Three former presidents and a roster of Washington luminaries are writing essays about every past president except the two most recent ones, in a project curated by the archivist Donald Trump fired without explanation earlier this year.
The series is called "In Pursuit," and it launched on Presidents' Day with an essay by George W. Bush about George Washington. Since then, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Chief Justice John Roberts, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and others have each taken a turn profiling a past president or first lady, 43 presidents and 30 first ladies in all, the Associated Press reported. The only two presidents left off the list: Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The project is published weekly on Substack, with a companion podcast and a PBS documentary scheduled for October. It has drawn more than one million cumulative views on Substack, 160,000 podcast downloads, and nearly 64,000 YouTube views. The organization behind it, More Perfect, describes itself as a nonpartisan alliance of presidential centers, academics, and groups dedicated to advancing democracy.
But the person running it, former U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan, was fired by President Trump in February 2025. She says she still has not been told why. The White House did not respond when asked for a reason, and Congress, which is required by law to be notified of the grounds for the archivist's dismissal, has apparently not been informed either. The statute sets no deadline for that notification.
Bush's essay, the first in the series, focused on George Washington's decision to relinquish authority voluntarily, first when he resigned as commander in chief of the Continental Army, and again when he served only two terms as president before the two-term limit was written into the Constitution.
Bush wrote that Washington "could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to," calling Washington's willingness to surrender power "among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics."
The essay drove heavy engagement, and the broader project has maintained a steady audience as new installments roll out each week in chronological order through December.
Shogan told the AP that she instructed every contributor to keep the essays nonpartisan and non-ideological.
"Everybody took those instructions and that guidance very seriously."
Her stated goal was for all Americans to "feel welcome to be able to read these lessons and essays and learn something from them." She described the mission as "debriefing the American story", surfacing lessons from 250 years of successes and failures to inform the present and the future.
Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who led U.S. and international forces in the Afghanistan War, contributed an essay on Ulysses S. Grant. McChrystal praised Grant for displaying "an absolute commitment to principles larger than personal ambition." He wrote that Grant, before his presidency, resisted pressure on military leaders to "align with political factions and be loyal to a person rather than the Constitution."
McChrystal closed with a pointed observation:
"The temptation to bend institutions toward personal power is not unique to Grant's era. Our future still depends on whether our leaders choose law over loyalty."
That line, whatever McChrystal intended, lands in a political environment where questions about executive power and constitutional boundaries are live and contested.
Clinton's essay, the latest installment, profiled Theodore Roosevelt. It focused on Roosevelt's drive to expand "we the people" at the expense of powerful corporate interests, while also acknowledging Roosevelt's exclusionary views on Black and Indigenous people.
Obama wrote about Abraham Lincoln. Roberts took on William Howard Taft, the only president who also served as chief justice. Hillary Clinton profiled Eleanor Roosevelt, and Michelle Obama wrote about Jacqueline Kennedy. GOP operative Karl Rove contributed an essay on William McKinley. Documentarian Ken Burns wrote about Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historian Michael Beschloss covered Lyndon Johnson.
Former New York congressman Steve Israel wrote about Millard Fillmore, calling him "a historic punchline, best remembered, ironically, for being so forgotten." Yale history professor David W. Blight tackled Franklin Pierce, recounting how Pierce won the presidency for the Democrats in 1852 despite Whig attacks branding him a "hero of many a well-fought battle", meant sarcastically. Blight described Pierce as a pro-slavery president and a "permanent victim" of Washington's alcohol-soaked culture.
The range of contributors, from Bush to Obama, from a retired four-star general to a Supreme Court chief justice, is wide enough to suggest the project genuinely aimed for bipartisan credibility. Roberts's participation is notable on its own. The chief justice rarely contributes to public-facing projects outside the Court, and his involvement comes during a period of intense scrutiny of the judiciary's independence. Justice Alito recently confirmed he will serve another term, and debates over the Court's role in the constitutional order show no signs of cooling.
Shogan, for her part, defended her record at the National Archives. She told the AP that the archivist position "used to be a nonpartisan position, much like the Librarian of Congress, the secretary of the Smithsonian," and that she "took that very seriously and acted the entire time when I was archivist in a nonpartisan way."
Trump has long had a tense relationship with the National Archives. The agency notified the Department of Justice about his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office following his first term. Shogan was not working for the agency at the time of that referral, but her firing in February 2025 came without any public explanation.
Federal law requires the administration to notify Congress of the reason for removing the archivist, but the statute does not set a deadline. As of the AP's reporting, Congress had not been told. The White House did not respond to questions about the firing or whether it planned to comply with the notification requirement.
That silence is its own kind of answer. When an administration removes a nonpartisan official and declines to explain why, even to the body the law says must be informed, it invites the conclusion that the reason would not hold up well in public. Tensions between the executive branch and independent institutions have become a recurring pattern, visible in everything from the Supreme Court's own internal debates about independence to federal judges pushing back on administration policies across multiple fronts.
Shogan now practices her archivist craft at More Perfect, the organization staging the essay project. She framed her work there as a continuation of the nonpartisan mission she held at the Archives.
The decision to exclude both Trump and Biden from the series is the project's most conspicuous editorial choice. Shogan has not offered a detailed public explanation for it, but the project's stated design, essays about past presidents written for the nation's 250th anniversary, provides a structural rationale. Both men are recent enough that their legacies remain actively contested.
Still, the exclusion means the project sidesteps the two figures who dominate contemporary political debate. That choice keeps the series out of the partisan crossfire but also leaves a gap that readers on both sides will notice. In a political environment where federal courts are actively adjudicating the limits of executive authority, the absence of the sitting president from a project about presidential leadership is hard to miss.
The essays themselves, though, are not shy about drawing lessons that apply to the present. Bush praised Washington for surrendering power. McChrystal warned against leaders who choose loyalty over law. Clinton acknowledged a celebrated president's failures on race. These are not neutral observations. They are arguments dressed in historical costume, and the contributors, all of them experienced enough to know exactly what they are doing, chose their subjects and their themes with care.
Whether the project amounts to a genuine public service or a polished exercise in indirect commentary depends on whether the reader trusts the contributors' motives. A project curated by a fired government official, featuring three former presidents who each left office under varying degrees of controversy, and pointedly omitting the sitting president, that is not a neutral act, no matter how many times the word "nonpartisan" appears in the mission statement.
The essays will keep rolling out weekly into December, and the PBS documentary arrives in October. Americans who want to read them can find them on Substack. Those who want to know why the woman running the project was fired from her government job will have to keep waiting, because the White House, so far, isn't saying.
A project about presidential accountability, run by someone the president fired without accountability. The irony writes itself, even if no one in the series will.
