“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” so said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Perhaps that explains the bizarre behavior of some political notables such as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, married 20 years and father of four sons, who shook his bodyguards and disappeared for a few days for a hike on the Appalachian Trail, which mysteriously turned south to Patagonia and a soirée to see his Argentinean mistress. The period during which he was AWOL included Father’s Day, 2009. He escaped impeachment but not divorce.
Shortly after his election as California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, father of four, was accused of hitting on several women, one of whom produced a child who is close to the age of one of the Governator’s natural children. For those who live and vote in Palm Beach County, Florida, that means he was married at the time the out-of-wedlock son was conceived. Ah-nold’s wife of 25 years has separated and is filing for divorce after her detective finds out how many other little earthlings Mr. Universe produced during their marriage.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, formerly the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested in New York for sexually assaulting a maid – behavior the old lecher has been getting away with for years. He has four daughters and lives with a third wife, who dutifully sent him a million dollars for bail and an ankle bracelet. If convicted, Strauss-Kahn will find American prisons have gone Dante one better and added a tenth circle to the Inferno – wall to wall males.
Today’s news comes to us courtesy of Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY), whose name and misdeeds have provided a field day for double entendres. The eponymously-named lawmaker’s body part is now more familiar than a “See Rock City” sign, and his tweets in various stages of, as the French say, déshabillé' make us wonder if the guy’s wardrobe consists only of towels and jockey shorts.
Weiner becomes the latest casualty in a line of men who forget that when they step on to the public stage, their lives will be under constant scrutiny even after those lives end.
To wit:
Young George Washington seems to have fallen in love with Sally Fairfax, the wife of George William Fairfax, a member of a prominent Virginia family. George William’s sister, Anne, was the wife of George’s half brother Lawrence Washington. The Fairfax’s social status and education was well above that of the Washington family; they were landed gentry in late colonial Virginia and therefore quite influential. Nevertheless, the Fairfax family had befriended George since he was 15, and when Sally married into the family, she taught George to dance. Their relationship blossomed but no evident indiscretions occurred.
Martha Custis was 27 years old when she and George, not yet 27, were married. She was sophisticated and quite wealthy, and despite George’s love for Sally Fairfax, they made a good marriage. George William and Sally Fairfax were frequent visitors to Mount Vernon, so when they decided to return to England in 1773, her leaving upset George Washington. How long he carried romantic feelings is not known – the war came, the Fairfax fortune in America was lost, George William died in 1787, and Sally remained a widow until her death 24 years later. She seems to speak with some regret in a letter to her sister-in-law the year after George William died and about the time that Washington became president when she wrote, “I know now that the worthy man is to be preferred to the high-born who has not merit to recommend him…when we enquire into the family of these mighty men we find them the very lowest of people.”
The year before he died, George Washington wrote his last letter to Sally:
During this period, so many important events have occurred, and such changes in men and things have taken place, as the compass of a letter would give you but an inadequate idea of. None of which events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind, the recollection of those happy moments, the happiest in my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.
Sounds like love lingered long.
Alexander Hamilton was Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury when he became entangled in a sex con involving Maria Reynolds. She was 23 and he was 34, married, and father of two children at the time. Maria also was married and her husband was part of the scheme. Maria claimed that she and her daughter had been abandoned by her husband, James, and she needed money to return to New York City and her family. Hamilton accommodated, and when Maria said she had more than money on her mind, it began a three year affair that would cost Hamilton his career and reputation.
James Reynolds began defrauding Revolutionary War veterans in a scam that cheated the ex-soldiers out of unpaid back wages. At the same time, Reynolds blackmailed Hamilton, allowing him to continue his sexual romps with Maria. Essentially Maria had become Hamilton’s prostitute, pimped by her husband. When Reynolds veterans’ scam was uncovered, he implicated Hamilton’s involvement. A Congressional investigatory committee consisting of James Monroe and Frederick Muhlenberg was established to determine Hamilton’s culpability.
Hamilton claimed his innocence in the wages scam but revealed his affair with Maria Reynolds and the fact that James Reynolds had blackmailed him in the amount of $1,000. He even turned over love letters he had written to Maria to prove his innocence. Monroe and Muhlenberg had been given Hamilton’s confession of the illicit affair in confidence, and since it was unrelated to Hamilton’s official duties, the affair was revealed to no one – except Monroe told his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was a political enemy of Hamilton.
