The 15 Most Sordid Presidential Sex Scandals In History

The office of the presidency is where men are supposed to make history, not illegitimate babies. It’s supposed to be where they sign famous legislation, not shtup unknown secretaries. Presidents are expected to grace the public with their wisdom, not smear prostitutes with their filthy ejaculate.

Still, being human and all, it is beyond doubt that most of our 44 presidents—all of whom, so far, have been males—have desperately sought places to shove their dicks.

Here are fifteen presidents who were at sometime or another accused of sexual impropriety. Since I was not an eyewitness to any of these alleged events, I cannot vouch for their veracity. For all I know, many of these cases may be nothing more than smear campaigns orchestrated by political opponents. In the end, the truth may not be so important as the idea that someone wanted it to be true.

1. Thomas Jefferson, His Slave Concubine, And Their Six Children

It is now generally accepted that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and a man who waxed eloquently on matters of personal freedom, lived with and conducted an ongoing sexual relationship with his half-black slave Sally Hemings that allegedly yielded a half-dozen mixed-race little Jeffersonians.

Jefferson freed four of these scandal-babies from slavery when they reached adulthood. Curiously, he never freed their mom.

Although master-slave sexual relations may have been rampant at the time, interracial sex was a matter of horror to the general public, which is why Jefferson’s Federalist enemies started dropping hints about Tommy and Sally as early as 1802. DNA tests conducted in the late 1990s revealed that Jefferson and Hemings’s descendants were genetically linked. The only mystery that remains is why this high-profile master-slave sex saga has yet to be made into a Quentin Tarantino movie.

2. America May Have Already Had Its First Gay Prez, And His Name Was James Buchanan

Known as the only president who was a bachelor, Buchanan lived for 15 years with pro-slavery Alabama Senator William Rufus King.

In Washington circles, Buchanan and King were commonly called “Siamese twins,” which allegedly was slang for gay and lesbian couples back then. Former President Andrew Jackson referred to King as “Miss Nancy.” In a letter to President James Polk’s wife, Democrat Aaron brown called King Buchanan’s “better half,” “his wife,” and “Aunt Fancy…rigged out in her best clothes.

When King was appointed envoy to France, in 1844, Buchanan expressed his heartbreak in a letter to a female friend:

I am now ‘solitary and alone,’ having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them.

“Wooing?” All signs point to gay!

3. Abe Lincoln Slept With Men For Years

According to Honest Abe’s stepmother, “He was not very fond of girls.” Sure, but that can be said of many guys. It still doesn’t mean they don’t want to have sex with girls.

Back in ye olden dayz of wayback, it was not uncommon for men to sleep together without, you know, “sleeping” together. Modern historians suggest Lincoln was gay because he lived with, and shared a bed with, a man named Joshua Fry Speed for four years. Although it’s possible, it seems unlikely that two grown men would share the same bed for four years without the occasional “swordfight.” Lincoln also shared his bed—while president—with his “bodyguard” Captain David Derickson as the Civil War raged far away from the downy-soft safety of their pillows.

4. Did Grover Cleveland Rape And Impregnate A Woman, Then Exile Her To An Insane Asylum?

As the official story goes, Ol’ Grover was a lawyer in the godforsaken town of Buffalo, NY, when he impregnated a young woman named Maria Crofts Halpin. Allegedly as a result of Cleveland’s political machinations, the son she bore wound up in a foster home and Halpin was banished to an insane asylum.

This story emerged during Cleveland’s 1884 presidential campaign, where opponents chanted “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” After Cleveland’s victory, his supporters came up with their own chant: “He’s gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

What Cleveland’s allies successfully respressed was the fact that Halpin at one point filed an affidavit accusing Cleveland of sexually assaulting her “[b]y use of force and violence.” According to Halpin, when she threatened to report Cleveland to the authorities,

[He] told me he was determined to ruin me if it cost him $10,000, if he was hanged by the neck for it. I then and there told him that I never wanted to see him again [and] commanded him to leave my room, which he did….

