President James K. Polk fixed a steely eye on his new Secretary of State, the future Chief Executive James Buchanan. “Mr. Buchanan is an able man, but, in small matters, without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid,” the president wrote. Andrew Jackson agreed and let Polk know it in an anxious letter. When Polk pointed out that Jackson himself had earlier appointed Buchanan minister to Russia, Jackson replied, “It was as far as I could get him out of my sight. I would have sent him to the North Pole if we had kept a minister there!”

Like Buchanan, Millard Fillmore and his successor, Franklin Pierce, are remembered today chiefly for their timidity in handling the slavery issue. But when Civil War finally resulted, neither man was timid about expressing his opinion of Abraham Lincoln. Pierce was particularly vehement; the climax of his opposition came on July 4, 1863. At a five-hour rally in Concord, New Hampshire, he assailed Lincoln, denounced the war as an attack on the Constitution, and ended by virtually urging his fellow Democrats to launch a Northern insurrection.

While Pierce was speaking, the news filtered through the crowd that a great victory had been won at Gettysburg. The speech became a political humiliation from which the former president never recovered.

The Republicans of Buffalo grew to detest Fillmore for his attacks on the president. The story goes that when Lincoln was assassinated, the city fathers ordered every building in the city to display mourning symbols. Fillmore, distracted by his wife’s illness, didn’t hear about the order. He awoke the next morning to find his house smeared with black paint.

Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, William Howard Taft, started out as friends. In 1901, TR said Taft would make a “glorious candidate and president,” and when, in 1908, Taft got the nomination with Roosevelt’s backing, Teddy told him he would be the “greatest president, bar only Washington and Lincoln.”

But Taft’s concept of the presidency turned out to be utterly opposed to Roosevelt’s. By January 1912, TR decided that Taft must go and he himself ran against him as the candidate of the impromptu Progressive party. In the course of the campaign TR called Taft a “puzzlewit” and a “fathead.” Taft called his erstwhile best friend an “egotist” and a “demagogue.” Roosevelt, convinced he had found his moment in history, seemed unvexed by these exchanges, but one reporter told of finding Taft, after a speech damning Roosevelt, slumped with his head in his hands, weeping.

TR succeeded only in electing the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Here too there was a curious early fondness on the part of both men, but Wilson slowly soured on TR. In 1907, he remarked, “I am told he no sooner thinks than he talks,

For his part, Roosevelt admired some of Wilson’s early political speeches but found him personally unattractive and compared him with Charles Sumner, “a cold-blooded creature with a good deal of intellect but lacking the fighting virtues.” This distaste rapidly grew into vitriol when war broke out in Europe and Wilson tried to remain neutral. When the President reacted to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by declaring that Americans were “too proud to fight,” Roosevelt called the sinking “piracy pure and simple” and warned that America would earn “scorn and contempt if we follow the lead of those who exalt peace above righteousness.”

When war finally came, Roosevelt asked for permission to raise a volunteer division and lead it to Europe. Wilson stonily refused him, creating a permanent antagonist on the home front. “I am the only one he has kept out of the war,” Teddy roared.

Another Republican President revered Wilson. Herbert Hoover worked for Wilson as U.S. food administrator and afterward wrote The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, a largely admiring tribute to Wilson’s “great clarity of thought” and “superior mind.” His only flaw, in Hoover’s view, was a tendency to mistake “honest and proper argument against his conclusions for personal criticism.”

On the other hand, Hoover did not love his fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt. In the late twenties, when Hoover was becoming a candidate for President, his backers came across a story of how he had rescued a trapped Chinese child from a crossfire during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. They proposed to release the tale to the papers. Hoover refused. “You can’t make a Teddy Roosevelt out of me,” he said.

Wilson’s opinion of Warren Harding was terse and totally negative. He was “a fool of a president.” Calvin Coolidge resented the praise heaped on Herbert Hoover in the press even before he became president and called him “the wonduh boy.” Franklin D. Roosevelt belabored Hoover mercilessly on his own way to the presidency in 1932, conveniently forgetting that he had offered to run as his vice president if Hoover should decide to become a Democrat for the 1920 presidential election. “I wish we could make him president,” FDR wrote a friend. “There could not be a better one.”

From his youth FDR modeled himself on his cousin Theodore. But Woodrow Wilson also became a dominant figure in his political thinking, and he saw himself as a blend of both men—a Wilsonian idealist with TR’s pragmatic streak. He liked to quote Wilson’s remark: “It is only once in a generation that a people can be lifted above material things. That is why conservative government is in the saddle two-thirds of the time.”