The numbers come first: 43 presidents, 30 first ladies, and one dismissed archivist steering the project.
Colleen Shogan, who was fired without explanation by President Trump — according to reporting dated August 8, 2026, the dismissal occurred in 2025 — is now curating In Pursuit, a 250th-anniversary essay series published weekly through December. The roster includes former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, alongside Chief Justice John Roberts, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, documentarian Ken Burns and GOP operative Karl Rove, among others.
Shogan told The Associated Press the project's mission is to 'surface the lessons from the past 250 years of American history, so that we can learn from those lessons, from both our successes and our failures, so we can plan for the present and the future.' She instructed every contributor to avoid partisanship or ideology. 'Everybody took those instructions and that guidance very seriously,' she said.
The essays cover all presidents except Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Trump, both judged too recent for historical appraisal.
Bush, a Republican, opened the series on Presidents Day with an essay on George Washington. 'Our first president could have remained all-powerful,' Bush writes, 'but twice he chose not to. In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to.' Bush adds: 'George Washington's humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics.' The essay drove heavy engagement on Substack, according to the source.
McChrystal, who led U.S. and international forces in the Afghanistan War, wrote about Ulysses S. Grant, portraying him as a leader who displayed 'an absolute commitment to principles larger than personal ambition' and who resisted pressure on military leaders to 'align with political factions and be loyal to a person rather than the Constitution.' McChrystal concludes: 'Our future still depends on whether our leaders choose law over loyalty.'
Clinton's essay focuses on Theodore Roosevelt's drive to expand 'we the people' at the expense of powerful corporate interests, while also noting Roosevelt's exclusionary views on Black and Indigenous people.
Other notable pairings: Chief Justice Roberts writes about William Howard Taft, the only president also to serve on the Supreme Court; Obama presents Abraham Lincoln; and historian Michael Beschloss covers Lyndon Johnson.
The project is staged by More Perfect, described in the source as a nonpartisan alliance of dozens of presidential centers.
CEO Times reads this clearly. Whatever Shogan's grievances with the administration that dismissed her, the editorial discipline she imposed — no partisanship, no ideology — is the right standard for any institution that claims to speak for all Americans. The irony is that the series' most resonant essays write themselves: when former commanders-in-chief and generals voluntarily choose Washington's model of limited power over Grant's temptations, the lesson lands without a byline fight. Free institutions survive not because bureaucracies protect them, but because individuals inside them choose principle over position. That is a lesson worth 250 years of ink.