Jefferson used his knowledge of the affair to start rumors about Hamilton's private life employing an ethically-challenged pamphleteer, James Callender, to hide Jefferson’s involvement. His motive clearly was to destroy a rival’s political career. Callender was a known muckraker and managed to get Hamilton’s letters, which he published. Hamilton had no choice but to come clean and openly confess the truth of the Reynolds affair in order to save his public reputation against the charge of misusing his office and its funds. He retired as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795.
The humiliation must have been unbearable for Hamilton’s wife, who was in the final stage of pregnancy with their third child. But the true humiliation of the scandal is that no one believed Hamilton’s innocence in the wage fraud scheme, though he was, and no one believed Jefferson was not the source of the love letters given to Callender, though he was not. Enraged, Hamilton threatened to make public an old chestnut about an early indiscretion in Jefferson’s life with Betsy Walker, the wife of a friend, but he never made good on the threat because he had no proof to substantiate the rumor.
The Betsy Walker story was finally made public in 1805 by Jefferson’s enemies when Jefferson was president. Whatever happened, it occurred when John Walker, a neighbor and Jefferson’s childhood friend, had left home for four months in 1768 to conclude an Indian treaty. He asked Jefferson – then a single, young plantation owner, and his friend – to look after his wife Betsy and their infant daughter. Twenty years passed before Betsy Walker mentioned the incident to her husband, which she did at the time when Jefferson was in France as the American minister. Betsy claimed Jefferson made repeated sexual advances during her husband’s absence, which continued, she said, after Jefferson married the 23-year-old widow Martha Wayles Skelton.
Jefferson said nothing publicly to refute the rumored Walker scandal. The closest thing we have to an admission survives in a letter to Jefferson’s Secretary of the Navy to whom he wrote, “You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness. It is the only one founded in truth among all of their allegations against me.”
One of the several “allegations against me” to which Jefferson refers was made by James Callender, who by then had turned against the President, revealing in an 1802 newspaper article the existence of “Dusky Sally” – a slave and alleged concubine of Jefferson named Sally Heming by whom Jefferson, then a widower, was accused of having sired several children. The news eclipsed the public’s interest in the Betsy Walker affair and haunted Jefferson all of his days.
Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died in 1782 shortly after delivering the sixth child in their 10-year marriage. Some have said that having so many children so closely spaced led to her death, although the absence of birth control and perinatal healthcare contributed to the high rate of maternal mortality in colonial times. Jefferson promised his wife on her death bed that he would not remarry – an odd commitment for a 40-year old with an apparently overactive libido to make.
Jefferson was sent to Paris as the US Minister to France by friends who feared that the death of Martha would destroy his health and career. His daughter Patsy accompanied him and soon after arriving, Jefferson called for 9-year old Polly, his other daughter, and the 14-year old slave girl, Sally Heming, to join him in Paris. Sally was 19 when the Jeffersons returned to America in late 1789. After being George Washington’s Secretary of State between 1790 and 1793, Jefferson resigned over his feuds with Hamilton and returned to his Virginia estate, Monticello. He would remain there until 1797 when he was elected Vice President in the election that made John Adams the Republic’s second president. It’s likely that during the four-year interregnum at Monticello, Jefferson’s affair with Sally Heming began. There was a 30 year difference in their ages.
Although Dumas Malone, the leading biographer of Jefferson, discounted the rumor of a Jefferson liaison with Sally Heming, a slave woman – which was not rare among slaveholders at the time – Malone’s biography was completed before the modern era of DNA testing. In 1998 DNA established evidence that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally’s six children although she was never married. Several bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson.
A dalliance not as well known as the Heming affair is one Jefferson had with Maria Cosway in Paris. She and her husband were introduced to Jefferson in 1786 when he was 43 and she was 27. Allegedly, Jefferson was immediately smitten with her, if not in love, and over the next six weeks they spent every day together, her husband having conveniently returned to their home in London. Cosway’s world-wise sophistication would certainly have attracted Jefferson into an intimate relationship, and Paris, after all, was the place in the late 18th century where morality among the aristocracy was lax and infidelity was a social sport.
