The only American President never to have been elected either President or Vice-President. Also the only person that Ronald Reagan ever lost to in an electoral sense.
Though history will remember him as a moderate-to-liberal Republican for his day, there are two minor but sparkling accomplishments of his political career that stand out in my mind.
One, while he was a member of the U.S. House in the late 1960s, he reacted to semi-serious globaloney chatter that NASA would/should plant U.N. flags instead of American flags on the moon before the manned Apollo missions by pushing legislation requiring the American. The other was that, as President, he signed legislation undoing the draconian Roosevelt (F., not T.) era law prohibiting American citizens owning bullion and numismatic (i.e. non-jewelry) gold.
On the other side of the ledger, he was House Minority Leader in 1965, and his refusal to corral opposition to the 1965 Immigration Invasion Act is a significant reason why it passed.
