Though George Washington easily won the first presidential election in 1789 with 69 electoral votes, under the rules of the time, runner-up John Adams, a fellow Federalist, legislator and diplomat from Massachusetts, was named vice president. Adams then won election in his own right in 1796, with Democratic-Republican party rival Thomas Jefferson finishing second, leaving the country in the odd position of having a president and VP from different political parties. In the highly partisan, nasty election of 1800, Jefferson eventually emerged victorious.

A New York politician, Martin Van Buren was appointed by Andrew Jackson as his Secretary of State. Van Buren proved adept at navigating the bitter rivalries within the Jackson administration, and during Jackson’s second term from 1833 to 1837, Van Buren served as his vice president. In the election of 1836, Van Buren ran as a Democrat and defeated three Whig party candidates. Van Buren would serve just one term. With the economy mired in a severe downturn in 1840, Van Buren was beaten by Whig candidate William Henry Harrison.

A former Representative and Senator from Virginia, John Tyler was elected as vice president on the Whig Party ticket in 1840 with William Henry Harrison. After Harrison died just 32 days after his inauguration in 1841, Tyler was sworn in to replace him.

In an effort to establish an orderly transition, Tyler kept Harrison’s entire cabinet, but almost all of them resigned in protest after Tyler vetoed a bill to establish the Bank of the United States. Tyler opted not to run for reelection in 1844.

Apprenticed to a New York textile manufacturer as a teenager, Millard Fillmore spent his time outside the mill reading the dictionary and trying to digest enormous legal tomes. In 1819 the 19-year-old attended a newly opened local school for several months; there he fell in love with his teacher, Abigail Powers, a minister’s daughter two years his senior. The pair wed in 1826 after a long courtship.

In the early 1820s, Fillmore followed in his sweetheart’s footsteps, teaching elementary school while clerking for a county judge. He used his earnings to dissolve his obligation to the textile factory and was admitted to the bar in 1823. While the 13th president’s schoolmaster career was short-lived, his future first lady continued to teach even after she married her husband—a rarity during that day and age.

During the Civil War’s election of 1864, Republican President Abraham Lincoln picked Democrat Andrew Johnson for his running mate as a unifying gesture. Unfortunately, the “unifying” candidate was averse to compromise. When Johnson became president after Lincoln’s assassination, the former slavery supporter vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which Congress passed through override) and opposed the 14th Amendment.

“For the most part, historians view Andrew Johnson as the worst possible person to have served as President at the end of the American Civil War,” writes Elizabeth R. Varon, a history professor at the University of Virginia, for the university’s Miller Center. “He is viewed to have been a rigid, dictatorial racist who was unable to compromise or to accept a political reality at odds with his own ideas.”

In addition, Johnson was the first president ever impeached. The House of Representatives voted to impeach him in 1868 for violating the Tenure of Office Act, and the Senate fell short of convicting him by one vote. He served the remainder of the term he took over for Lincoln but didn’t receive a nomination to run for another.

Vermont native Chester Arthur, a school principal and lawyer by trade, had little government experience except for a stint as collector of tariffs for the port of New York, where also he routinely collected salary kickbacks from employees to support the Republican Party. Presidential candidate James Garfield picked him for regional balance for the 1880 Republican ticket. But after Garfield was fatally shot by an emotionally disturbed assassin, Charles J. Giteau, in 1881, Arthur took Garfield’s place.

Some feared Arthur would act like a hack machine politician, but as president he showed a willingness to reform. He did, however, sign into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, a discriminatory bill banning Chinese immigration and forbidding Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens. Arthur lost his party’s nomination in 1884.

A physical fitness buff and Spanish-American War hero, Teddy Roosevelt developed a reputation for fierce independence as New York governor. Republican party bosses tried to neutralize him by putting him on the 1900 ticket with William McKinley, figuring that he would have little leverage to advance his progressive agenda as VP. But when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt suddenly was the man in charge.

To gain support from industrialists, he held back on pushing progressive and reform policies at first, but after winning reelection in a landslide in 1904, he embarked on the ambitious “Square Deal” program, which regulated industry, promoted social programs to help the poor, and set aside 200 million acres of wilderness for preservation. After he left office, Roosevelt grew disenchanted with his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and ran unsuccessfully against him as a third-party candidate in 1912.

