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Everything you didn't know about the so-called leaders of the free world, from their favorite foods to their pets' names.

U.S. Presidents

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This list is of the best former potential Presidents this nation might have missed out on. It includes those popular Presidential candidates who never made it to the White House, because of defeat, death, or other reasons.

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Al Gore

Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Gore was Bill Clinton's running mate in their successful campaign in 1992, and the pair was re-elected in 1996. Near the end of Clinton's second term, Gore was selected as the Democratic nominee for the 2000 presidential election but lost the election in a very close race after a Florida recount. After his term as vice-president ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned him (jointly with the IPCC) the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Gore was an elected official for 24 years. He was a representative from Tennessee (1977–1985) and from 1985 to 1993 served as a senator from that state. He served as vice president during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest presidential races in history. Gore won the popular vote, but after a controversial election dispute over a Florida recount (settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 in favor of Bush), he lost the election to Republican opponent George W. Bush in the Electoral College.
Gore is the founder and current chair of the The Climate Reality Project, the co-founder and chair of Generation Investment Management and the now-defunct Current TV network, a member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc., and a senior adviser to Google. Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading its climate change solutions group. He has served as a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He served on the Board of Directors of World Resources Institute.Gore has received a number of awards that include the Nobel Peace Prize (joint award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007), a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album (2009) for his book An Inconvenient Truth, a Primetime Emmy Award for Current TV (2007), and a Webby Award (2005). Gore was also the subject of the Academy Award-winning (2007) documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. In 2007, he was named a runner-up for Time's 2007 Person of the Year.

Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, and as a U.S. Senator from New York from January 1965 until his assassination in June 1968. Kennedy, like his brothers John and Edward, was a prominent member of the Democratic Party and has come to be viewed by some historians as an icon of modern American liberalism.Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh child of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Kennedy. After serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve as a seaman apprentice from 1944 to 1946, Kennedy returned to Harvard University and graduated in 1948. He received his law degree from the University of Virginia, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1951. He began his career as a lawyer at the Justice Department but later resigned to manage his brother John's successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1952. The following year, he worked as an assistant counsel to the Senate committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He gained national attention as the chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee from 1957 to 1959, where he publicly challenged Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa over the corrupt practices of the union and authored The Enemy Within, a book about corruption in organized labor. Kennedy resigned from the committee to conduct his brother's campaign in the 1960 presidential election. He was appointed United States Attorney General after the successful election and served as the closest advisor to the President from 1961 to 1963.His tenure is best known for its advocacy for the civil rights movement, the fight against organized crime and the Mafia, and involvement in U.S. foreign policy related to Cuba. After his brother's assassination, he remained in office in the Johnson Administration for several months. He left to run for the United States Senate from New York in 1964 and defeated Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating. In office, Kennedy opposed racial discrimination and U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He was an advocate for issues related to human rights and social justice and formed relationships with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.
In 1968 Kennedy became a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency by appealing to poor, African American, Hispanic, Catholic, and young voters. His main challenger in the race was Senator Eugene McCarthy. Shortly after winning the California primary around midnight on June 5, 1968, Kennedy was mortally wounded when shot with a pistol by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, allegedly in retaliation for his support of Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War. Kennedy died the following day. Sirhan was arrested, tried, and convicted, though Kennedy's assassination, like his brother's, continues to be the subject of widespread analysis and numerous conspiracy theories.

