One aspect of Benen's fine piece troubles me. When listing previous presidents known to have experienced un-nuptialed nookie, Benen neglects to name Dwight Eisenhower.
Please understand that I've no antipathy toward Ike. He kicked Nazi butt. During his tenure in the White House, we learned that the economy could zoom even as the upper tax limit headed toward 90%. I still like Ike. He may have been the last likable Republican.
Nevertheless, I find it odd that the short list of presidential philanderers always leads with JFK, then speeds off toward Bill Clinton and FDR -- and then zooms all the way back to Grover Cleveland and Thomas Jefferson. Democrats all. No Ike in sight.
(Benen does mention Wendell Wilkie, who never got the big prize.)
Republican partisans still express doubts about the tale of Ike's wartime romance with his secretary and confidant, Kay Summersby. Here are the facts: Summersby admitted the affair in a 1975 book called Past Forgetting, written when Eisenhower was gone and Summersby was close to her own passing. Those defending the reputation of a deceased president claimed that Summersby was a fantasist. Others would argue that a deathbed confession -- which is what Past Forgetting essentially was -- carries great weight.
In an oral biography of Harry Truman, Plain Speaking, we find a story which tends to confirm Summersby's account:
According to Truman in Plain Speaking, Eisenhower informed Gen. George C. Marshall that he intended to divorce Mamie Eisenhower and marry Kay Summersby. Marshall, Truman allegedly told Miller, wrote back to Eisenhower that he should not do it and promised that if he did, he, Marshall, would drive him out of the Army and presumably make any postwar political career impossible.Marshall, we are told, destroyed the paperwork which would have documented this incident.
Truman historians Robert H. Ferrell and Francis H. Heller have cast doubt on the accuracy of Plain Speaking. First, they claim that the tale has "almost no corroborating evidence." Then they admit that the story of the "divorce" letter was fully corroborated by Truman's military aide, Major General Harry Vaughan.
The word of Major General Vaughan certainly provides better evidence than we possess for many of the wilder stories we've heard about Bill Clinton and JFK. Notice the pattern? Standards of proof shift according to party affiliation.
It has even been claimed that the Eisenhower/Summersby union resulted in an illegitimate child named Anne Morrow, who wrote a book about Republican corruption in Texas called A Case of Injustice.
I have no idea what to make of the Morrow assertion. Even so, I think we may fairly presume that Eisenhower, separated from his spouse during the war, had a period of human weakness. So did millions of other men and women.
Many have aruged -- persuasively, in my view -- that George H.W. Bush has had extramarital affairs. I happen to know that, in the late 1980s, one left-oriented publication hired a writer to look into these claims. Years later, this writer told me that after he had acquired some rather good leads, his editor changed his mind and cancelled the story. Such matters just seemed "too sleazy."
Different times!
Nixon never cheated -- although Anthony Summers, in his Nixon biography, makes a very good case that he struck his wife, perhaps on more than on occasion. (Some reviewers have scoffed at Summers, but his sourcing is persuasive.) Nixon did admit to an attraction for an Asian woman, but no evidence suggests that he took the matter beyond flirtation. Many believe that he was impotent by the time he became president.
To my knowledge, no-one has claimed that Ronald Reagan ever strayed, although Kitty Kelley related a widely-questioned story about Nancy and Frank Sinatra in the White House. I would not dismiss the tale. Back in the day, Nancy had earned a rather slutty reputation, and a woman of her generation would have considered Sinatra the ultimate triumph.
I once skimmed a Peter Lawford biography which portrayed young Nancy Davis as the blowjob queen of Hollywood -- an image which still gives me the creeps.
10 comments:
You say, "In Jesusland, penis misplacement trumps all other concerns."
That requires a qualifier. Penis misplacement is quite okay if you are a "saved Christian" and later regret your misplacement. Like, when you get caught.
Thoe people are so cognitively twisted that it amazes me they can start their cars in the morning.
Clinton was, and I presume still is, a saved Christian. At least, he came from that Baptist tradition. But he was a Democrat. Thus, the Jesusland dwellers presume that his salvation and his regret constitute nothing more than fooling and pretending. Expressions of regret are presumed genuine only when a Republican makes them.
When I was a kid growing up in New York City, my parents told me that a friend of theirs had lived across the street from Eisenhower's mistress when he was president of Columbia University in the late 40's and would see him leaving her building in the wee hours of the morning.
In all the years since, I've never heard another word about this supposed affair -- but it was described to me not as rumor but as something that was common knowledge in the neighborhood, so I'm inclined to believe it.
If you're "saved" under these evangelical creeds, you don't even have to regret your "sins", and there's no need to stop committing them -- all that's required for salvation is a professed belief in Jesus. You could be Ghandi, Moses, St. Francis and Jesus combined, and yet burn in hell for not accepting the gospel according to Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye. Behavior ("works") is utterly irrelevant. Which is awfully convenient.
As for Ike and his tax rates -- if the top .1% (you read that correctly: one tenth of one percent) of American earners paid the same rates they did in 1957, we'd have $200+ billion more in the treasury every year. And that doesn't count the much higher corporate taxes of that era.
Regretfully, I live in Jesusland (definition: a place that completely fictionalizes the real Jesus and tries to make him over in their own distorted image)I stopped going to church when I was 16 because a 40 something deacon was having an affair with a 19 year old girl- everyone knew about it but nothing was ever done.I simply could not abide the hypocrisy.
He's still a deacon.
Woah, hold up. Clinton, a "saved Christian"? I didn't know that he'd ever portrayed himself that way. And I wasn't that young (read: middle school) during the '92 campaign. Really?
George H.W. Bush has been named a number of times by victims of ritual abuse and pedophilia. Candy Jones, Cathy O'Brien, and Senator John DeCamp in his book on the Boystown Scandal of 1988 that Rev. Moon used his Washington Times to assure he had a permanant seat of power in the GOP. A good site that explores this subject is Jeff Well's riginit.blogspot.com
sofla said:
In Reagan's divorce, Jane Wyman alleged infidelity, iirc. However, in those days, there was no no-fault divorce, and somebody had to have done something, and perhaps Wyman's claim was simply the boilerplate legal language required at that time, without regard to the truth of it.
With all the above qualifications, I think it's true that Reagan stipulated to the truth of the Wyman divorce action contents, i.e., admitted to infidelity.
Given that Nancy gave birth to their first child together about 7 months after their marriage, and that Reagan was said to live the typical Hollywood star's promiscuous life (at least when he was single), he may well have adultery on his record as well as the evident intercourse without benefit of marriage.
Poor Mamie was a real lush. The official story was she had Meniere's syndrome, which caused her to stagger. She had a permanent suite in the VIP section at a military hospital in DC.
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