Reagan would be Wikipedia-notable but might not be a household name.
Maybe Al Gore would have become known primarily as a technology planner and environmental activist.
I agree with others who say that presidents who were high ranking military officers would have a claim to fame in just being that, including Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower.
Presidents who were closely related to other ones might be famous even without becoming President, the two Adams and the two Bushes specifically, as long as they had some independent claim to fame. The relationship would bolster the fame.
Except he was. I didn’t become aware of politics in general until 1964, but Nixon was in the limelight then, and remained so even before his 1968 run for the Presidency.
He may have been the closest human relation to the cockroach, but if he’d lost in 1968, he would have continued to be famous for some time. He just had a way of keeping himself in the middle of things.
Nitpicking but there isn’t even one George Bush Junior. The first President Bush is George Herbert Walker Bush. His son is George Walker Bush. (There’s also a George Prescott Bush in the family.)