While the Fourth of July saw the death of three of the first five U.S. presidents—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826 and James Monroe in 1831—Calvin Coolidge was the only chief executive born on Independence Day. The 30th president was born on July 4, 1872, in the small hamlet of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. While serving as vice president, Coolidge was at the family homestead in the early morning hours of August 3, 1923, when the shocking news of the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding arrived. By the light of a kerosene lamp in the family’s parlor, Coolidge’s father administered the oath of office to his son.

Born May 8, 1884, the 33rd president was 68 years and 257 days old when he left office in January 1953. Truman, who ascended to the presidency when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, was a diligent exerciser, who even in his sixties walked 1.5 miles each day at the same vigorous 120 steps-per-minute pace that he’d used while marching in the U.S. Army.

“He was in good shape,” William Seale, a historian and journal editor with the White House Historical Association, told CNN in 2016. But the strain of leading the nation through the brutal Korean War, and Truman’s habit of working 18-hour days and ignoring illnesses, almost got to him. In the summer of 1952, he became so sick that he had to be hospitalized, and doctors discovered that he was suffering simultaneously from three different bacterial infections. As an article from the National Archives website notes, the seriousness of his illness was kept from the public.

Lyndon B. Johnson on Gerald Ford: 'Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.'

LBJ was one of the crudest presidents in U.S. history. In one instance, when reporters asked him why the United States was still in Vietnam, he pulled out his penis and answered, “This is why!” Another time, he let a reporter know he didn’t like his recent article by, as the New York Times puts it, “defecating on the ground in front of him.”

Given this, it’s not terribly surprising that his burns were often scatalogical.

He was also preoccupied with people knowing in what department he was superior to John F. Kennedy, the president he’d served under and succeeded. “When people mentioned Kennedy’s many affairs, Johnson would bang the table and declare that he had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose,” writes presidential historian Robert Dallek in The Atlantic.

Richard Nixon, a Californian who served in the House and Senate and then as Dwight Eisenhower’s VP from 1953-1961, was unable to build on Eisenhower’s popularity, and lost a close election in 1960 to Democrat John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, Nixon managed to rebuild his political viability, and in 1968, won a narrow victory to the presidency in a three-way race with Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

Nixon went on to win reelection in 1972 in a rout over antiwar Democrat George McGovern. Nixon had many achievements as president, from ending the military draft to founding the Environmental Protection Agency and moving to establish normal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. But the Watergate scandal sunk his political fortunes, and he became the first president to resign from office.

Gerald Ford, a veteran legislator from Michigan, replaced Spiro Agnew as Richard Nixon’s vice president after Agnew was forced to resign in 1973 over allegations of corruption. In the summer of 1974, Ford replaced Nixon himself, who decided to quit rather than go through impeachment and a trial in the Senate. A month later, Ford pardoned his predecessor “for all offenses against the United States for which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed.” That action was unpopular, and likely contributed to Ford’s narrow loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Born June 12, 1924, the 41st president had reached 68 years and 222 days in age when he left office in January 1993. After a long career in government that included a stint as Central Intelligence Agency director and eight years as vice president, Bush had a lot of mileage on his tires the time he reached the Oval Office. But a lifetime of exercise had kept the former Yale University baseball star remarkably fit for a man in his sixties.

Bush was a regular runner who frequently invited reporters along on his runs, former White House correspondent Kevin Merida later recalled in a piece for sports website The Undefeated. Bush did have some stumbles that some interpreted as signs of being tired and out of touch, including a moment in which he checked his watch during a 1992 debate and then had difficulty answering an audience member’s question about how the recession had affected him.

Though he lost the election, historians have come to appreciate his achievements as president, including his handling of the end of the Cold War.

Joe Biden was 78 when he took the oath of office as the 46th president of the United States in January 2021. This earned him the spot as the oldest president in U.S. history. Taking office at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was taking an especially deadly toll on America's elderly population, Biden acknowledged his age. As he told hosts on "The View" during his candidacy, “It’s a legitimate question to ask about my age. Hopefully, I can demonstrate not only with age has come wisdom and experience that can make things a lot better.”