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SEX!

When it comes to presidential sex, we don’t know what’s more shocking:

A. An utter lack of sex scandals in the White House for 16 years after the Bill Clinton presidency and impeachment.

B. That as we write this, both the Republican and Democratic parties are caucusing and voting to choose their next presidential candidates. Yet none of the major candidates in either party has been publically accused of having an affair.*

C. Or that at the time of this writing, the front-runner for the usually more traditional Republican party, Donald Trump, has publically bragged about having affairs.

D. According to our “Presidential ‘Score’ Card” which follows, unless Donald Trump is elected AND has at least one affair while president, it will be the longest period in 100 years that there has been no White House sex scandal.

Ironically, not all White House sex scandals have taken place in the White House.

That’s because sometimes these little indiscretions occur before a president becomes president—but we don’t care. We want to hear all of the details, no matter when in a president’s life the affairs occurred.

Presidential affairs come in a variety of sizes. Some presidents have wee little affairs, so small and insignificant they’re barely worth noticing and hardly worth caring about (unless you’re the First Lady, of course). Others have bold, brash, obnoxious affairs that involve a troika of ultimate sins—which is to say they have sex with women other than their wives, they do it in such a way so as to ensure that everyone will know about it, and they act as if they don’t care who (that’s you and us and the First Lady and the media) finds out.

Dems vs. Repubs: Which are sexier?

* * *

Forget Barack Obama in his “mom jeans” and Bill Clinton jogging from fast-food outlet to fast-food outlet. We’re talking:

• Gerald Ford, who appeared on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Look magazines as a model in the 1930s.

• Ronald Reagan won the Most Nearly Perfect Male Figure award from the University of California in 1940.

• And let’s not forget Republican Scott Brown. Although never president, this senator from Massachusetts did pose nude in Cosmo in June 1982 while Ronald Reagan was president.

PRESIDENTIAL “SCORE” CARD

What if presidents were ballplayers and it was Wolf Blitzer’s job to fill time ever night with a lot of meaningless statistics? Suddenly the evening news makes a lot of sense:

PRESIDENTIAL ADULTERY CHART

PRESIDENT:	George Washington
CHEATED ON:	Martha Custis, his fiancée
CHEATED WITH:	Sally Fairfax
THE SCOOP:

Did George Washington cheat on Martha?

He was tall and broad and handsome. He had a successful career and had inherited a small farm. He was polite and soft-spoken. Yet he courted and wooed a number of women, and none wanted anything to do with him. At one point things got so bad for George Washington in the romance department that after moping around for a while like a lovesick pup, he finally accepted that he would never find a woman to love.

A large part of the problem was that he was already in love. Her name was Sally Fairfax—and she toyed with him and flirted with him and made him feel all light and giddy and gay.

Finally! A woman who would fawn over him and treat him like he was special. Finally! A woman who would respond to his notes of love. Finally! A woman to visit and make love with whenever he could get away from his duties on the front lines of the French and Indian War, where he was commander in chief of the Virginia militia.

Oh, but there were a few minor problems with the relationship: For one thing, Sally was married—to one of George’s closest friends, George William Fairfax. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the two Georges were practically family because George Washington’s half-brother Lawrence was married to George William’s sister Anne.

In spite of all this, George and Sally carried on for as long as seven years—even after George decided that if he couldn’t marry for love, he would at least marry for money and then got engaged to the richest widow in Virginia, Martha Custis.

Some historians say the relationship between George and Sally never amounted to anything more than a long-term flirtation. Others paint a picture of George riding from battle directly to the home of his love—Sally, not Martha—on those nights while her husband was away. Most historians agree, however, that once married, George took his duties as a husband very seriously and what physical relationship he had with Sally ended.

Did George Washington cheat on Martha? Obviously that would depend on which version of history you believe and on how you define adultery.

PRESIDENT:	John Adams
THE SCOOP:

In case you thought sexual liberation and freedom were invented in the 1960s, consider this quote from John Adams:

“No father, brother, son, or friend ever had cause of grief or resentment for any intercourse between me and any daughter, sister, mother, or any other relation with the female sex. My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother exists or ever existed.”

Implied in this statement, of course, is that while Adams stood by watching, everyone else was doing the wild thing with everyone else—and, given what you are about to read, he was quite right to speak out about his chasteness.

“My children may be assured that no illegitimate brother or sister exists or ever existed.”

