Exhibit takes visitors from schoolhouse to White House

WASHINGTON (CNN) - In October 1925, a 12 year-old boy in a small California town wrote in a school assignment that he "would like to study law and enter politics for an occupation so that I might be of some good to the people." The boy: Richard Milhous Nixon, some 43 years before being elected the nation's 37th president.

Young Nixon's eighth-grade essay is but one of more than 150 documents, photos, artifacts and mementos on display in a new National Archives exhibit in Washington focusing on the early lives and education of every American president since Herbert Hoover.

The exhibit, called "School House to White House: The Education of Presidents," opened to the public Friday and runs through January 2008, just as voters begin the long process of electing the next president. Full story