5. Warren G. Harding: He Called His Penis “Jerry”

Harding was such an incurably randy goat and serial cheater on his wife Florence, rumors persist that his unexpected 1923 death while in office happened because a murderously jealous Florence had poisoned him.

The “G.” stands for “Gamaliel,” which I only mention because it’s a really cool name and the only time I can ever recall someone with that name. It wouldn’t even be a bad nickname for one’s penis. But according to a recently released trove of love letters he exchanged between 1910-1920 with his mistress Carrie Fulton Phillips, he used a different coded name for his presidential schlong: “Jerry.”

The following letter from 1915 only seems filthy when you realize who “Jerry” is…

Jerry—you recall Jerry…—came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it…He told me to say that you are the best and darlingest in the world, and if he could have but one wish, it would be to be held in your darling embrace and be thrilled by your pink lips….

…same with this passage from a 1918 letter from Harding to Phillips:

Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry. Wonderful spot. Not in the geographies but a heavenly place, and I have seen some passing views there and reveled in them. Gee! How I wish you might be along.

While in the White House, Harding employed “Jerry” to carry on an affair with a woman named Nan Britton, who was 31 years younger than him and bore his child. In 1927 she released a tell-all book called A President’s Daughter, but by then Harding was already far too dead to be ashamed.

6. FDR: Wheelchair-Bound But Sexually Functional

Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent his 12-year presidency confined to a wheelchair, his penile function was apparently unaffected.

Sometime around 1916 he began an affair with a young woman named Lucy Mercer, who had been serving as his wife Eleanor’s social secretary at the time. The affair would last until FDR’s 1945 death—she was by his side when he drew his last breath.

FDR also carried on alleged affairs with his unfortunately named secretary Missy LeHand and even Princess Martha of Norway.

Undaunted through it all, Eleanor Roosevelt allegedly went pearl-diving with a series of women including reporter Lorena Hickok and famed pilot Amelia Earhart.

7. Eisenhower: The Spirit Was Willing, But The Flesh Was Limp

During World War II, American General Dwight David Eisenhower was routinely motored between Europe’s charred battlefields by his personal driver, Kay Summersby.

Eisenhower then went on to become president. Then, as all presidents eventually do, he died.

Six years later, Summersby published a book called Past Forgetting: My Love Affair With Dwight D. Eisenhower. She claimed that she tried to have a baby with Ike but hinted that the former military hero couldn’t seal the deal due to his chronic erectile-dysfunction issues.

8. JFK: Nailed Everything That Wasn’t Nailed Down

According to legend, this amphetamine-addled lothario had his own personal midlife “missile crisis” inside Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson, Gene Tierney, famous stripper Blaze Starr, painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, mobster moll Judith Exner Campbell, and two White House secretaries commonly referred to as “Fiddle” and “Faddle.”

Did I leave anyone out? I’m sure I did.

Despite all the unanswered questions about his death, the only question I have is why his wife Jackie wasn’t the one that shot him.

9. LBJ: The “J” Stood for “Jumbo”

Apparently jealous of his predecessor JFK’s legendary prowess with the ladies, this bloodhound-jowled Texas longhorn once felt the need to proclaim, “I have had more women by accident than he has had on purpose.”

LBJ had a habit being able to carry on extraordinarily long-term affairs without getting fatally busted—one of 20 years with a woman named Madeline Brown and one of 30 years with a woman named Alice Glass.

More than any other president in history, LBJ also had a proclivity for whipping out his…um…Johnson…at inopportune moments and bragging about its size. His pet name for his peen was “Jumbo” and he had a habit of skinny-dipping at the White House pool and displaying Jumbo in all his glory to establish “genital dominance” with other world leaders. When a reporter once asked him why the country was at war with Vietnam, Johnson unleashed his “substantial organ” and said, “This is why!”

