george bush

#41 FACTS:

--In 1942, at 18 years old, Bush became the youngest aviator in the U.S. Navy at the time. He was the last WWII veteran to serve as President.

--Bush was one of three U.S. Presidents who served as a member of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University (William Howard Taft and George W. Bush are the others). Bush's Skull and Bones nickname was "Magog". Creepy.

--Bush became the first Vice President to become 'Acting President' when, on July 13, 1985, Ronald Reagan underwent surgery to remove polyps from his colon. Bush served as Acting President for approximately eight hours.

--In 1988 Bush became the first serving Vice President to be elected President since Martin Van Buren in 1836, as well as the first person to succeed someone from his own party to the Presidency via election to the office in his own right since Herbert Hoover in 1929.

--George Bush's sweat is a powerful natural hallucinogen.

girl

samurai jack

james buchanan

#15 FACTS:

--Buchanan served as James K. Polk's Secretary of State, and so far remains the last former Secretary of State to become President. Born in 1791, he was also the last President born in the 18th century.

--Buchanan regularly tops the list of a lot of "Worst Presidents" rankings. Like Franklin Pierce before him he was a Northerner with apparent Southern sympathies, and his efforts to maintain a peaceful status quo between the North and the South alienated both sides and, combined with Abraham Lincoln's election, helped to move the Southern states to declare succession a few months before Buchanan left office.

Buchanan both denied the legal right of states to secede and also held that the Federal Government legally could not prevent them. Furthermore, he placed the blame for the crisis solely on "intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States." Buchanan's specific, last-ditch solution to the crisis was that the Congress call for a constitutional convention which would give the people of the country the opportunity to vote specifically on an amendment to the constitution regarding the slavery issue. However, there was no ability to reach agreement on this approach as a solution to be pursued.

--Buchanan remains the only Presidential bachelor. When his ex-fiancee, Ann Coleman, died (of hysteria, how weird is that?), Buchanan vowed to never marry. He lived in Washington D.C. with Alabama senator William King for fifteen years, until King, who was elected as Franklin Pierce's VP, died suddenly of tuberculosis. Both Buchanan and King's nieces burned the two men's correspondence after Buchanan's death, and many have claimed that the two were a couple (it was a popular rumor at the time, in fact--many spoke of them as "Buchanan and his wife" and Andrew Jackson often referred to King and Buchanan as "Miss Nancy" and "Aunt Fancy"), and that, therefore, Buchanan was the first gay President. However, there's not enough evidence to definitively say one way or the other.

--When you Google 'James Buchanan' the 4th thing that comes up is a "Gothic Gay Erotic Romance" website. So...now you know that.

chinese neighborhood

franklin pierce

#14 FACTS:

--Generally regarded as one of the more worthless Presidents, Pierce is the only sitting President not to be renominated by his own party after his first term. Afterwards, he was quoted as telling a friend, “There is nothing left to do but get drunk.”

On the bright side, he might win if you were to rank Presidents by "best hair".

--And yes, he probably was something of an alcoholic. There was even a story told that a drunken Pierce ran over an elderly woman with his carriage, though there's no evidence of that actually happening. He died at 64 of cirrhosis.

--His reputation was destroyed during the American Civil War when he declared some support for the Confederacy, and personal correspondence between Pierce and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was leaked to the press (Davis had been Pierce's Secretary of War when he was in office, and the two remained friends).

--Pierce became President partly because of the success of a book written by his college roommate, Nathaniel Hawthorne, called "The Life of Franklin Pierce", which came out a few months before the election.

--Pierce's VP, William King, died just 45 days after Pierce took office. For the rest of Pierce's term he had no acting Vice-President.

--I swear to God this is true: The Democrats' slogan in the election of 1852 was "We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852!"

man-thing-jam

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