When Cosway’s husband insisted later that year that she return to London, Jefferson penned his famous 4,000 word letter to her that has been called “The Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart” which is classic Jeffersonian logic – the struggle of the romantic and the practical – concluding that a lasting relationship between the two of them was impossible. Yet when he departed Paris to return home even as she was preparing to live in Italy with her brother – apparently having separated from her husband – Jefferson wrote to her: "I am going to America and you are going to Italy. One of us is going the wrong way, for the way will ever be wrong that leads us further apart."
Their letters would continue for the rest of his life.
It’s generally known that President Grover Cleveland, a bachelor early in his term, fathered a child by Maria Halpin a decade before his election in the 1884 campaign. However details vary widely, ranging from his manly advice to his campaign staff to “Tell the truth” and his acceptance of paternity – the story in general circulation – to the sordid details in a yet-to-be-released book, A Secret Life, which reveal an uglier Grover Cleveland than the one constructed by history.
Author Charles Lachman tells a tale of date rape which resulted in Halpin’s pregnancy. After the birth of the child, a boy, in 1874 Cleveland acted with Dickensian cruelty to forcibly remove the child from his mother and have him placed in the Buffalo Orphan Asylum. Maria Halpin was incarcerated in the Providence Lunatic Asylum but was soon released when it became evident that she was the victim of high-placed political abuse.
When the media uncovered the illegitimate son during the 1884 presidential campaign, the Cleveland smear machine went to work, according to Lachman, and spun a tale of Halpin’s promiscuity and excessive drinking. She was allegedly intimate with three or four married men – all Cleveland cronies – and since Cleveland was the only bachelor, he took the fall as the father of Oscar Folsom Cleveland, the name Maria Halpin gave him.
And the beat goes on.
Warren Harding did not live long enough to complete the four years of his presidency. Perhaps it’s a good thing. He had already had extramarital affairs with four women, two of them personal friends of his wife when he died at age 57. One of those women, Carrie Phillips, was involved with Harding for 15 years beginning in 1905 – encompassing all but three of his remaining years.
Fearing revelations about his illicit affair with a young campaign volunteer – which included sex in an Oval Office hideaway while being guarded by Secret Service agents – Harding realized that lying was pointless. So in a Carteresque confession about his carnal desires, he stunned a group of reporters at the National Press Club, saying, "It's a good thing I am not a woman, I would always be pregnant. I can't say no."
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s philandering is well-known. His longstanding affair with Lucy Mercer began in 1918 and she, not Mrs. Roosevelt, was with him when he died of a stroke at Warm Springs, Georgia in 1945. The affair was an open secret that everyone, including the First Lady and the Secret Service, kept hushed up until long after Roosevelt’s death.
Then there’s the hero of D-Day and the invasion of Europe, General and later President, Dwight Eisenhower. While he was busily managing WW II as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces he apparently made time to carry on an affair with Kay Summersby, his Irish driver. In a post-war book, Harry Truman revealed that Ike had planned to divorce his wife Mamie and marry Summersby but his superior officer, General George Marshall, threatened to bust him out of the army if Ike persisted. Still, Mamie heard the rumors, and Ike knew she knew. The rumored affair stayed as quiet as it could among the bunch of lonely soldiers surrounding Ike until Summersby, dying of cancer in 1975, wrote a tell-all book entitled Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which she says they twice tried to consummate their relationship but Ike couldn’t do his part. War has that effect, I suppose.
John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Need I say more?
Yet when I think of the utter idiocy of Anthony Weiner’s inability to keep his pants on, Gary Hart comes to mind. Hart was the frontrunner for the Democrat nomination in the 1988 presidential campaign and very likely would have won the presidency. After he announced his candidacy, however, rumors began to fly that he was having an extramarital affair. Power and testosterone turn some male brains into oatmeal. Hart dared the press corps: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored." They did. And they weren’t bored.
Reporters staked out Hart’s Washington townhouse and observed Donna Rice, a very beautiful 29 year-old model, leaving in the evening. Later, a photograph of Hart with Rice on his lap was published by the Miami Herald. They had spent the night together in Bimini on a yacht appropriately called Monkey Business. The allure of Miss Rice was a Hart-stopper. Within a week his political career was toast.
So is Anthony Weiner’s. Since all of his income-earning years have been spent as a government parasite – he doesn’t even have a law degree – how is he going to earn a living? Maybe he could follow Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York whose sexcapades with a prostitute ended his career. He is making a non-political comeback as a CNN talk show host. The two defrocked politicos could join forces on CNN and call their program WeinerSpitzer.
I know. It’s bad.