—JOHN ADAMS

For all his prudishness, Adams was not without a sense of humor. In fact, when Adams heard of a rumor that accused him of dispatching General Charles Cotesworth Pickney to England with a US battleship to pick up four pretty girls so he and the general could each keep two as mistresses, Adams replied to a friend: “If this be true, General Pickney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two!”

PRESIDENT:	Thomas Jefferson
THE SCOOP:

In spite of all you read about him in Chapter One, he never committed adultery.

PRESIDENTS:	James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams
THE SCOOP:

None for them …

… but there sure were some good rumors going around at the time about Madison’s wife, Dolley, and Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr. Of course, by most accounts, these rumors were started by Burr himself.

PRESIDENT:	Andrew Jackson
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Rachel
CHEATED WITH:	His wife, Rachel
THE SCOOP:

Every time this president had sex with his wife, he helped her commit adultery again.

Confused? You should be.

Here’s what happened: In 1791 Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donelson Robards—or at least he thought he did.

He first met Rachel when he moved into her family’s boarding house as a young attorney, and he was taken with her at first sight. Unfortunately for Jackson, Rachel was married. In fact, she was not only married but was married to a man who was given to insane fits of jealous rage.

This was unfortunate for Jackson—who was an honorable guy—because he really liked Rachel and wanted to be her friend.

Unfortunately, Rachel’s husband, Captain Lewis Robards, perceived Jackson’s overtures of friendship as a threat and flew into such a fit that Rachel had to send word home to her family for help. It was Andrew Jackson who went to her rescue and moved her to the safety of her sister’s house in Tennessee.

Through word of mouth Jackson heard that Captain Robards had sought and received a divorce from Rachel in his home state of Kentucky. Very much in love, Jackson quickly approached Rachel’s mother and asked for her hand in marriage.

Unfortunately, Jackson was so excited at the prospect of marrying the only woman he had ever loved that he neglected to check the veracity of the secondhand report; in reality Captain Robards’s divorce from Rachel was not complete. Therefore, for the first two years of their marriage—until Jackson and Rachel took another marriage vow—Rachel was guilty of adultery with her not-legal husband, Andrew Jackson!

The story gets even more tragic, however. When Jackson ran for president in 1828, incumbent John Quincy Adams and his supporters were relentless in using the story of his “adulterous” marriage to smear Jackson’s otherwise popular image. Jackson, who was strong and a fighter, was able to weather the attacks and persevere in his drive to win the presidency. Rachel, on the other hand, did not fare so well. The scandalous charges being made against her honor were more than she could handle—first she slipped into a deep depression. Then, following the election, she had a massive heart attack and died before she even had a chance to see her husband take office.

She was buried three days before Christmas in the gown she had planned to wear to the Inaugural Ball.

PRESIDENT:	Martin Van Buren
THE SCOOP:

None, although his VP, Richard Johnson, was publicly known to be the father of two illegitimate children.

Perhaps Johnson would’ve married Julia Chinn, his mistress and the mother of his children, if he could have—but the law forbade it as she was black and he was her master.

PRESIDENTS:	William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce
THE SCOOP:

Not a cheater in the bunch.

PRESIDENT:	James Buchanan
CHEATED ON:	???
CHEATED WITH:	???
THE SCOOP:

Why did James Buchanan’s fiancée commit suicide? (Hint: You can find the answer on page 64.)

a. Because she suspected Buchanan had a girlfriend.

b. Because she suspected Buchanan had a boyfriend.

c. None of the above.

PRESIDENT:	Abraham Lincoln
THE SCOOP:

He never cheated on his wife. He left her standing at the altar instead.

It’s true. It was New Year’s Day 1841. Mary Todd was at the appointed place at the appointed time, surrounded by friends, a preacher, and a lot of flowers … but Abe never showed. They finally did marry two years later—this time with two hours’ notice.

PRESIDENTS:	Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes
THE SCOOP:

Nothing here.

PRESIDENT:	James Garfield
CHEATED ON:	Lucretia Garfield
CHEATED WITH:	Lucia Calhoun
THE SCOOP:

The marriage of James and Lucretia Garfield was a rocky one.

Once, while a Civil War general all alone in a strange town, he met a woman. He liked her; she liked him. They had an affair.

Not much is known about Garfield and Mrs. Calhoun because once Mrs. Garfield found out about the affair, she sent her husband back for one last visit with his New York mistress. But he didn’t make the trip to make love. Instead, he went back to destroy all the love letters he had sent so they wouldn’t surface later and ruin his political career.

PRESIDENT:	Chester A. Arthur
THE SCOOP:

Sorry. Nothing.

