Dead Presidents

I've mentioned many times over the years that I've been waiting for someone to write an up-to-date, full-fledged biography of Libya's longtime leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, who I've always considered one of the more fascinating historical figures of the past 50+ years.

Argentina!

Also, I’ve followed you for years! I’ve really enjoyed reading your stuff!

It looks like your polling has finished, so I'm sorry that I didn't see this earlier!

Dear George,

...This letter is about your leadership and the way you have conducted yourself as you face an accumulation of problems that no American President in the last 150 years has faced.

You have borne the burden with no complaining, no posturing. You have led with conviction and determination...

The other day I started to tell a group of very close friends how I felt about you and your service to our country...I shamefully choked up, the tears running down my aging cheeks. I was embarrassed, but then I realized that I shouldn't worry if people see this visible manifestation of a father's concern, a father's love...

Devotedly, Dad AKA George Bush #41

-- Excerpts from a personal letter that former President George H.W. Bush (the 41st President) sent to his son, President George W. Bush (the 43rd President), on April 9, 2003.

In fact, two weeks after the Anschluss Waldheim joined the Nazi Student Union. One week after Kristallnacht, he joined a calvary unit of the Storm Troopers -- in German, the Sturmabteilng, or S.A. The Storm Troopers had made a name for themselves in Vienna on Kristallnacht, burning synagogues...When it was time to marry, he chose a girl, Elisabeth Ritschel, who held the right new National Socialist views, and had joined the Nazi Party as soon as she was eighteen. When it was time to write his law-school thesis, he chose for a subject a German nationalist named Konstantin Frantz, whose concept of the Reich, Waldheim said, had finally been realized in the "current great conflict...with the non-European world."

Two years into the war, he got himself attached to the staff of the German High Command for the Balkans, under General Alexander Löhr, and...ended up with a King Zvonimir medal from the Croatian puppet state. He also ended up as Case No. R/N/684 in the United Nations War Crimes Commission file, charged with "murder" and with "putting hostages to death." Officially, he was a translator, an interpreter, and a "special missions staff officer." His job involved verifying and transmitting special orders, and, eventually, recommending on those orders and making suggestions of his own.

He was in Greece for the high command when forty eight thousand Jews from Salonika and Corfu were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. He was there, after the Italian surrender, when a hundred thousand Italian soldiers who were left in the country were seized and deported to German camps. He was in Yugoslavia for the High Command when massacres of thousands of partisans and their families took place. As far as the record goes, Waldheim never murdered anyone himself or personally "put to death" any hostage. "I only did my duty," he says now."

Charles P. Pierce's Top 10 Presidents in American history, ranked for America's 250 birthday and published in Esquire's Summer 2026 issue.

Here are a few books that are not just general histories of the Vice Presidency, but examine some of the President-Vice President relationships through the years:

•First in Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents, and the Pursuit of Power (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Kate Andersen Brower [2018]

•American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency by Donald Young [1972]

•Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice Presidency by Jules Witcover [1992]

•The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power (BOOK | KINDLE) by Jules Witcover [2014]

•The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (BOOK | KINDLE) by Joel Goldstein [2016]

And these are even more directly focused on specific Administrations:

•Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Gordon S. Wood [2017]

•Jefferson's Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary (BOOK | KINDLE) by Joseph Wheelan [2005]

•The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 (BOOK | KINDLE) by Irwin F. Gellman [2015]

•Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Jeffrey Frank [2013]

•The Johnson Eclipse: A President's Vice Presidency by Leonard Baker [1966]

•In His Steps: Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy Mystique by Paul R. Henggeler [1991]

•Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (BOOK | KINDLE) by Jules Witcover [2007]

•Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Peter Baker [2013]

•Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) by Barton Gellman [2008]

"I am living, breathing proof the Democrats can win anywhere and we should be fighting everywhere!" -- Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky

Mr. Beshear, who seems to be everywhere on the 2026 midterms circuit, is in demand as a surrogate for Democrats in frontline races, all while positioning himself for an expected Presidential run in 2028. Democrats who urgently need to be competitive in more states if they are to win back Congress and eventually the White House, see hope in Beshear, a twice-elected Democratic governor of a deep-red state that President Trump won by 30 points in 2024... ...In Kentucky, Mr. Beshear remains popular despite his support for abortion rights and his veto in 2023 of a bill that placed sweeping restrictions on transgender youth. A statewide poll in February showed that 52 percent of Kentucky voters approved of the job he was doing as governor, including 81 percent of Democrats, 50 percent of independents, and 30 percent of Republicans.

One morning, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt entered the Oval Office to find Donald Trump clutching a tube of superglue and attempting to affix gold decorations to the marble fireplace mantel. As he was known to prefer his own aesthetic handiwork to anyone else's, the sight of the President squeezing glue onto gilded appliqués and mounting them on the wall himself surprised no one in his inner circle.

Trump's first wife, Ivana, the vice president of interior design at his company, had had a penchant for gilding everything. It was Ivana who was said to have first encouraged the gold obsession that soon became a hallmark of her husband's properties. Gold projected the ostentation that would be Trump's brand and he reveled in its glow. His signature New York City building would beat the words "TRUMP TOWER" in gold letters and boast gold-hued elevator doors and escalators; gold silk lined the walls of the bedroom on his private plane, he draped himself in bling for the cover of Esquire, and he would eventually sell gold sneakers.

The Oval Office had always been deliberately understated -- a reminder that the United States was a republic, not a monarchy, and the President's office was not a palace. Trump had gone along with that tradition in his first term. In his second term, he would unleash his inner Louis XIV.

Every President had put his own stamp on the White House. In 1909, William Howard Taft bathed the original Oval Office expansion of the West Wing in olive green. Some critics at the time imagined that Taft's greenery was an homage to the natural beauty of America, but in fact Taft just liked green.

Similarly, Trump now brought gold. Golden urns and chalices would replace the tufty green Swedish ivy on the mantelpiece -- which had graved the Oval Office for many decades before Trump. As the year progressed, he kept jamming more gold pieces onto the mantel. When Trump asked White House residence staff what they thought of the glittering display, most responses were muted, but his devout aide Natalie Harp would gush with delight.

Gold cherubs flitted about in the pediments above doorways. Golden molding encircled the room, a golden Presidential seal beckoned like heaven from the recessed ceiling above, and golden appliqués festooned the hearth and walls, alongside ornate gold-framed paintings from the vast art collections of the federal government. Trump called the antique golden urns plucked from the White House collection "cash," and would tell people: "See that cash? People look at it, all they see is cash."

-- Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)