There are myriad reasons for us to learn about the presidents, whether past, present, or future. One of the most compelling is that the President of the United States is our nation’s (and indeed, the world’s) foremost guardian of liberty, a liberty for which millions of Americans have fought and died to preserve.

The American president wields enormous power, a power that can precipitate and even control events well beyond his (or her, as the case one day may be) time in office. Every presidential action endures far into the future, both our own future and that of our posterity.

Obscure as he was (and is), President Millard Fillmore set in motion a series of events, which long after he was gone, wrote for us one of the most horrifying chapters in the 20th-century book of history. President Ford was thrust into the turning pages of that book and wrote for us a heroic chapter of his own. Fillmore and Ford were thus inexplicably bound to one another, and we are too.

Each Presidential cigar peeks into the soul of its honored namesake and, beneath the blue-grey smoke, reveals the magnificent stories that acquaint us with times past. More remarkably, those same stories foretell the future.

Some stories are heroic, some are tragic, and some dare to make us laugh. Common to them all, however, is that they eagerly speak to us – both to the ennobling grandeur of our earthly potential, as well as the profound fragility that defines our humanity.

We offer these cigars, in the epoch in which they existed, as both tribute and heed. It is our fervent prayer that those who would be president, and equally important, those who would cast their ballots for him or her, should forever take to heart the solemn and timeless wisdom of the ages.