he had ever met. Chafee won the Rhode Island governorship in 1962 by 398 votes and in 1964 won reelection by two to one while Lyndon Johnson carried the state with about 81 percent.

He lost a 1968 bid for a fourth term after reversing his opposition to a state income tax and after his 14 year old daughter Tribby died in a horse show accident. As Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Navy from 1969, he passed over 33 senior officers to make Elmo Zumwalt chief of naval operations and blocked a court martial for Lloyd Bucher, commander of the captured USS Pueblo. Elected in 1976 as Rhode Island's first Republican senator since 1930, he helped shape the Clean Water Act, the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments and Superfund. In 1999 he voted against the articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton and was one of four Republicans to vote for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, weeks before he died at 77.

• As governor he created the Green Acres land conservation program.
• His Coastal Barrier Resources Act removed federal subsidies for building on fragile barrier islands instead of banning development.
• He voted to override President Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.
• The John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, renamed for him, helps young people aging out of foster care.
• President Clinton's eulogy said Chafee embodied the decent center, and his son Lincoln Chafee succeeded him in the Senate.

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John Breaux was born in Crowley, Louisiana, in 1944, earned his bachelor's degree in Lafayette in 1964 and a law degree from LSU in 1967, and went to work for Representative Edwin Edwards. When Edwards was elected governor, Breaux won the 1972 special election for his seat at 28, becoming the youngest member of the House, and served there until 1987. Elected to the Senate in 1986 as a Southern Democrat with a conservative streak, he co-founded the bipartisan Senate centrist coalition, chaired the Democratic Leadership Council and served as deputy majority whip from 1993 until his retirement.

His votes crossed party lines: he opposed Robert Bork in 1987 but was one of seven Southern Democrats who voted to confirm Clarence Thomas 52 to 48 in 1991, and he backed NAFTA, welfare reform and the 2001 Bush tax cuts before proposing in 2003 to cut their size to $350 billion. From the Finance Committee he helped build the 1996 welfare and health insurance reforms, chaired the 1998 National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, and was principal architect of the $400 billion Medicare prescription drug law. After leaving the Senate in 2004 he taught at LSU's Manship School and turned to lobbying, and a 2007 run for governor ended over his Maryland voter registration.

• In 2004 he cast the only Senate vote against raising broadcast obscenity fines from $27,500 to $275,000.
• In 1995 he joined liberal Democrats against lawsuit reform measures that President Clinton later vetoed.
• He endorsed Chris John to succeed him, but Republican David Vitter won the seat.
• He co-founded the Breaux Lott Leadership Group, later acquired by Squire Patton Boggs, and launched a Ceasefire on Healthcare campaign.
• A Japanese restaurant chain in Acadiana serves a crawfish and avocado sushi roll named after him.

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Jim Webb was born in Missouri in 1946 into a military family with Scots-Irish roots; his father flew B-17 and B-29 bombers in World War II and cargo planes in the Berlin Airlift. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1968, he led a Marine platoon in Vietnam, earned the Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts, and was medically retired because of his wounds. He earned a Georgetown law degree, worked for the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, and published a successful 1978 combat novel. Under Ronald Reagan he became the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs and the first Naval Academy graduate to serve as Secretary of the Navy, resigning in 1988 rather than approve cuts to the 600 ship fleet.

Seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion he warned that it had no exit strategy. In 2006 he ran for Senate in Virginia as a Democrat, wearing his son's combat boots, and after incumbent George Allen called a Webb staffer macaca, a slur, Webb won by less than half a percent, giving Democrats control of the Senate. At a White House reception he told President George W. Bush he wanted the troops out when asked about his Marine son in Iraq. He wrote what became the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, passed in 2008, and in 2009 met Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, returning with detained American John Yettaw. He left after one term and ended a 2015 Democratic presidential bid in October.

• His Navy Cross citation from July 1969 describes capturing three enemy soldiers, clearing a bunker with a Claymore mine and shielding a fellow Marine from a grenade.
• Allen's campaign cited his 1979 article opposing women in combat and explicit passages from his novels.
• He and President Bush later met privately in the Oval Office after his son came home.
• He pointed out that the United States held about 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners.
• He speaks Vietnamese and is married to a Vietnamese American lawyer who fled the fall of Saigon.

