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Pete Wilson was born in Illinois in 1933 and raised in St. Louis. He earned an English degree at Yale, served as a Marine infantry officer, and finished law school at UC Berkeley in 1962, then failed the California bar three times before passing. After disliking criminal defense work, he became an advance man for Richard Nixon's run for governor and Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. Elected...

Warren G. Harding was born in Ohio in 1865 into an abolitionist family, and at 18 he and partners paid $300 for the failing Marion Star. He kept the daily edition nonpartisan and the weekly mildly Republican to sell to both sides of a divided county. He married Florence Kling, a divorced piano teacher five years older, who ran the paper's circulation and finances. Her father, Amos Kling, spread ru...

John Sherman was born in Ohio in 1823, the eighth of 11 children, and was six when his father, a state Supreme Court justice, died and the family was split up. His brother William Tecumseh Sherman became the Union general. Expelled from school for punching a teacher, John became a junior surveyor at 14 and lost the job in 1838 when a Democratic governor cleared out Whig appointees. He studied law...

Jim Jeffords was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1934, the son of Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Olin M. Jeffords. After Yale in 1956 he served as a Navy officer on the USS McNair, the first ship to enter the Suez Canal after the 1956 crisis, and took part in the 1958 Lebanon response. He earned a Harvard law degree in 1962, entered local politics in Shrewsbury, won the state senate in 1966 and...

Ralph Owen Brewster was born in Dexter, Maine, in 1888, a direct descendant of Mayflower leader William Brewster. He graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin, spent a year as a high school principal in Castine, and earned a Harvard law degree in 1913 before practicing in Portland and helping lead the Committee of 100 to replace the ward system with a city manager. Elected to the Maine House in 1916,...

Hiram Johnson was born in Sacramento in 1866, the son of Grove L. Johnson, a legislator and congressman dogged by accusations of graft and election fraud. Valedictorian at 16, he worked as a stenographer in his father's law office before studying law at UC Berkeley, and he later held license number two when the State Bar of California was organized in 1927. In 1908, while assisting in the San Fran...

Daniel Akaka was born in Honolulu in 1924, decades before statehood, to a family with Chinese and Native Hawaiian roots, and Hawaiian was his first language. He graduated from Kamehameha Schools in 1942 and served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1945 to 1947 on Saipan and Tinian. He worked as a welder, a mechanic and, in 1948, first mate on the schooner Morning Star, married Mary Mildred "Mill...

This episode explains the Senate maneuver known as the nuclear option. Changing a standing rule formally takes a two thirds vote, but a senator can raise a point of order claiming a rule means something other than its text, and when the chair rejects it, appeal the ruling. Because an appeal on a non-debatable question such as cloture cannot be filibustered, a simple majority can overturn the chair...

Hiram Fong was born in 1906 in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu, one of 11 children of Cantonese immigrant Fong Sau Hao, who arrived in 1872 to work Hawaii's sugar plantations. He picked beans for cattle feed at four and shined shoes at seven. He graduated from McKinley High School in 1924, where classmate Masaji Marumoto later became the first Japanese American justice on the Hawaii Supreme Co...

Harry Flood Byrd was born in 1887 into an old Virginia family whose fortune had been lost. At about 15 he took over his father's insolvent Winchester Star, which owed its newsprint supplier $2,500, and paid the debt off with daily cash payments. By 21 he was running a 93 mile toll road for $33 a month, and he built a large apple business in the Shenandoah Valley, where squalid conditions for migra...

Harris Wofford was born in New York City in 1926, and at 11 he traveled the world for six months with his grandmother in 1937, spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, walking through Shanghai after its capture by the Japanese army, watching Mussolini announce Italy's exit from the League of Nations, and discovering Gandhi in India. As a teenager he built a national student group promoting world gover...

Albert Benjamin "Happy" Chandler was born in rural Kentucky in 1898, and by age three his mother had left the family. By eight he was running paper routes and odd jobs, and he later paid for law school by coaching high school sports. In 1921 he scouted Harvard's practices for a former teammate coaching tiny Centre College, which then beat Harvard 6 to 0. Elected lieutenant governor in 1931, he blo...

George Murphy, the only U.S. senator with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was born on July 4, 1902, in New Haven, Connecticut, to an Irish Catholic family; his father Mike Murphy was a noted athletic trainer. After Yale, Murphy entered films in 1930 as studios sought stage-trained talent for talkies, and he became a leading song and dance man in musicals such as the Broadway Melody series an...

