Presidential Sex Scandals
Bill Clinton is only the latest U.S. president to carve himself a spot on the Mount Rushmore of Romance. Here's a roll call of presidential sex scandals, admitted and alleged, from the past.
THOMAS JEFFERSON: Did Jefferson secretly father children by slave Sally Hemings? Such rumors were first published in 1802 by a political rival of Jefferson, James Callender. Jefferson was a widower and Hemings was herself the illicit daughter of a female slave and Jefferson's own father-in-law. For the most part historians tended to dismiss the rumors as scurrilous gossip spread by Jefferson's enemies. But in 1998, DNA testing on his descendants showed that Jefferson or one of his close male relatives was highly likely to be the father of Hemings's last son, Eston. A later study by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation also concluded that Jefferson was likely the father of at least one of Hemings's six children.
GROVER CLEVELAND: Ten years before Cleveland's presidency, store clerk Maria Halpin named him as the father of her illegitimate son. Cleveland didn't dispute the charge, and the child was quietly adopted out. During the 1884 campaign a Buffalo newspaper dug up the story, which Cleveland then -- remarkably -- admitted. His opponents attacked with chants of, "Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!" But the big man survived and was elected with a slim 62,000 vote margin.
WOODROW WILSON: Wilson caused a public scandal simply by getting engaged. His first wife having died in August of 1914, Wilson met widow Edith Bolling Galt the following March and proposed in May. Much nasty gossip followed about Wilson's 'disrespect' for his first wife. Crazy rumors even surfaced that Wilson had murdered his wife, or had been having an affair. No matter: Wilson and Galt were married that December.
WARREN HARDING: Harding got around. One mistress, Carrie Phillips, took $20,000 in hush money from the GOP while Harding ran for president. Another, Nan Britton, bore Harding's child in 1919 while he was a senator. After Harding became president he continued to 'entertain' Britton, sometimes in a small anteroom just off the Oval Office. After Harding's death she wrote a bestseller, The President's Daughter, telling all.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer was discovered by his wife Eleanor in 1918. Roosevelt agreed to end the affair, but the romance began anew sometime later and continued while he was president. Mercer was with Roosevelt when he died in Warm Springs, Georgia in 1945, but this (like the affair itself) was kept hidden until much later.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER: While fighting World War II in Europe, Eisenhower allegedly began an affair with his driver, Kay Summersby. The story goes that Ike planned to divorce his wife Mamie and marry Summersby; his superior, General George Marshall, quashed the plan by threatening to bust him out of the army. The rumor stayed mostly under wraps until 1975, when Summersby wrote a controversial book titled Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Who hasn't heard the tabloid rumors about JFK? Always a ladies' man, Kennedy had a boatload of girlfriends before marrying Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. After their marriage he reportedly continued to see other women, supposedly even sneaking them into the White House. (Mafia moll Judith Exner and actress Marilyn Monroe are two of the wilder alleged partners.) At first a great secret, such rumors have since gotten wide public airing, and even Kennedy's closest aides seem to have stopped denying many of the tales.
BILL CLINTON certainly had the best-publicized affair of any sitting president. From November 1995 to March of 1997, Clinton had a series of brief sexual encounters with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the assignations taking place in or near the Oval Office. The affair became public in 1998 thanks to the unrelated case of Paula Jones, who was suing Clinton for sexual harrassment. During a deposition in that case Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky; his denial, among other things, led to Clinton's impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice. (It also led to the 453-page Kenneth Starr report explicitly detailing Clinton's affair with Lewinsky -- a landmark document in the history of presidential peccadilloes.) Clinton was acquitted, but not before the scandal had dominated public discussion for more than a year. For a full history of the case, see the Washington Post's extensive report titled Clinton Accused.
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