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Jean Carnahan was born Jean Anne Carpenter in Washington, D.C., in 1933 to a plumber and a hairdresser. She sat next to future husband Mel Carnahan at Anacostia High School and worked her way through George Washington University, graduating in 1955 as the first in her family to finish high school. They married in 1954 and settled in Rolla, Missouri, in 1959, where she drafted speeches and press releases and organized volunteers across roughly 20 campaigns. As First Lady after Mel became governor in 1993, she pushed for on site daycare, childhood immunizations and domestic abuse centers, and funded a $1.5 million governor's mansion restoration through sales of her books If Walls Could Talk and Christmas at the Mansion.

Three weeks before the 2000 election, Mel Carnahan, their son Randy, who was piloting, and chief of staff Chris Sifford died in a plane crash while Mel was challenging Senator John Ashcroft. With his name locked on the ballot, Governor Roger Wilson pledged to appoint Jean if Mel won, and after one television ad and one news appearance by her, Mel won posthumously with 51 percent. As Missouri's first woman senator, Jean opposed a filibuster of Ashcroft's nomination as Attorney General but voted against confirming him, worked to save 12,000 TWA jobs in St. Louis through the American Airlines deal, and voted for the Bush tax cuts. She lost the 2002 special election to Jim Talent by about 22,000 votes.

• Mel Carnahan received about 1.19 million of the 2.36 million votes cast.
• After September 11 she sponsored benefits and health care extensions for laid off airline workers.
• Her 2004 book Don't Let the Fire Go Out took its title from the 2000 campaign's rallying cry.
• Her son Russ was elected to Congress in 2004 and her daughter Robin became Missouri Secretary of State.
• She died in January 2024 at age 90 at a hospice facility in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

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James Mountain Inhofe (1934 to 2024), Oklahoma's longest serving U.S. senator, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and moved to Tulsa in 1942, where his father was an insurance executive. He sold blackberries as a boy, set a school record in a mile relay, was drafted into the Army in the late 1950s, and later led his father's insurance business. His official biography long listed a 1959 University of Tulsa degree that he did not complete until 1973. Elected to the Oklahoma House in 1966 and then the state Senate, he led the effort to bring the World War II submarine USS Batfish up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to a museum in Muskogee.

A 1974 pact with Democrat David Boren to both run against the incumbent governor ended with Boren defeating him, and he lost a 1976 House race despite campaign help from Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. Elected Tulsa mayor in 1978, he issued a first proclamation celebrating alternative clean energy and appointed the first Black member of the city commission. He won a House seat in 1986, led a 1993 discharge petition drive that changed House rules, and in 1994 won the Senate seat Boren vacated. As chairman of Environment and Public Works he opposed climate regulation, famously tossing a snowball on the floor, and in 2020 he refused to back delaying certification of the presidential election, citing his oath.

• He voted against Hurricane Sandy relief while seeking federal disaster funds after tornadoes struck Oklahoma.
• His travels in Africa and ties to leaders there helped lay the groundwork for AFRICOM.
• A licensed pilot, he flew his own plane to campaign stops and slept in a tent at aviation conventions.
• In the late 1990s he held an ambassadorial nominee for 20 months over the nominee's sexual orientation.
• He retired early citing long COVID and died in 2024 at 89 after a stroke, having lost his son in a private plane crash.

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James G. Blaine was born in Pennsylvania in 1830 to a Whig father and an Irish Catholic mother, in a home where the daughters were raised Catholic and the sons Presbyterian. After teaching in Kentucky, where he met his wife Harriet, he moved to Maine in 1853, bought the Kennebec Journal with borrowed money, and used it to promote the new Republican Party. He rose to Speaker of the Maine House, entered the U.S. House in 1862 and became Speaker in 1869, backing the gold standard against greenbacks. In 1875 he proposed the Blaine Amendment to bar public funds from religious schools, a measure aimed at Catholic parochial schools.

