On a rainy night in 1793, the Van Buren family ox slipped in the mud, fracturing its foreleg. Realizing that the ox was no longer any good to anyone, Abe Van Buren loaded his flintlock and took aim, when, all of a sudden, his ten-year-old son, Martin, leaped in front of the ox and cried, “If you shoot this ox, Father, you would do as well to shoot me! For this unfortunate beast is no less God’s creation than I.” And so his father shot him. Then he turned to Martin’s identical twin and said, “From now on, you’re Martin.” And that is how Phil Van Buren became President of the United States.

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James Monroe, too, had a cherry tree. It may not have been as tall or as sturdy as George Washington’s, and its fruit may not have been as abundant. In fact, it may not have been a tree at all but a big wooden picket with clumps of rotting cherries stapled to it. Still, it was the finest tree in the Monroe orchard, and rare was the afternoon that James’s father did not spend three or four hours buffing its knobby bark, tutoring it in Latin and rhetoric, whispering sweet nothings into its low-lying branches. “You could learn a lot from that cherry tree,” he was fond of telling people. “You really could.”

Then, one day, James took his father’s prized axe from the mantelpiece and reduced the tree to a sorry pile of mulch. But his father was not angry. “Think nothing of it, son, for a tree is just a tree,” he said, his hand resting gently on the boy’s shoulder. “But touch my axe again and I’ll break your fucking arm.”

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“Pirates!” the young sailor Andrew Jackson cried. He and MacGraw skittered down the mainmast and in a heartbeat a hundred and twenty men, all sweat and sinew, swarmed the deck, priming the cannons, affixing bayonets to rifles. In two minutes, they were ready.

The captain probed the misty horizon, his lips contracting into a taut frown. “What pirates?” he shouted. “These are otters! Who is responsible?” His fearsome eyes searched the crew, and came to rest squarely on Andrew Jackson. But Andrew Jackson did not shrink. No, he boldly returned the captain’s gaze, and, with a single bony thumb, he gestured over his right shoulder—in the direction of MacGraw.

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It wasn’t often that President Eisenhower lingered on the ground floor of the White House. But something on that sticky summer evening had summoned him downstairs, to the unfamiliar corners of the Vermeil Room, where he stood transfixed before the alabaster temptress with the narrow black eyes. True, it was only a painting, but the hero of D Day was besotted nonetheless, lost in the glossy visage of Dolley Madison.

His visits continued through the summer. Some nights, he brought her flowers; some nights, scented soap. Some nights, he would arrive with a tin of caviar and two quarts of imported varnish. The President would slip out just before dawn, whereupon the maids would find that the adjacent portraits—Florence Harding, Edith Roosevelt, the estimable Mrs. Wilson—had been rehung backward, their reproachful eyes watching nothing but the wall.

Finally, he resolved to tell Mamie his secret. “I’m in love,” he said, standing at the door of the executive bedroom. “It’s a rotten thing, and I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to be done. I hope you’ll forgive me.” With that, the President gave a curt nod, pivoted on his heel, and shut the door behind him.

Mamie Eisenhower relaxed her grip on the comforter, and suddenly the head of a compact, gray-haired man popped out from beneath the sheets.

“You think he’s onto us?” said Herbert Hoover.

“Hell if I know,” Mamie replied. “The man is a lunatic.”

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“Retreat!” cried Durutte, his voice straining above the crackling musket fire and the deadly whine of grapeshot.

At Napoleon’s headquarters, on the outskirts of Waterloo, the news had just arrived. “Impossible!” Napoleon cried. “Who is responsible for this debacle?” At once, the crowd of assembled officers parted and Napoleon found himself face to face with Andrew Jackson. But Andrew Jackson did not back down. No, he returned the Emperor’s stare, and, with a single bony thumb, he gestured over his shoulder—in the direction of MacGraw.

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The first two wishes had been easy. Sure, President seemed like a reach, but George W. Bush figured you only came across a genie in a lamp so many times—you might as well go for it. As for the chocolate milkshake, well, that was a lark. Later, he would claim that he was just testing the genie’s powers, but in truth he’d really wanted that milkshake, and in his heart he never regretted it. The third wish, though, had proved more vexing than he’d ever imagined; and, to his own surprise, the genie’s suggestion was starting to make sense. “Explain it to me one more time,” W. said.

“You see, master,” the genie said, stroking his goatee, “high earners provide the capital for business infrastructure and equity markets. Therefore, sweeping tax cuts for corporate income, coupled with steady deregulation, will stimulate growth, the benefits of which will necessarily trickle down.”

Years later, with the country in a shambles, the President privately wondered if he’d been too quick to accept the genie’s supply-side logic. But by then the genie had his own problems: his 401(k) was all but defunct, and he found himself embroiled in a major lawsuit over whether or not he had assured a previous client that “all the riches of Araby” were tax-exempt. ♦