10. Nixon’s Alleged Gay Affair With A Mob Associate

As much as I don’t even want to consider the likelihood that Richard Nixon even had a sex drive, I must admit it’s funny to think he had an ongoing gay affair with his “friend and confidant,” Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, whom the FBI identified as having deep connections with organized crime.

According to the book Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, this alleged gay affair continued for decades, with reporters claiming to have seen the pair holding hands and cuddling while drunk. They also allegedly vacationed together alone in Key Biscayne more than once.

This is all noteworthy because Nixon once said of homosexuals, “They have a problem. They were born that way.” He also once said that homosexuality “destroyed” ancient Greece and that “Aristotle was a homo.”

11. Jimmy Carter’s Adulterous Heart

This is of so little consequence that it’s stretching things to call it a “scandal,” but when Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he caused a minor sensation with a minor confession in a Playboy interview. Carter, told the magazine:

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

Carter had singlehandedly introduced the term “born-again Christian” into the public lexicon when he made a huge point of being a Protestant evangelical during his campaign, and the “adultery in my heart” thing was a reference to Christ’s admonition in the Gospel of Matthew that “anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

So he hadn’t physically committed adultery…only in his heart. It was so simultaneously wholesome and filthy, his erection confession may have won him the election.

12. Did Young Ronnie Reagan Rape A Starlet?

According to sleaze biographer Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized bio of Nancy Reagan, a Hollywood starlet named Selene Walters accused Ronnie of raping her in 1952 when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Walters told People magazine that Reagan suddenly appeared at her apartment one night at 3AM demanding to be let in:

I opened the door, then it was the battle of the couch. I was fighting him. I didn’t want him to make love to me. He’s a very big man, and he just had his way. Date rape? No, God, no, that’s [Kitty Kelley’s] phrase. I didn’t have a chance to have a date with him.”

13. Bill Clinton’s Magical Cigar

Even while he was still the governor of Arkansas, this inveterate horn-doggie had a solid reputation of only keeping his pants on long enough to give speeches. He would ultimately face an array of sexual-impropriety accusations from women such as Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Gennifer Flowers, and Paula Jones.

But it was his misleading statements about his White House affair with an eager intern 27 years his junior named Monica Lewinsky that led to Clinton being only the second president in history to be impeached. Several of Clinton’s trysts with Lewinsky allegedly took place in the White House while Hillary Clinton was on the premises.

Stories vary about the infamous incident in which Clinton allegedly placed a cigar inside Lewinsky’s vagina and later smoked it, with the most seemingly reliable accounts being that he placed a cigar tube inside her rather than a cigar, but does it really matter? As Sigmund Freud famously said, sometimes a cigar tube is just a cigar.

14. Did George W. Bush Have An Affair With A Stripper And Rape A Black Woman?

In January of 2000 a 35-year-old stripper named Tammy Phillips declared to the media that she’d recently ended an eighteen-month affair with Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. The story was largely ignored, and Bush went to win the election, however dubiously.

A more serious charge came in 2002, when a thirty-eight-year-old black woman named Margie Schoedinger filed a lawsuit claiming that in October 2000—during the final weeks of the presidential election—Bush was guilty of “race based harassment and individual sex crimes committed against her and her husband.” Less than a year after filing the complaint, Schoedinger was dead of what police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

15. Barack Obama and the Gay Bathhouses of the Windy City

According to persistent yet unverified rumors, Barack Obama and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel frequented a gay Chicago bathhouse called Man’s Country back in the 1990s. According to a blogger named Kevin DuJan, Man’s Country is where Obama reportedly enjoyed receiving blowjobs from older white men. A man named Larry Sinclair made headlines after claiming that he’d had sex with Obama on two different occasions in 1999, one which involved giving Obama head while the future president smoked crack in the back of a limo.

I don’t care whether it’s true or not. It’s a great story either way. And if it bothers you, I have no choice but to call you a racist, gay-bashing, crackophobe.