Perhaps that explains the bizarre behavior of some political notables such as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, married 20 years and father of four sons, who shook his bodyguards and disappeared for a few days for a hike on the Appalachian Trail, which mysteriously turned south to Patagonia and a soirée to see his Argentinean mistress. The period during which he was AWOL included Father’s Day, 2009. He escaped impeachment but not divorce.
Shortly after his election as California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, father of four, was accused of hitting on several women, one of whom produced a child who is close to the age of one of the Governator’s natural children. For those who live and vote in Palm Beach County, Florida, that means he was married at the time the out-of-wedlock son was conceived. Ah-nold’s wife of 25 years has separated and is filing for divorce after her detective finds out how many other little earthlings Mr. Universe produced during their marriage.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, formerly the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested in New York for sexually assaulting a maid – behavior the old lecher has been getting away with for years. He has four daughters and lives with a third wife, who dutifully sent him a million dollars for bail and an ankle bracelet. If convicted, Strauss-Kahn will find American prisons have gone Dante one better and added a tenth circle to the Inferno – wall to wall males.
Today’s news comes to us courtesy of Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY), whose name and misdeeds have provided a field day for double entendres. The eponymously-named lawmaker’s body part is now more familiar than a “See Rock City” sign, and his tweets in various stages of, as the French say, déshabillé' make us wonder if the guy’s wardrobe consists only of towels and jockey shorts.
Weiner becomes the latest casualty in a line of men who forget that when they step on to the public stage, their lives will be under constant scrutiny even after those lives end.
To wit:
Young George Washington seems to have fallen in love with Sally Fairfax, the wife of George William Fairfax, a member of a prominent Virginia family. George William’s sister, Anne, was the wife of George’s half brother Lawrence Washington. The Fairfax’s social status and education was well above that of the Washington family; they were landed gentry in late colonial Virginia and therefore quite influential. Nevertheless, the Fairfax family had befriended George since he was 15, and when Sally married into the family, she taught George to dance. Their relationship blossomed but no evident indiscretions occurred.
Martha Custis was 27 years old when she and George, not yet 27, were married. She was sophisticated and quite wealthy, and despite George’s love for Sally Fairfax, they made a good marriage. George William and Sally Fairfax were frequent visitors to Mount Vernon, so when they decided to return to England in 1773, her leaving upset George Washington. How long he carried romantic feelings is not known – the war came, the Fairfax fortune in America was lost, George William died in 1787, and Sally remained a widow until her death 24 years later. She seems to speak with some regret in a letter to her sister-in-law the year after George William died and about the time that Washington became president when she wrote, “I know now that the worthy man is to be preferred to the high-born who has not merit to recommend him…when we enquire into the family of these mighty men we find them the very lowest of people.”
The year before he died, George Washington wrote his last letter to Sally:
During this period, so many important events have occurred, and such changes in men and things have taken place, as the compass of a letter would give you but an inadequate idea of. None of which events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind, the recollection of those happy moments, the happiest in my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.
Sounds like love lingered long.
Alexander Hamilton was Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury when he became entangled in a sex con involving Maria Reynolds. She was 23 and he was 34, married, and father of two children at the time. Maria also was married and her husband was part of the scheme. Maria claimed that she and her daughter had been abandoned by her husband, James, and she needed money to return to New York City and her family. Hamilton accommodated, and when Maria said she had more than money on her mind, it began a three year affair that would cost Hamilton his career and reputation.
James Reynolds began defrauding Revolutionary War veterans in a scam that cheated the ex-soldiers out of unpaid back wages. At the same time, Reynolds blackmailed Hamilton, allowing him to continue his sexual romps with Maria. Essentially Maria had become Hamilton’s prostitute, pimped by her husband. When Reynolds veterans’ scam was uncovered, he implicated Hamilton’s involvement. A Congressional investigatory committee consisting of James Monroe and Frederick Muhlenberg was established to determine Hamilton’s culpability.
Hamilton claimed his innocence in the wages scam but revealed his affair with Maria Reynolds and the fact that James Reynolds had blackmailed him in the amount of $1,000. He even turned over love letters he had written to Maria to prove his innocence. Monroe and Muhlenberg had been given Hamilton’s confession of the illicit affair in confidence, and since it was unrelated to Hamilton’s official duties, the affair was revealed to no one – except Monroe told his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was a political enemy of Hamilton.