George Hearst was born in 1820 in Sullivan, Missouri, where his father William ran a store and three heavily mortgaged farms. With little schooling, George learned geology from books lent by the family doctor, Silas Reed, and by watching local lead mines. His father died in 1846, leaving him the family debts. In 1850 he left for California with a group of 16, failed at placer mining near Sutter's...

George David Aiken was born in 1892 in Dummerston, Vermont, and grew up in Putney, where his father farmed and served on the school board, select board and in the legislature. In 1912 Aiken borrowed $100 to plant raspberries and built it into a 500 acre operation with a nursery and a pioneering wildflower business, writing Pioneering with Wildflowers in 1933. After 17 years on the school board and...

Gaylord Nelson was born in 1916 in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, to a nurse and a country doctor. He earned a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1942, served in the Army in the Okinawa campaign, and rose to first lieutenant. Joining Wisconsin's minority Democrats in 1948, he helped bring in remnants of the Progressive Party, and in 1958 became the first Democrat elected governor of Wisconsin...

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1942. After his father's business setbacks, the family lived with his maternal grandparents before moving to Delaware, where his father sold used cars. Biden gave up alcohol for life after seeing its effects in his family and worked through a severe stutter by reciting Emerson and Yeats in front of a mirror. At Syracuse law school h...

Rufus King grew up in Scarborough, Massachusetts, in present day Maine, the son of Richard King, a wealthy merchant, sea captain and lumberman loyal to the Crown. In 1765 a mob ransacked the family home and destroyed his father's papers, and a year later returned to burn the barn; John Adams wrote to Abigail that the family's suffering would melt a heart of stone. Rufus and his brothers sided with...

Thomas J. Dodd was born in 1907 in Connecticut to a political family of Irish descent. He joined the FBI in 1933 and took part in the raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin aimed at John Dillinger. As a federal prosecutor under five attorneys general, he pursued Ku Klux Klan cases and in 1942 convicted a clergyman under the Espionage Act for serving as a link in a German spy network. Justic...

Alben W. Barkley was born in 1877 in a log house in rural Kentucky to tenant farmers who grew tobacco and wheat. Named Willie Alben at birth, he later reversed it to Alben William. With no money for tuition, he worked as a janitor at a small Methodist college in exchange for classes, then clerked in Paducah to read law. Elected county attorney in 1905 after touring the county by horse and buggy, h...

Rose McConnell Long was born on April 8, 1892, in Greensburg, Indiana. She met Huey Long by winning a cake baking contest he had organized to promote a product he was selling. After a two and a half year courtship they married in 1913, and a year later Huey turned to law and passed the bar. They had three children, Russell, Palmer Reed and Rose Lolita, as Huey rose to governor of Louisiana in 1928...

Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, was born in 1804 in a New Hampshire log cabin to Benjamin Pierce, a Revolutionary War veteran who became governor. At 12 he walked 12 miles home from school in a thunderstorm, and his father drove him partway back and made him walk the rest. He rose from last to fifth in his class at Bowdoin, befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne, and at 32 was the youngest member of...

Frank Murkowski was born in Seattle in 1933 to a family of Polish descent, graduated from Ketchikan High School in 1951, and earned an economics degree from Seattle University in 1955. He served in the Coast Guard aboard the cutters Sorrel and Thistle, and his daughter Lisa was born in 1957. He rose fast in banking, becoming Alaska's commissioner of economic development at 33 in 1966 and president...

Rebecca Latimer Felton was born in 1835 in Decatur, Georgia, to a prosperous merchant and planter family. She graduated first in her class from Madison Female College in 1852 at 17 and a year later married Dr. William Harrell Felton, settling on his plantation near Cartersville, where they held enslaved people. Only one of her five children survived childhood, and the Civil War destroyed the plant...

Ernest Gruening was born in New York City in 1887 to a Jewish family; his father Emil, a German-born eye and ear surgeon, had fought in the Civil War and was present at Appomattox. Gruening graduated from Harvard in 1907 and Harvard Medical School in 1912, then immediately left medicine for newspapers, rising from the Boston American to editor roles at the Boston Evening Traveler, the New York Tri...