With the myopia of hindsight, it might be imagined that Bill Clinton was the first American president who could not keep his zip up. But Bill was only treading a well-trodden path.
The first president, George Washington, set a dizzying standard that few presidents have come close to equaling with the ‘Washerwoman Kate Affair.’ While the father of the nation was busy fighting the British during the War of Independence he had a congressman procuring for him young women to administer the comforts of love.
Thomas Jefferson, who became the third president of the United States, fathered a second family with his slave girl, Sally Hemings.
Gay Gossip concerning the President’s homosexuality was rife during James Buchanan’s (15th president, 1857-61) tenure of office in the late 1850s.
James Carfield (20th president, 1881) also seems to have had a gay affair before joining one of the many 19th century sects in America that encouraged free love.
Scurrilous pamphlets alleging ‘bestial practises’ lost Glover Cleveland the 1880 election.
The lugubrious President Woodrow Wilson (28th president, 1913-21) was a serial adulterer.
Warren Harding could just about qualify as America’s first — and only black president(He had a Jamaican grand-father), was caught by his wife in flagrante delicto with a young woman in the coat closet in the Oval Office.
Franklin Roosevelt (32nd president, 1933-45), always a ladies’ man, womanized so much …..his wife, Eleanor turned lesbian.
Perhaps John F Kennedy’s prodigious sex life is the most well known - he had a ‘taste’ for actresses, and is reported to have been involved with prostitutes often.
Lyndon Johnson was even more blatant. He flaunted his infidelity in front of the press, even boasting that he had celebrated signing the equal rights legislation into law by having sex with a black girl in the Oval Office. “I had more women by accident than Kennedy had on purpose,” he bragged memorably.
Lyndon Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, was so deeply mired in the political sleaze of Watergate that his sexual misdemeanours were overlooked.
President Jimmy Carter caused a scandal by not having sex. During the 1976 election campaign, he told Playboy magazine: “I have looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”
In the Reagan White House, Nancy Reagan masterminded the ‘Just Say No’ campaign. But Spy magazine said that when she was an actress, she gave the ‘best head in Hollywood.’
During the 1988 election, it was alleged that George Bush had had a longterm affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, an aide on his vice presidential staff.
….More
References:
[1] One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism.
[2] Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson
[3] The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy: Stunning Evidence in the Assassination of the President
[4] Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes
[5] Profits of War : Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network
[6] Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis
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