PRESIDENT:	Grover Cleveland
THE SCOOP:

See Grover Cleveland’s Love-Child-of-the-Month Club on page 22.

PRESIDENTS:	Benjamin Harrison, Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, William H. Taft
THE SCOOP:

Nah.

“You can’t cast a man as a Romeo who looks and acts much like an apothecary’s clerk.”

—TEDDY ROOSEVELT, OF HIS OPPONENT WOODROW WILSON

PRESIDENT:	Woodrow Wilson
CHEATED ON:	His first wife, Ellen (Accused)
CHEATED WITH:	Mary Peck (Accused)
THE SCOOP:

The Many Loves of the Apothecary, Part One

Wilson and Mrs. Peck met in Bermuda. He needed a rest, his doctor said. But his salary as the president of Princeton University didn’t allow him the luxury of taking his wife along.

Mrs. Peck was separated from her wealthy husband and living the high life in Bermuda, hanging out with the governor and Mark Twain and all sorts of other fascinating people.

Wilson’s—and Mrs. Peck’s—first visit to Bermuda was in 1907. He returned in 1908 and 1910, all the while carrying on an active correspondence with Mrs. Peck in the time in between.

Wilson’s relationship with Mrs. Peck made for good newspaper copy when Wilson became a contender for the presidency and when he ran for reelection. When Mr. Peck filed for divorce, it was rumored that Wilson was to be named in the suit. It was also rumored that Wilson’s letters to Mrs. Peck would be used as evidence. But none of that came to pass.

In reality Wilson had nothing to hide. He had already told his wife about his platonic but treasured friendship with Mrs. Peck, and in an effort to put an end to the rumors once he won the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency, he took his entire family to Bermuda to meet her.

Later, Mrs. Peck visited the Wilsons at the White House and even spent a day on a shopping spree with Mrs. Wilson.

The Many Loves of the Apothecary, Part Two

While Wilson was president, his wife died of Bright’s disease—and it didn’t take long for rumors to surface romantically linking Wilson and Mrs. Peck again.

In reality, however, those rumors couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was true that Wilson began seeing another woman a year after his wife died and that he did propose to her just two months after they met—but that woman was a widow named Edith Galt, not Mrs. Peck.

Call it a Freudian slip

* * *

After Wilson and Mrs. Galt announced their engagement, the Washington Post ran an exclusive front-page story about the couple’s first day in public. While the writer of the story reported that the president spent the day “entertaining” his new fiancée, no one at the paper caught the typo that announced in large type:

“… the President spent the afternoon entering his new fiancée.”

PRESIDENT:	Warren G. Harding
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Florence
CHEATED WITH:	Nan Britton and Carrie Phillips
THE SCOOP:

See Mistresses: The Warren G. Harding Way on page 70.

PRESIDENT:	Calvin Coolidge
THE SCOOP:

Old Silent Cal? Nothing to tell.

PRESIDENT:	Herbert Hoover
THE SCOOP:

Are you kidding? Hoover was an engineer.

PRESIDENT:	Franklin Delano Roosevelt
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Eleanor
CHEATED WITH:	Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand
THE SCOOP:

Without presidents like FDR, there wouldn’t be books like this one.

Or have you already forgotten the stories about FDR and Eleanor that begin on page 1?

PRESIDENT:	Harry S Truman
THE SCOOP:	Nope.

PRESIDENT:	Dwight D. Eisenhower
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Mamie
CHEATED WITH:	Kay Summersby, sort of Jimmy Carter-style
THE SCOOP:

Ike almost had an affair.

While a general during World War Two, Ike had a driver in London who was a very attractive model and actress named Kay Summersby. Later, when he took full command of the European Theatre of Operation, he requested that she be assigned to him as his full-time driver.

According to one account, after the war Eisenhower had written to his superior requesting reassignment in the United States so he could divorce his wife and marry Kay. Kay later wrote a tell-all about her affair with Ike called Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower. The irony is, there wasn’t much to tell, for according to Summersby, Ike was impotent.

“This administration’s going to do for sex what the last one did for golf.”

