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Spencer Abraham was born in 1952 in East Lansing, Michigan, to a family of Lebanese descent, and his mother was active on the state Republican committee. After graduating from Michigan State University's Honors College in 1974 he went to Harvard Law School, where in 1978 he co-founded the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and then helped found the Federalist Society, formally organized in 1...

Spark Matsunaga was born Masayuki Matsunaga on Kauai in 1916 to Japanese immigrant parents and picked up the nickname Sparky at age eight from a comic strip character called Sparkplug. He graduated with honors from the University of Hawaii in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. Japanese American soldiers in the Hawaii National Guard were pulled into a provisional battalion, and in June 1942 more tha...

Simon Cameron was born in 1799 in Maytown, Pennsylvania, son of a tailor and tavern keeper who died when Simon was a boy. Boarded with a doctor in Sunbury, he read through the doctor's library and befriended Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who then ran a grocery there. Apprenticed as a printer, he became an assistant editor of a state newspaper in his early 20s and set type for the Congression...

Frank Moss was born in 1911 in Holladay, Utah, the youngest of seven children of educator James Edward Moss. A two time state debate champion at Granite High School, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Utah in 1933, married Phyllis Hart in 1934, and earned his law degree at George Washington University in 1937 while working at New Deal agencies. He served in the Army Air Forces' Ju...

Sam Houston was born in Virginia in 1793, and after his father's death his mother moved the family to Maryville on the Tennessee frontier. At 16 he ran away to live with the Cherokee under Chief John Jolly, learning the language and taking the name Raven. He joined the Army in the War of 1812 and was wounded so badly at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 that doctors left him for dead, earning Andrew Jackson'...

Russell B. Long was born Huey Pierce Long III in 1918, son of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, and is the only person preceded in the Senate by both his father and his mother, Rose McConnell Long. After serving as student body president at LSU, he commanded a Navy landing craft in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy and southern France, earning four battle stars. Elected in 1948...

Roscoe Conkling was born in Albany, New York, in 1829, son of a federal judge and congressman. Six foot three, he boxed, rode and took long daily walks, yet recoiled from being touched. As a Utica lawyer he won a forgery case by proving the defendant could not read or write, then served as mayor of Utica and went to the House as an anti-slavery Republican. During the Civil War he investigated the...

Roman Hruska was born in 1904 in David City, Nebraska, one of 11 children of Czech immigrants, and moved to Omaha in 1917. He studied at the University of Omaha and the University of Chicago Law School, graduated from Creighton law in 1929, and cofounded the Douglas Theatre Company. In 1944 he accepted a Douglas County Board seat as a favor after a friend resigned, chaired the board until 1952 and...

Roland Burris was born in 1937 in Centralia, Illinois, graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1959, studied international law in Germany and earned a Howard University law degree in 1963. He became the first African American national bank examiner for the Comptroller of the Currency, then spent about a decade at Continental Illinois National Bank, rising to vice president. After heading th...

Robert F. Wagner was born in Prussia in 1877 and came to New York in 1885, growing up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, where his father worked as a janitor. He graduated from City College in 1898 and New York Law School in 1900, then rose through Tammany Hall to the state Assembly in 1905 and the state Senate in 1909, serving as president pro tempore from 1911 to 1914. After the 1911 Triangl...

Richard Nixon grew up poor in Yorba Linda and Whittier, California, where his family ran a failing lemon ranch and then a grocery store and gas station. He lost his brothers Arthur and Harold to illness, rose at 4 a.m. to drive to Los Angeles for produce, and turned to debate after a lung scar barred him from football. Rejected by the Franklins at Whittier College, he cofounded the rival Orthogoni...

Quentin Burdick was born in 1908 in Munich, North Dakota, son of Usher Burdick, a Republican lieutenant governor and longtime congressman. He broke wild ponies on the family ranch near Williston, captained his high school football team and played blocking back for Bronko Nagurski at the University of Minnesota, where a knee injury later kept him out of World War II. After law school he returned to...

Philip Hart was born in December 1912 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of a bank president, and was student body president and an award winning debater at Georgetown before earning a University of Michigan law degree in 1937. In 1943 he married Jane Briggs, daughter of the Detroit Tigers' owner, who became Michigan's first female helicopter pilot and later passed Mercury 13 astronaut screening....