Jefferson used his knowledge of the affair to start rumors about Hamilton's private life employing an ethically-challenged pamphleteer, James Callender, to hide Jefferson’s involvement. His motive clearly was to destroy a rival’s political career. Callender was a known muckraker and managed to get Hamilton’s letters, which he published. Hamilton had no choice but to come clean and openly confess the truth of the Reynolds affair in order to save his public reputation against the charge of misusing his office and its funds. He retired as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795.
The humiliation must have been unbearable for Hamilton’s wife, who was in the final stage of pregnancy with their third child. But the true humiliation of the scandal is that no one believed Hamilton’s innocence in the wage fraud scheme, though he was, and no one believed Jefferson was not the source of the love letters given to Callender, though he was not. Enraged, Hamilton threatened to make public an old chestnut about an early indiscretion in Jefferson’s life with Betsy Walker, the wife of a friend, but he never made good on the threat because he had no proof to substantiate the rumor.
The Betsy Walker story was finally made public in 1805 by Jefferson’s enemies when Jefferson was president. Whatever happened, it occurred when John Walker, a neighbor and Jefferson’s childhood friend, had left home for four months in 1768 to conclude an Indian treaty. He asked Jefferson – then a single, young plantation owner, and his friend – to look after his wife Betsy and their infant daughter. Twenty years passed before Betsy Walker mentioned the incident to her husband, which she did at the time when Jefferson was in France as the American minister. Betsy claimed Jefferson made repeated sexual advances during her husband’s absence, which continued, she said, after Jefferson married the 23-year-old widow Martha Wayles Skelton.
Jefferson said nothing publicly to refute the rumored Walker scandal. The closest thing we have to an admission survives in a letter to Jefferson’s Secretary of the Navy to whom he wrote, “You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness. It is the only one founded in truth among all of their allegations against me.”
One of the several “allegations against me” to which Jefferson refers was made by James Callender, who by then had turned against the President, revealing in an 1802 newspaper article the existence of “Dusky Sally” – a slave and alleged concubine of Jefferson named Sally Heming by whom Jefferson, then a widower, was accused of having sired several children. The news eclipsed the public’s interest in the Betsy Walker affair and haunted Jefferson all of his days.
Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died in 1782 shortly after delivering the sixth child in their 10-year marriage. Some have said that having so many children so closely spaced led to her death, although the absence of birth control and perinatal healthcare contributed to the high rate of maternal mortality in colonial times. Jefferson promised his wife on her death bed that he would not remarry – an odd commitment for a 40-year old with an apparently overactive libido to make.
Jefferson was sent to Paris as the US Minister to France by friends who feared that the death of Martha would destroy his health and career. His daughter Patsy accompanied him and soon after arriving, Jefferson called for 9-year old Polly, his other daughter, and the 14-year old slave girl, Sally Heming, to join him in Paris. Sally was 19 when the Jeffersons returned to America in late 1789. After being George Washington’s Secretary of State between 1790 and 1793, Jefferson resigned over his feuds with Hamilton and returned to his Virginia estate, Monticello. He would remain there until 1797 when he was elected Vice President in the election that made John Adams the Republic’s second president. It’s likely that during the four-year interregnum at Monticello, Jefferson’s affair with Sally Heming began. There was a 30 year difference in their ages.
Although Dumas Malone, the leading biographer of Jefferson, discounted the rumor of a Jefferson liaison with Sally Heming, a slave woman – which was not rare among slaveholders at the time – Malone’s biography was completed before the modern era of DNA testing. In 1998 DNA established evidence that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally’s six children although she was never married. Several bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson.
A dalliance not as well known as the Heming affair is one Jefferson had with Maria Cosway in Paris. She and her husband were introduced to Jefferson in 1786 when he was 43 and she was 27. Allegedly, Jefferson was immediately smitten with her, if not in love, and over the next six weeks they spent every day together, her husband having conveniently returned to their home in London. Cosway’s world-wise sophistication would certainly have attracted Jefferson into an intimate relationship, and Paris, after all, was the place in the late 18th century where morality among the aristocracy was lax and infidelity was a social sport.