—JFK SPEECHWRITER THEODORE SORENSEN

PRESIDENT:	John F. Kennedy
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Jackie
CHEATED WITH:	Perhaps it would be easier to list the names of the few glamorous and beautiful women of the time he didn’t sleep with.
THE SCOOP:

On second thought, that wouldn’t be half as much fun as listing the names of some he allegedly did sleep with:

Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Audrey Hepburn, Angie Dickinson, stripper Blaze Starr, and gangster moll Judith Campbell Exner. And let’s not forget Marlene Dietrich, who claimed to have slept with JFK and JFK’s brother Joe Jr., and JFK’s father, Joe Sr. This short list does not include the names of hundreds (yes, hundreds) of other women JFK is said to have slept with. Of course, supplying names of more than a handful of his lovers would be impossible since it is doubtful even Kennedy knew them all by name.

Or, to quote the book Presidential Sex by Wesley O. Hagood:

“Jack had numerous sexual encounters with many women. Some were well-known movie stars and burlesque queens. Others were high-class call girls and common prostitutes. His sexual partners also included White House staffers, secretaries, stewardesses, socialites, campaign workers, and acquaintances of his trusted male friends. Hundreds of others will probably never come to light.”

For fun, let’s focus on two of his affairs:

Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe: Their regular meeting places included his sister Patricia’s home in Santa Monica (she was married to actor Peter Lawford) and the Beverly Hilton Hotel. And they even got together for dalliances at the White House when Jackie was away and when he was aboard Air Force One. In 1961 JFK attended a Christmas party at the Lawford home without Jackie and ended up spending several hours alone with Monroe. The entire intimate event, in which the two soaked together in a tub, showered each other with champagne, and more, was caught on tape by a private investigator hired by Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Teamsters’ Union.

The affair led Marilyn to believe the president was going to leave Jackie and marry her … which obviously spelled trouble for JFK. Younger brother Bobby was dispatched to delicately make it clear to Marilyn she would never be the First Lady. Once Bobby helped her see the light, he had a passionate affair with her himself. And when she began to have the same delusions about him, he dumped her just as JFK had done.

But Marilyn was stubborn, delusional, and in love. And she had the ear of anyone in the press she wanted—in other words, she represented real danger to the president and the whole of the Kennedy clan. On August 4, 1962, Bobby made a special trip to Los Angeles to convince her their relationship was over. Hours later, she killed herself.

JFK and Judith Campbell Exner: She was Sam Giancana’s mistress, and he was a huge mob boss. Of course, when the year is 1960 and you are running for president and you want your friends to introduce you to women who are accessible, willing, and stunningly beautiful, you either need friends in Hollywood (see Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe above) or friends who hang out with gangsters—since gangsters always have beautiful girlfriends hanging around.

Or you could make the process a whole lot easier by having friends who were comfortable in both the world of Hollywood and the world of underground crime.

Those who can read between the lines can see the name Frank Sinatra printed there, for he’s the one who introduced the president to Sam Giancana’s moll.

What did JFK see in Campbell? Well, she was a stunner, first of all. And second, she had once been Sinatra’s mistress, so that added to the appeal. Then, of course, there was the fact that brother Ted had made a pass at her earlier in the evening and had been rebuffed by her—and no Kennedy boy could pass up the chance to best one of his brothers.

The two lovers met all over the country: at the Kennedy home in Georgetown, at a friend’s home in Palm Beach, and at the Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles where the Democratic Convention was being held. Once Kennedy was president, the two even met at the White House, and the president once invited Campbell to join him on Air Force One.

“Yes! I remember her. She was great!”

—JFK, WHEN AIDES SHOWED HIM A SNAPSHOT OF HIM AND AN UNNAMED WOMAN SUNBATHING IN THE NUDE

“We Learned It All from Dad!”

In spite of the fact that JFK’s father had married into one of the most prominent families in Boston and then fathered nine children (Joe Jr., JFK, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, Jean, and Teddy), he made a career of womanizing. In the early days of his marriage, he had late-night affairs aplenty with hat-check girls and women of unsavory reputation. Later, as a Hollywood mogul, his tastes became more refined; he counted among his mistresses stars like Gloria Swanson and a host of others. But you didn’t have to be a Hollywood starlet to be one of Joe Sr.’s girls.

Nellie Bly, in her book The Kennedy Men, tells this story:

Jack [JFK] liked to tell friends about the time one of his sisters’ friends woke in the middle of the night at Hyannis and saw the Ambassador [JFK’s father] standing next to her bed, beginning to take his robe off as he whispered, “This is going to be something you’ll always remember.” Jack had watched the scene through a keyhole and took to warning female guests: “Be sure to lock the bedroom door. The Ambassador has a tendency to prowl late at night.”