In 1876, as the Republican frontrunner, he faced charges that the Union Pacific had paid him $64,000 for worthless Little Rock and Fort Smith railroad bonds. When Boston clerk James Mulligan testified that he held letters on the deals, Blaine took them from him in a hotel room and read selected passages on the House floor. Robert G. Ingersoll nominated him as the Plumed Knight, but Rutherford B. Hayes won the nomination. In 1880 Blaine threw his delegates to James A. Garfield, who named him Secretary of State; weeks after Blaine rebuffed office seeker Charles Guiteau, Guiteau shot Garfield at a Washington train station on July 2, 1881, with Blaine at his side. He lost the 1884 race to Grover Cleveland by about a thousand votes in New York after a supporter called Democrats the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.

• Democratic crowds chanted about the continental liar from the state of Maine, ending with burn this letter.
• Reform Republicans known as Mugwumps backed Cleveland because of the railroad scandal.
• Back as Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison, he hosted the first International Conference of American States in 1890.
• His old newspaper colleague John L. Stevens, U.S. minister to Hawaii, aligned with sugar planters in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
• After two sailors from the USS Baltimore died in a mob attack in Valparaiso, the administration forced Chile to pay reparations.

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James Buchanan, the 15th president, was born in a Pennsylvania log cabin in 1791 to an Irish immigrant father. Nearly expelled from Dickinson College for vandalism and tavern hopping, he was readmitted after his pastor pleaded his case and graduated with honors, then built a lucrative law practice. In 1819 his fiancée, Anne Caroline Coleman, broke off their engagement amid rumors about his motives and died soon after of a suspected laudanum overdose; her father barred him from the funeral, and Buchanan never married. He helped deliver Pennsylvania to Andrew Jackson in 1828, became minister to Russia and Britain and Secretary of State under James K. Polk, and shared a Washington boarding house for a decade with Alabama politician William R. King.

Serving in Europe in 1854, Buchanan helped draft the Ostend Manifesto, which offered to buy Cuba from Spain and justified seizing it by force if Spain refused. Abroad during the Kansas-Nebraska fight, he won the presidency in 1856, survived a deadly dysentery outbreak at the National Hotel that killed his nephew, and before his inauguration wrote to Justice Robert Grier to bring a Northern justice into the Dred Scott majority. Two days after he urged the country to accept the Court's coming ruling, the decision was published and inflamed the North. After Abraham Lincoln's election, as seven states seceded, Buchanan told Congress that secession was illegal but that he had no authority to use force against a state.

• He was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, which kept his head tilted and cocked to one side.
• Andrew Jackson mocked Buchanan and King with names such as Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy, and nieces of both men are believed to have destroyed their letters.
• He sent a fleet and 2,500 Marines to Paraguay to demand an apology and a fine over a skirmish involving an American ship.
• His push for the Corwin Amendment would have permanently protected slavery where it existed.
• Retired at Wheatland, he received death threats, wrote a memoir defending his final months in office, and died in 1868.

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Jake Garn was born in Richfield, Utah, in 1932, the son of a World War I pilot. After a business and finance degree from the University of Utah in 1955, he flew Martin P-5M Marlin flying boats for the Navy and then KC-97L and KC-135A tankers in the Utah Air National Guard, retiring as a colonel with 17,000 flight hours. He served on the Salt Lake City Commission, was elected mayor in 1972, led the National League of Cities in 1975, and won Wallace F. Bennett's Senate seat in 1974. His 1980 reelection with 74 percent was the largest statewide victory margin in Utah history, and as Banking Committee chairman he shaped the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which deregulated the savings and loan industry.

As head of the appropriations subcommittee over NASA's budget, Garn pushed for a shuttle seat from 1981, saying he needed to kick the tires of the program he funded. In April 1985 he flew on Discovery mission STS-51D as a payload specialist and test subject for space adaptation syndrome, and his severe nausea led astronauts to call the maximum level of space sickness one Garn. Mike Mullane criticized sending a politician, while Charles Bolden noted that Garn had more flight hours than anyone in the astronaut office. His first wife, Hazel, died in a 1976 car crash in Nebraska, and in 1986 he donated a kidney to his 27 year old daughter Susan.

• He and Representative Henry Hyde resigned from the board of a pro-life PAC whose director drew up a hit list of lawmakers.
• STS-51D logged 108 orbits and more than 2.5 million miles.
• In 1989 he co-wrote Night Launch, a thriller about terrorists hijacking Discovery during a joint U.S. and Soviet mission.
• NASA named its astronaut training facility after him.
• After leaving the Senate in 1992 he became a supporter of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.