Curated playlist
20th-century United States senators
- John F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy spent hours in the water towing a burned crewman after a destroyer cut his boat in half.
- Richard NixonRichard Nixon was the only U.S. president to resign. He left office on the 9th of August, 1974, over Watergate.
- Robert F. KennedyRobert F. Kennedy won the California Democratic primary on the 5th of June 1968, and around midnight a gunman shot him. Kennedy died 25 hours later. The shooter was Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian who acted in retaliation for…
- Chuck SchumerBob Dole once joked that the most dangerous place in Washington was between Charles Schumer and a television camera. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn, has been a United States senator from New York since 1999. Along the way he has led his…
- Al GoreAl Gore won the 2000 popular vote but lost the presidency by 537 Florida votes.
- Joe BidenJoe Biden took the oath as the 46th president of the United States on the 20th of January 2021. At 78, he was the oldest person to assume the office up to that point. The inauguration was a muted affair, shaped by pandemic precautions and…
- Lyndon B. JohnsonLyndon B. Johnson took the presidential oath from a woman, a first for any American president.
- Harry S. TrumanHarry Truman became president knowing nothing about the atomic bomb. He had been vice president for only 82 days.
- John Foster DullesJohn Foster Dulles ran U.S. foreign policy while his brother Allen ran the CIA.
- Mitch McConnellMitch McConnell won his first Senate race in 1984 by 3,437 votes out of more than 1.2 million cast, a margin of just over 0.4 percent. He was the only Republican Senate challenger to win that year, even though Ronald Reagan carried the…
- Ted KennedyEdward Moore Kennedy had just lost the fight for his party's presidential nomination. On the 12th of August 1980 he stepped to the podium at Madison Square Garden. His closing words stayed with the hall: "the work goes on, the cause…
- Harrison SchmittHarrison Schmitt was the only professional geologist to walk on the Moon. He flew on Apollo 17 in 1972.
- James F. ByrnesJames F. Byrnes left school at 14 and later sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. He never earned a law degree.
- Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan once shined shoes in Penn Station, which now has a train hall named for him.