When Cosway’s husband insisted later that year that she return to London, Jefferson penned his famous 4,000 word letter to her that has been called “The Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart” which is classic Jeffersonian logic – the struggle of the romantic and the practical – concluding that a lasting relationship between the two of them was impossible. Yet when he departed Paris to return home even as she was preparing to live in Italy with her brother – apparently having separated from her husband – Jefferson wrote to her: "I am going to America and you are going to Italy. One of us is going the wrong way, for the way will ever be wrong that leads us further apart."
Their letters would continue for the rest of his life.
It’s generally known that President Grover Cleveland, a bachelor early in his term, fathered a child by Maria Halpin a decade before his election in the 1884 campaign. However details vary widely, ranging from his manly advice to his campaign staff to “Tell the truth” and his acceptance of paternity – the story in general circulation – to the sordid details in a yet-to-be-released book, A Secret Life, which reveal an uglier Grover Cleveland than the one constructed by history.
Author Charles Lachman tells a tale of date rape which resulted in Halpin’s pregnancy. After the birth of the child, a boy, in 1874 Cleveland acted with Dickensian cruelty to forcibly remove the child from his mother and have him placed in the Buffalo Orphan Asylum. Maria Halpin was incarcerated in the Providence Lunatic Asylum but was soon released when it became evident that she was the victim of high-placed political abuse.
When the media uncovered the illegitimate son during the 1884 presidential campaign, the Cleveland smear machine went to work, according to Lachman, and spun a tale of Halpin’s promiscuity and excessive drinking. She was allegedly intimate with three or four married men – all Cleveland cronies – and since Cleveland was the only bachelor, he took the fall as the father of Oscar Folsom Cleveland, the name Maria Halpin gave him.
And the beat goes on.
Warren Harding did not live long enough to complete the four years of his presidency. Perhaps it’s a good thing. He had already had extramarital affairs with four women, two of them personal friends of his wife when he died at age 57. One of those women, Carrie Phillips, was involved with Harding for 15 years beginning in 1905 – encompassing all but three of his remaining years.
Fearing revelations about his illicit affair with a young campaign volunteer – which included sex in an Oval Office hideaway while being guarded by Secret Service agents – Harding realized that lying was pointless. So in a Carteresque confession about his carnal desires, he stunned a group of reporters at the National Press Club, saying, "It's a good thing I am not a woman, I would always be pregnant. I can't say no."
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s philandering is well-known. His longstanding affair with Lucy Mercer began in 1918 and she, not Mrs. Roosevelt, was with him when he died of a stroke at Warm Springs, Georgia in 1945. The affair was an open secret that everyone, including the First Lady and the Secret Service, kept hushed up until long after Roosevelt’s death.
Then there’s the hero of D-Day and the invasion of Europe, General and later President, Dwight Eisenhower. While he was busily managing WW II as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces he apparently made time to carry on an affair with Kay Summersby, his Irish driver. In a post-war book, Harry Truman revealed that Ike had planned to divorce his wife Mamie and marry Summersby but his superior officer, General George Marshall, threatened to bust him out of the army if Ike persisted. Still, Mamie heard the rumors, and Ike knew she knew. The rumored affair stayed as quiet as it could among the bunch of lonely soldiers surrounding Ike until Summersby, dying of cancer in 1975, wrote a tell-all book entitled Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which she says they twice tried to consummate their relationship but Ike couldn’t do his part. War has that effect, I suppose.
John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Need I say more?
Yet when I think of the utter idiocy of Anthony Weiner’s inability to keep his pants on, Gary Hart comes to mind. Hart was the frontrunner for the Democrat nomination in the 1988 presidential campaign and very likely would have won the presidency. After he announced his candidacy, however, rumors began to fly that he was having an extramarital affair. Power and testosterone turn some male brains into oatmeal. Hart dared the press corps: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored." They did. And they weren’t bored.
Reporters staked out Hart’s Washington townhouse and observed Donna Rice, a very beautiful 29 year-old model, leaving in the evening. Later, a photograph of Hart with Rice on his lap was published by the Miami Herald. They had spent the night together in Bimini on a yacht appropriately called Monkey Business. The allure of Miss Rice was a Hart-stopper. Within a week his political career was toast.
So is Anthony Weiner’s. Since all of his income-earning years have been spent as a government parasite – he doesn’t even have a law degree – how is he going to earn a living? Maybe he could follow Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York whose sexcapades with a prostitute ended his career. He is making a non-political comeback as a CNN talk show host. The two defrocked politicos could join forces on CNN and call their program WeinerSpitzer.
I know. It’s bad.
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