All the following texts are from:
http://millercenter.org/president/biography/
"Life in Brief" as regards Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagon.
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter,
Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an
American politician and author who served as the 39th
President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. He was awarded
the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for
his work with the Carter Center...A state
Senate seat was opened by the dissolution
of Georgia's County Unit System in 1962;
Carter announced his run for the seat 15 days
before the election. Rosalynn(his wife), who had an instinct for politics and
organization, was instrumental to his campaign. The initial results showed Carter
losing, but this was the result of fraudulent voting orchestrated by Joe Hurst,
the sheriff of Quitman County. Carter challenged the results; when
fraud was confirmed, a new election was held, which he won....
Since leaving office, Carter has remained active,
serving as a freelance ambassador for a variety of international missions and
advising presidents on Middle East and human rights issues....In August 2015, at age 90, Carter was diagnosed
with melanoma which had metastasized to his liver and brain, and he
began treatment which included surgery, immunotherapy, and radiation therapy.
On December 6, 2015, Carter, now 91, announced that he was cancer-free.
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On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in
Dallas, Texas. The event thrust Lyndon Johnson into the presidency....In 1937, Johnson resigned as the state director of the National
Youth Administration and won election to Congress,..epresenting his home district as an ally of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He was just twenty-eight years old....When he ran for election against the Republican conservative
Barry Goldwater in late 1964, he won by the biggest popular vote margin in history.... After a relatively short period in restless retirement, Lyndon Johnson
died on January 22, 1973.
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In 1968, Nixon won a presidential election almost as narrow as the one he
had lost in 1960...Schoolchildren absorb at least one fact about Richard
Milhous Nixon: He was the first and (so far) the only President of the United
States to resign the office. Before the spectacular fall, there was an equally
spectacular rise. In a half-dozen years, he went from obscurity to a heartbeat
from the presidency, winning a congressional race (1946), national prominence
in the Alger Hiss spy case (1948), a Senate seat (1950), and the vice presidency
(1952). John F. Kennedy interrupted Nixon's assent in 1960, winning the presidency
by the narrowest margin of the twentieth century.
After losing a 1962 race for governor of California and holding his "last
press conference," Nixon patiently laid the groundwork for a comeback.
In 1964, he campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater
at a time when other prominent Republicans were keeping their distance from
the leader of the budding conservative movement. The Republican Party lost in
a landslide that year but Nixon won the gratitude of conservatives, the growing
power within the party. The GOP's huge losses in 1964 were offset in 1966 when
two years of the Vietnam War and urban riots led to huge Republican gains in
congressional elections. In 1968, Nixon won a presidential election almost as
narrow as the one he had lost in 1960.....Until the Watergate scandal led to his near impeachment by the House of Representatives
and resignation in 1974, he was the dominant politician of the Cold War. As
a Washington pundit once said, hers was not the Pepsi generation but the Nixon
generation.
................................................................................................................................................................................
Gerald R. Ford became President of the United States on August 9, 1974, under
extraordinary circumstances. Owing to the Watergate scandal, Ford's predecessor,
Richard Nixon, had resigned under the threat of congressional impeachment....After the war, Ford returned home to Grand Rapids, where he practiced law,
got married, and entered politics. In 1948, he unseated Congressman Bartel (Barney)
Jonkman in the Republican primary and then easily defeated Democrat Fred J.
Barr, Jr., in the general election....Ford took the vice presidential oath of office on December 6, 1973....Ford's road to the 1976 presidential election was surprisingly difficult....Gerald Ford's presidency ended after only two and a half years.
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Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, followed a
unique path to the White House. After successful careers as a radio sports announcer,
Hollywood movie actor, and television host, he turned to politics and was elected
governor of California in 1966, serving eight years.....He ran unsuccessfully for President in 1968 and 1976, but in 1980, during
a time of U.S. economic troubles and foreign policy difficulties, he won the
Republican presidential nomination in a contest with George H.W. Bush and others
and defeated President Jimmy Carter in the general election....1n 1984, Reagan was reelected to a second term in a 49-state landslide....His presidency has been ranked highly by the American people in subsequent
polls. Reagan died on June 5, 2004.
In 1937, Reagan went to California with the Chicago Cubs baseball team on
spring training and arranged through a friend for a screen test at Warner Brothers.
Warner Brothers offered Reagan a contract for $200 a week that launched his
film career.
During the next twenty years, Reagan made 52 films, beginning with
Love
Is on The Air in 1937 and
ending with
Hellcats of
the Navy in 1957. Reagan
began his movie making in the B-division of Warner's, where, he said, "they
didn't want [the films] good, they wanted them Thursday." His break came
when his friend, the actor Pat O'Brien, recommended him for the role of doomed
Notre Dame football star George Gipp in
Knute
Rockne?All American (1940),
in which O'Brien had the title role. Reagan was a feature film actor from then
on, receiving particularly good notices for a dramatic role in
Kings
Row (1942), which Reagan
considered his best film. Overall, Reagan earned a reputation as a capable actor
who did his best work in light comedies. After his film career ended, Reagan
became a spokesman for General Electric, hosting the highly rated Sunday television
program
General Electric
Theater and speaking to
GE employees around the country.
Reagan admired President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose "New Deal for
the American people" provided jobs for his father and brother during the
depths of the Depression. His parents were Democrats, in a Republican area,
and Ronald Reagan remained a Democrat until after he turned 50. Although he
never lost his admiration for FDR, Reagan became an ardent conservative and
switched his registration to Republican in 1962. Reagan's political and ideological
evolution was the product of numerous factors: increased wealth, and the higher
taxes that accompanied it; conflicts with leftist union leaders as an official
of the Screen Actors Guild, and exposure in his General Electric days to a growing
view that the federal government, epitomized by the New Deal, was stifling economic
growth and individual freedom.
That view formed the essence of the speech Reagan gave on October 27, 1964,
when he burst on the national political scene with a stirring televised appeal
for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Using many of the stories
and statistics that had become staples of his basic GE speech, Reagan contended
that government restrictions and taxation were causing the erosion of individual
freedom within the United States. He also decried what he saw as the weakness
of the U.S. government in the face of the expansive Soviet Union, which Reagan
said was bent on world domination. His performance inspired Republicans and
raised $1 million in contributions for the faltering Goldwater campaign. Although
Goldwater lost the election in a landslide, conservatives had found a new standard-bearer
in Reagan.