Henry Clay

Henry Clay Sr. (April 12, 1777 – June 29, 1852) was an American attorney and statesman who represented Kentucky in both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, served as 7th speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and served as the 9th U.S. secretary of state. He received electoral votes for president in the 1824, 1832, and 1844 presidential elections and helped found both the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. For his role in defusing sectional crises, he earned the appellation of the "Great Compromiser."
Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia in 1777 and launched a legal career in Lexington, Kentucky in 1797. As a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Clay won election to the Kentucky state legislature in 1803 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810. He was chosen as speaker of the House in early 1811 and, along with President James Madison, led the United States into the War of 1812 against Britain. In 1814, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which brought an end to the War of 1812. After the war, Clay returned to his position as speaker of the House and developed the American System, which called for federal infrastructure investments, support for the national bank, and protective tariff rates. In 1820, he helped bring an end to a sectional crisis over slavery by leading the passage of the Missouri Compromise.
Clay finished with the fourth-most electoral votes in the multi-candidate 1824 presidential election, and he helped John Quincy Adams win the contingent election held to select the president. President Adams appointed Clay to the prestigious position of secretary of state; critics alleged that the two had agreed to a "corrupt bargain." Despite receiving support from Clay and other National Republicans, Adams was defeated by Democrat Andrew Jackson in the 1828 presidential election. Clay won election to the Senate in 1831 and ran as the National Republican nominee in the 1832 presidential election, but he was defeated by President Jackson. After the 1832 election, Clay helped bring an end to the Nullification Crisis by leading passage of the Tariff of 1833. During Jackson's second term, opponents of the president coalesced into the Whig Party, and Clay became a leading congressional Whig. 
Clay sought the presidency in the 1840 election but was defeated at the Whig National Convention by William Henry Harrison. He clashed with Harrison's running mate and successor, John Tyler, who broke with Clay and other congressional Whigs after taking office in 1841. Clay resigned from the Senate in 1842 and won the 1844 Whig presidential nomination, but he was defeated in the general election by Democrat James K. Polk, who made the annexation of the Republic of Texas his key issue. Clay strongly criticized the subsequent Mexican–American War and sought the Whig presidential nomination in 1848, but was defeated by General Zachary Taylor. After returning to the Senate in 1849, Clay played a key role in passing the Compromise of 1850, which resolved a crisis over the status of slavery in the territories. Clay is generally regarded as one of the most important and influential political figures of his era. He was also an advocate of the extermination and extinction of Native Americans. As Secretary of State he predicted that Indians would be gone within 50 years and “their disappearance from the human family (would) be no great loss to the world.”

Hubert Humphrey

Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (May 27, 1911 – January 13, 1978) was an American politician who served as the 38th vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969. He twice served in the United States Senate, representing Minnesota from 1949 to 1964 and 1971 to 1978. He was the Democratic Party's nominee in the 1968 presidential election, losing to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.
Born in Wallace, South Dakota, Humphrey attended the University of Minnesota.  At one point he helped run his father's pharmacy. He earned a master's degree from Louisiana State University and worked for the Works Progress Administration, the Minnesota war service program, and the War Manpower Commission. In 1943, he became a professor of political science at Macalester College and ran a failed campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. He helped found the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) in 1944. In 1945, he won election as mayor of Minneapolis, serving until 1948 and co-founding the liberal anti-communist group Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1948, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and successfully advocated for the inclusion of a proposal to end racial segregation in the 1948 Democratic National Convention's party platform.Humphrey served three terms in the Senate from 1949 to 1964. He was the Senate Majority Whip from 1961 to 1964. During his tenure, he was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, introduced the first initiative to create the Peace Corps, sponsored the clause of the McCarran Act that threatened concentration camps for "subversives", proposed making Communist Party membership a felony, and chaired the Select Committee on Disarmament. He unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 1952 and 1960. After Lyndon B. Johnson acceded to the presidency, he chose Humphrey as his running mate, and the Democratic ticket was elected in the landslide 1964 election.
In March 1968, Johnson made his surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Humphrey launched his campaign for the presidency. Loyal to the Johnson administration's policies on the Vietnam War, he saw opposition from many within his own party and avoided the primaries to focus on winning the delegates of non-primary states at the Democratic Convention. His delegate strategy succeeded in clinching the nomination, and he chose Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate. In the general election, he nearly matched Nixon's tally in the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a wide margin. After the defeat, he returned to the Senate until his death in 1978.

This list is of the best former potential Presidents this nation might have missed out on. It includes those popular Presidential candidates who never made it ...