Paul Laxalt was born in Reno in 1922 to immigrants from the French Pyrenees: a sheepherder father who made and lost a fortune, and a Le Cordon Bleu trained mother who ran the French Hotel in Carson City. He served as an Army medic at Leyte, became a district attorney and then a lawyer for casino figures, winning the Golden Rooster case by convincing a jury that a 15 pound gold statue was art rathe...

Mark Kirk was born in 1959 in Champaign, Illinois, and studied at Blackburn College, the Autonomous University of Mexico and Cornell before earning a master's from the London School of Economics and a Georgetown law degree. He was chief of staff to Congressman John Porter, worked at the World Bank and Baker McKenzie, and in 2000 won Porter's 10th District seat, where he chaired the centrist Tuesda...

Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo was born in 1859 in Valle de Allende, Chihuahua, to a wealthy landowning family that was ruined after French soldiers ransacked its estate over the family's support for Benito Juárez. At 11 he was sent to the Arizona Territory under Bishop Jean Salpointe to prepare for the priesthood, graduated from St. Michael's College in Santa Fe in 1876, and chose teaching instead...

Norm Coleman was born in Brooklyn in 1949 to a Jewish family whose surname his grandfather had changed from Goldman. At Hofstra University he was an antiwar activist suspended for leading a sit-in, served as Student Senate president, fought the campus newspaper over funding, worked as a roadie for bands like Jethro Tull and turned 20 at Woodstock. After graduating from the University of Iowa Colle...

Muriel Humphrey was born Muriel Faye Buck in 1912 and grew up in Huron, South Dakota, where she worked as a bookkeeper while attending Huron College and met Hubert Humphrey. After they married in 1936, she paid the bills as a typist for the Department of Government at Louisiana State University while he did graduate work there, typing the papers that kept the department running. The family later s...

Millard Tydings was born in 1890 in Havre de Grace, Maryland, graduated from the Maryland Agricultural College in 1910, and worked as a civil engineer for the B&O Railroad before passing the bar in 1913. In World War I he served as a division machine gun officer, rose to lieutenant colonel, and earned the Distinguished Service Cross and Army Distinguished Service Medal. He became speaker of th...

Mike Gravel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1930 to French-Canadian immigrants, spoke only French until seven, and was held back in third grade with undiagnosed dyslexia. He enlisted in 1951, served in the Army Counterintelligence Corps in France, and earned an economics degree at Columbia on the GI Bill. In 1956, broke, he moved to Alaska and worked as a brakeman on the Alaska Railroad...

Mike Enzi was born in Bremerton, Washington, in 1944 and raised in Thermopolis and Sheridan, Wyoming, where his father Elmer ran shoe stores. He earned an accounting degree at George Washington University and an MBA in retail marketing from the University of Denver, served in the Wyoming Air National Guard from 1967 to 1973 after a medical rejection for glycosuria, and in 1969 married Diana and op...

Mike DeWine helped write the 1980s law that restored Ohio's death penalty as a conservative Catholic state senator, then on June 16, 2026, as governor, called for abolishing capital punishment. His career began after law school in 1972 as an assistant prosecutor in Greene County, where he was elected county prosecutor in 1976. In 1993, while he was lieutenant governor, his 22 year old daughter Reb...

Mel Carnahan was born in 1934 and raised near Elsinore, Missouri, the son of Congressman A.S.J. Carnahan, later John F. Kennedy's ambassador to Sierra Leone. He handed out flyers for his father at 12, saw Harry Truman campaign in St. Louis in 1948, and met his wife Jean at a Baptist youth group in Washington. He fainted during an Air Force blood test and spent his service at a desk, later earning...

Max Cleland grew up in Lithonia, Georgia, graduated from Stetson University and Emory, and served as an Army captain with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam, earning the Silver Star and Bronze Star. On April 8, 1968, a month before his tour ended, he flew to Hill 471 near Khe Sanh to set up a radio relay. Seeing a grenade on the ground after the helicopter lifted off, he reached for it; the blast...

Martin Van Buren was born in 1782 in Kinderhook, New York, the first president born a U.S. citizen, and grew up speaking Dutch in his father Abraham's tavern, a hub of local politics. Apprenticed to the Federalist Silvester family, he was told to dress like the ruling class and became the impeccably polite Red Fox. He married Hannah Hoes, who died of tuberculosis in 1819, leaving four sons, and he...