PRESIDENT:	Lyndon Baines Johnson
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Lady Bird
CHEATED WITH:	Alice Glass, Madeline Brown, and many others if you believed LBJ
THE SCOOP:

LBJ was a known womanizer.

He earned that reputation because he loved bragging about his exploits. Perhaps the story that best illustrates his attitude toward extramarital affairs occurred while one of his female staffers was with him on a working trip to the Johnson ranch in Texas. In the middle of the night, the staffer reported, a figure in a white sleeping shirt appeared at the foot of her bed. “Move over!” the figure ordered. “This is your president.”

Madeline Brown, on the other hand, was more than a one-night stand. She claims she was LBJ’s mistress and sexual plaything for twenty-one years and the mother of his son. In return for satisfying Johnson sexually, LBJ gave Brown a two-bedroom house, a new car every few years, a maid, and the use of a host of credit cards.

But when it comes to longevity, Alice Glass had Madeline Brown beat. She met LBJ while he was a young congressman. He was no doubt impressed with Alice’s stunning good looks and her intellectual charms; she was impressed with LBJ’s commitment to the same causes she was—particularly the wars against poverty, racism, and discrimination. They had an affair that lasted almost thirty years—but after all that time she stopped sleeping with him because she strongly disagreed with his actions and policies in Vietnam.

“Move over. This is your president.”

—LBJ, TO A FEMALE STAFFER AFTER APPEARING AT THE FOOT OF HER BED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

“Of course, I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don’t want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.”

—LBJ, IN A STATEMENT TO THE PRESS

PRESIDENT:	Richard Nixon
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Pat
CHEATED WITH:	Marianna Liu
THE SCOOP:

Sex and Richard Nixon? Get real!

Or so we would have thought until we learned about Marianna Liu, a beautiful Chinese cocktail waitress he met in 1958 while on a trip to Hong Kong as Ike’s vice president. When Nixon’s term as VP ended, he returned again to Hong Kong in 1964, 1965, and 1966 to see Marianna. On one memorable night Nixon and his good friend Bebe Rebozo visited Marianna at The Den, the cocktail lounge where she was hostess. Later that night, Marianna and a friend visited Nixon and Rebozo in their hotel suite to share “drinks and fruit.”

Nixon’s relationship with Marianna was of special interest to investigators in Hong Kong because Marianna was suspected of being a communist spy. The relationship became of greater interest to them after Nixon declared his candidacy for the presidency. After all, if Nixon became president—and he and Marianna were having an affair and she was a communist spy—any tape recordings and photos or other materials she had could be used to blackmail him and the American government and the American people.

Marianna finally emigrated to the US in 1969, choosing the town of Whittier, California, to settle in. Whittier just happened to be Nixon’s hometown. After she became a permanent resident of the United States, she visited Nixon twice at the White House. Their relationship ended shortly afterward, however, because, as one source says, Pat Nixon was “on to it.”

PRESIDENT:	No, not Gerald Ford. This time, it was the vice president, Nelson Rockefeller
THE SCOOP:

Surrounded by good wine and good food and with a beautiful young aide, the vice president was found barefoot and dead …

Gerald Ford may have kept his nose clean, but his VP, Nelson Rockefeller, died of a heart attack one night at the age of seventy while “editing an art book” with an attractive twenty-five-year-old aide. When paramedics arrived, they found wine and food on the table but no art and no book. Meanwhile, Rockefeller was lying on the floor sans shoes or socks while the aide, Megan Marshak, was dressed in a long black evening gown.

PRESIDENT:	Jimmy Carter
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Rosalynn (sort of)
CHEATED WITH:	He didn’t really say.
THE SCOOP:

While running for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter ended an interview with Playboy magazine with a final thought intended to explain his relationship with God. Instead he put his foot in his mouth:

“I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, ‘I’ll tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.’

I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

PRESIDENT:	Ronald Reagan
THE SCOOP:

Nothing to tell. (But there are some really good rumors about Nancy and Frank Sinatra.)

PRESIDENT:	George H. W. Bush
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Barbara
CHEATED WITH:	Allegedly with an aide named Jennifer Fitzgerald and others
THE SCOOP:

When a CNN reporter asked George H. W. Bush in 1992 about an alleged affair with his longtime aide, Jennifer Fitzgerald, he responded:

“I’m not going to take any sleazy questions like that from CNN. I am very disappointed that you would ask such a question of me, and I will not respond to it. I haven’t responded in the past, and I think it’s an outrage.”

It was the first time a reporter had ever asked a sitting president if he had ever had an affair.

