pplpod

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 Muc...

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, wh...

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 per...

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 be...

Terry Sanford was born in North Carolina in 1917, and when the Depression closed his family's hardware store he picked cotton, raised pigs and delivered newspapers. He put himself through the University of North Carolina and its law school, became an FBI special agent, then enlisted as a paratrooper, fighting in Italy and southern France and earning a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. In the Battle of...

Jeremiah Denton was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1924 and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 in the same accelerated class as Jimmy Carter. Over a 34 year Navy career he was a test pilot, flight instructor and A-6 squadron commander, and in 1957 he developed the Haystack concept of hiding aircraft carriers among commercial shipping to confuse enemy radar. In July 1965, leading a bombing...

Maurine Brown was born January 9, 1907, in Cloverdale in Tillamook County, Oregon. She attended the Oregon College of Education at Monmouth, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in 1929, and taught in Oregon public schools from 1932 to 1944. She met Richard L. Neuberger in Portland around 1937 and married him in 1945. Elected to the Oregon House in 1950, she also served on the...

Gordon H. Smith was born in Pendleton, Oregon, in May 1952 and grew up partly in Bethesda, Maryland, while his father served as an assistant secretary of agriculture. An Eagle Scout, he served a Latter-day Saint mission in New Zealand, studied at Brigham Young University and Southwestern Law School, and later ran the family's Smith Frozen Foods. His mother was a Udall, a cousin of Mo and Stewart U...

Edward D. Baker was born in London in 1811 to poor Quaker parents who moved to Philadelphia in 1816, where he worked as a boy operating a loom. The family tried the utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, then settled in Illinois near St. Louis, where Baker hauled goods by cart until Governor Ninian Edwards opened his law library to him. Admitted to the bar in 1830, he preached for the...

Harrison "Jack" Schmitt was born in 1935 and grew up in the copper mining country of Santa Rita and Silver City, New Mexico. He earned a geology degree at Caltech in 1957, mapped rock formations in Norway as a Fulbright scholar, received a Harvard PhD in 1964 and helped develop lunar field techniques for NASA with the U.S. Geological Survey in Arizona. Selected in NASA's first scientist astronaut...

David Rice Atchison was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1807 and attended Transylvania University, where five classmates, including Jefferson Davis, later served in the Senate. In 1830 he moved to Liberty, Missouri, opened a law practice, bought a plantation and became a slaveholder, partnering with Alexander William Doniphan. He defended Joseph Smith in land disputes, entered the Missouri House i...

Thomas J. Walsh was born in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 1859 to Irish Catholic immigrants Felix Walsh and Bridget Comer, and taught school to pay for University of Wisconsin law school, graduating in 1884. In 1890 he moved his family to Helena, Montana, and practiced personal injury, water rights and copper mining law. After losing a House race in 1906 and a Senate bid in 1910, he won a Senate seat...

Reed Smoot was born in Salt Lake City in 1862, a son of mayor and Latter-day Saint leader Abraham O. Smoot, who had six wives and 27 children; Reed's mother, Anne, was the fifth wife. Reed graduated from Brigham Young Academy in 1879, served a mission in England, married Alpha Eldredge in a monogamous marriage in 1884, and built interests in banking, mining, railroads, retail, lumber, livestock an...

This episode reads a single disambiguation page for the name George Norris as a composite biography of very different lives. The earliest entry is a George Norris who, as master of the vessel Sprightly, named Bouvet Island in 1825, a legacy that depended on fixing coordinates by hand at sea and surviving the voyage home to report them. The next is George W. Norris, an American politician who lived...

Jon Corzine was born in 1947 and grew up on a small Illinois farm, played quarterback and captained the basketball team, made sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve, and earned a University of Chicago MBA at night while working at a regional bank. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1975 as a bond trader, rose to CEO and senior partner by 1994, and helped organize the 1998 private rescue of Long-Term Capital...

Bill Nelson was born in Miami in 1942, lost his father to a heart attack at 14 and his mother to ALS at 24, transferred to Yale, earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1968, and reached the rank of captain in the U.S. Army Reserve during the Vietnam War. Elected to the Florida House in 1972 from Brevard County on the Space Coast, he moved to the U.S. House in 1978 and chaired the H...

Oliver Ellsworth was born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1745 and transferred from Yale to Princeton, where he co-founded a debate society. He married Abigail Wolcott in 1772, and they had nine children. During the Revolution he led militia, served as state attorney for Hartford County, and sat on Continental Congress committees. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention he replaced the phrase national g...

Wendell Hampton Ford was born near Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1924, the son of a state senator. He left the University of Kentucky to join the Army in World War II, serving as an administrative noncommissioned officer and rising to technical sergeant, then joined his father's insurance business and commanded a Kentucky National Guard company that became a tank company. After working for Bert Combs's...

Hugo Lafayette Black was born in 1886 in rural Clay County, Alabama, into a Baptist family and built a Birmingham law practice around labor and personal injury cases, including the defense of a Black man forced into commercial slavery after a prison sentence. That case led to a police court judgeship and a job as a prosecutor. Pursuing a U.S. Senate seat in the 1920s, he joined the Ku Klux Klan an...

The Keating Five scandal grew out of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, when deregulated thrifts gambled federally insured deposits; 747 failed, at a cost of about $160 billion, roughly $124 billion borne by taxpayers. In 1984 Charles Keating's American Continental bought Lincoln Savings and Loan of Irvine, California, and its assets grew from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion in four years. Whe...

Warren B. Rudman was born in Boston in 1930 to a family of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Russia and spent most of his life in New Hampshire, settling in Hollis. He attended Valley Forge Military Academy and Syracuse University, earned a Bronze Star as an Army captain in the Korean War, and graduated from Boston College Law School in 1960. By 1970 he was New Hampshire's attorney gener...

Albert J. Beveridge was born in Ohio in 1862, grew up in Indiana working on farms and as a logger, and put himself through Indiana Asbury University, now DePauw, graduating in 1885. He passed the bar in 1887 and built a national reputation as an orator, campaigning for James G. Blaine in 1884. In 1899, at 36 and without prior elected office, he was chosen for the U.S. Senate from Indiana. He champ...

Bob Kerrey was born in 1943 and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, and earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Nebraska in 1966 before joining the Navy and SEAL Team One. On March 14, 1969, his team climbed a 350 foot cliff at night on an island in Nha Trang Bay; a grenade shattered his right leg, and he directed a crossfire and the defense of an extraction site until evacuated, earning the Meda...

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, f...

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, wo...