Brian Williams, the NBC news chair, gave this bit of history on http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/:

"The FIRST American to win the Nobel Peace Prize was a sitting president: Theodore Roosevelt, in 1906. And here's where it gets interesting: Roosevelt's Secretary of State was a man named Elihu Root, who went on to get elected to a Senate seat as a Republican from New York. Root won the Nobel in 1912.
"He ran for president in 1916, but he lost the Republican nomination to Charles Evans Hughes, who in turn lost the general election to Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson, a Democrat, won the Nobel in 1919. Wilson's successor was Warren G. Harding, who died in office, elevating Vice President Calvin Coolidge."

"When Coolidge was elected president in his own right in 1924, his vice president was Charles G. Dawes, who like Coolidge was a Republican. Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925.

"Coolidge's Secretary of State was a man named Frank B. Kellogg, a former Republican Senator from Minnesota. And yes, he too won a Nobel -- in 1929.

"Cordell Hull won the prize in 1945; another Secretary of State (for 11 years under FDR) who was also a former Senator (a Democrat, from Tennessee). But he was the last American Nobel laureate who was also a politician -- someone who had at some point held elective office -- until 2002, when the Nobel Peace Prize went to former President Jimmy Carter. Now it's Al Gore's turn."

Flamin' bleedin' heart liberal leftists, one and all.