Granted, CNN reporter Mary Tillotson displayed bad timing with her question … for standing right next to the president at the time was Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. However, it is also important to note how Bush answered the question.

Read his response again. He didn’t answer.

If you think about it, catching a president at adultery is pretty tricky business. After all, it’s all idle speculation unless there’s a mistress (or mistresses) who spills her guts or eyewitnesses who spill the beans.

“I hope you made my grandfather happy.”

—ROCKEFELLER’S EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON, STEVEN, WHEN ASKED WHAT HE WOULD SAY TO MARSHAK IF HE HAD A CHANCE TO MEET HER

Such is the case of George H. W. Bush—there was a lot of innuendo from Democrats and various members of the press. But it was all circumstantial:

In the summer of 1992, the cover of Spy magazine was devoted to a story called “1,000 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush.” The first reason the article cited for not voting for Bush? Because he cheats on his wife.

The story, by reporter and author Joe Conason, covered the Jennifer Fitzgerald story in detail, and alluded to as many as five other mistresses as well. And even though it was still all circumstantial, Conason summed things up well when he said:

“If all the proof needed were what people who know him well say in private or off the record about George Bush, he would have been pilloried as a philanderer years ago.”

In 1986 a CNN reporter interviewed Louis Fields, a US ambassador to the Geneva nuclear disarmament talks. Louis confessed that he had once arranged for then Vice President Bush and his aide Jennifer Fitzgerald to “use” a guest house in 1984. “It became very clear to me that the vice president and Ms. Fitzgerald were romantically involved. It made me very uncomfortable.” Unfortunately, Fields died in 1988, so he’s not available for further comment.

Kitty Kelley, in her biography of Nancy Reagan, tells the story of a group of people having dinner in Washington, D.C.:

“Suddenly, there was a great commotion,” recalled one of the five dinner guests, “as the security men accompanying the secretary of state [Alexander Haig] and the attorney general [William French Smith] converged on our table.

They started jabbering into their walkie-talkies, and then whispered to Haig and Smith, who both jumped up and left the restaurant. The two men returned about forty-five minutes later, laughing their heads off. They said they had to bail out George Bush, who’d been in a traffic accident with his girlfriend. Bush had not wanted the incident to appear on the D.C. police blotter, so he had his security men contact Haig and Smith. They took care of things for him, and then came back to dinner.”

Even though Kelley got this story firsthand from people who were there at the dinner, it’s still all just circumstantial evidence.

PRESIDENT:	Bill Clinton
CHEATED ON:	His wife, Hillary Clinton
CHEATED WITH:	Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Dolly Kyle Browning, Kathleen Willey (although she claims she was unwilling), Monica Lewinsky, maybe others?
THE SCOOP:

No need to belabor the point here …

… we all know what happened next.

PRESIDENT:	George W. Bush
THE SCOOP:

He was once compelled to tell a reporter at Newsweek: “The answer to the Big A question (adultery) is N-O.”

Laura Bush, however, may have felt at one time that her marriage was at risk because her husband was spending more time with a bottle than with her. As the story goes, she once told him, “It’s Jim Beam … or me!”

PRESIDENT:	Barack Obama
THE SCOOP:

Do the 2014 rumors of an affair with Beyoncé count?

Now, that’s a mouthful!

* * *

Here’s how President Obama thanked Ellen DeGeneres, one of Hollywood’s most prominent lesbians, for introducing him at an LGBT fundraiser:

“I want to thank my wonderful friend, who accepts a little bit of teasing about Michelle beating her in pushups … but I think she claims Michelle didn’t go all the way down.”

PRESIDENTIAL MISTRESS/GIRLFRIEND NAMING CHART

Just a little advice for parents: If you want your daughter to grow up to be the mistress or girlfriend of the president, just give her a name that is some variation of Mary, Maria, or another name starting with “Mar”:

Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway

Grover Cleveland and Maria Halpin

FDR and Marguerite (Missy) LeHand

JFK and Marilyn Monroe

JFK and Marlene Dietrich

Richard Nixon and Marianne Liu

Second runner-up: Jennifer (if you want your daughter to grow to have an affair with a Republican) or Gennifer (if you want to see her playing around with a Democrat):

George H. W. Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald

Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers

Honorable mention: James Buchanan and Vice President William Rufus Devane King (See page 64 for more details)

*Donald Trump gets a pass here, since he has freely admitted to having affairs and that’s very different from being publically accused. For the record, here’s what he said in his book The Art of the Comeback: "If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller."