Photograph Source: Ranch9613 – CC0 1.0
July 4, 2026, will be the 250th anniversary of the U.S. of America.
It will likely be a day of great celebration, a great shopping extravaganza day! Everything from soapsuds to high-end SUVs is marked down to lure in shoppers and move products off the store shelves. However, the biggest sale that takes place on the 4th will be the selling of the president.
In the 237 years that the U.S. has had a president, all 47 of them have been men and, like most American men, they have had sex lives.
For nearly two-and-a-half centuries, Americans have watched with much glee as media stories and word-of-mouth rumors recounted the sordid tales of how one or another of our commanders-in-chief succumbed to their wilder temptations. On July 4th, a clean-up squad of PR hacks, academics and media pundits will be enrolled to whitewash the public record of America’s great leaders.
Thomas Jefferson remains America’s most compelling president and his reported sexuality mirrors this passion. In his youth, he attempted to seduce his best friend’s wife, Betsy Walker, and after his wife Martha died, he apparently had an affair in Paris with Mrs. Maria Cosway. However, it was his relationship with Sally Hemings, the African-American slave who was his wife’s half-sister (the daughter of Martha’s father) and with whom he had six children, that made him. America’s most scandalous sex scandal-plagued president.
On Presidents’ Day 2026, Trump championed what he called America’s “Golden Age,” a period of falling inflation, record-low crime rates, strong financial markets and secure borders, insisting that the country was “bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”
He proclaimed this while his second term is faltering. Trump’s efforts in support of Israel’s war with Iran are floundering; his immigrant-deportation plan has turned into a nightmare; his tariffs were ruled unconstitutional; and his economic agenda is failing as inflation rises.
But “Teflon Don” established a new standard of the presidential sexual persona, one that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable. Over the last couple of decades, Trump morphed from an upmarket hedonist to a repentant moralist and, as president, relaunched the culture wars. His positions on a host of sex-related issues became more regressive, targeting those considered threats to traditional puritanical values, including women seeking an abortion as well as gay and transgender people. His abuse of E. Jean Carroll led to a court judgment ordering him to pay her $83.3 million and nearly twenty women have brought sex-abuse charges against him. Trump’s story of extramarital sex, let alone sexual abuse, is but one of many that define the American presidency.
The sex scandal associated with Ronald Reagan is more complicated. As the champion of the conservative ascension to federal power, Reagan came under hardline Christian scrutiny because he was the only divorced person to be president. He married Jane Wyman in January 1940, her third husband; she filed for divorce in 1948. In 1952, he married Nancy Davis, an actress.
However, things got more intriguing for Reagan when Kitty Kelley revealed in an unauthorized bio of Nancy Reagan that, in 1952, when the “Gipper” was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he raped the actress Selene Walters in her home. “I opened the door,” she admitted in an interview in People magazine, “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.” (Kelley also reported, without substantiation, that the Reagans smoked pot with Jack Benny and George Burns and that Frank Sinatra had an affair with Nancy Reagan. It should be noted that no legal actions were taken by the Reagans against Kelley.)
Presidential sex scandals can occur by simply challenging the social or religious conventions of the day. Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Playboy interview, in which he uttered those famous words, “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” is but one example. Similarly, a friendship between a man and a woman could be the grounds for suspicion as to more scandalous goings-on. George Washington’s close friendship with Mrs. Sally Fairfax and Woodrow Wilson’s associations with Mrs. Mary Hulbert Peck and Edith Bolling Galt came under much suspicion. Andrew Jackson was assailed over his marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards, an alleged bigamist, because her divorce was not legally finalized before their marriage.
A similar scandal of innuendo involved Calvin Coolidge. As reported in the tabloids of the day, Coolidge and his wife, Grace, were being separately shown around a chicken farm. Learning that the farm’s rooster had sex dozens of times a day, the first lady said: “Tell that to the president.” On being told, the president asked: “Same hen every time?” “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different one each time.” Coolidge is supposed to have quipped: “Tell that to the first lady.” There had been rumors that Grace Coolidge had intimate liaisons with secret service agents.
The alleged homosexuality of Pres. James Buchanan and Pres. Abraham Lincoln is a more slippery subject, given that our 21st-century notions of sexuality are not applicable to 19th-century same-sex intimacies. In addition, it was not uncommon for strangers to share a bed for a night when staying at a small-town inn or to share a bed — i.e., “bundling” — at a rural household with strangers traveling in the wilderness or at isolated settlements. However, as in Buchanan’s and Lincoln’s cases, it was uncommon for male (or female) acquaintances of financial means to share an urban home.
Grover Cleveland was, like Buchanan, a bachelor when he was elected president. However, he came to the office with a reputation as a ladies’ man. After assuming office in 1874, he was confronted by newspaper reports claiming he had an affair with Mrs. Maria Crofts Halpin, who accused him of fathering her illegitimate 10- year-old son, Oscar Folsom Cleveland. While he never admitted paternity, Cleveland sent child support to Mrs. Halpin.
James Garfield’s alleged extramarital affair with a “Mrs. Calhoun” appears to have taken place in October 1862 while he was a Civil War general. It allegedly took place during a visit to New York while, as he wrote, he was living through “years of darkness.” When his wife, Lucretia, discovered the affair, they worked out their differences.
Pres. Warren G. Harding is reported to have had an affair for fifteen years with Carrie Fulton Phillips, the wife of a friend, James Phillips. When he became president, he began a relationship with Nan Britton, thirty years his junior. It is rumored that he had sexual liaisons with her in the White House. Their adulterous affair culminated in the birth of an illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth Ann. After Harding’s death, Britton published The President’s Daughter, an intimate account of their affair. However, the most scandalous part of this scandalous tale is the questions associated with Harding’s untimely death in 1923. While stopping over in San Francisco from a trip to Alaska and Canada, he came down with ptomaine poisoning contracted from tainted Japanese crabmeat and died. Rumor circulated widely that his wife, Florence, poisoned him.
Scholars have had an easier time uncovering the extramarital affairs of 20th-century presidents – although their sexual nature has often been denied. For example, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s “friendship” with Lucy Page Mercer, Eleanor’s secretary, is openly acknowledged, but its apparent sexual aspect is still debated. It is reported that Eleanor threatened to divorce FDR if he didn’t end his relations with Mercer; and it was Mercer, then a widow, who was with FDR at Warm Springs just before he died. FDR is reported to also have had affairs with Marguerite Alice (Missy) LeHand, his secretary, and Crown Princess Marta of Norway, who lived at the White House during World War II. (Eleanor’s “friendships” with Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman and Lorena Hickok are the subject of similar debate.)
Much gossip circulated about Pres. Richard Nixon’s long-term friendship with Marianna Liu, a Chinese cocktail waitress he met in Hong Kong while vice-president. Nixon first met Liu in 1958 while she was a tour guide. It is reported that, in the mid-60s, Liu and a female friend had a party with Nixon and his buddy, Bebe Rebozo, in a suite at the Mandarin Hotel. What gives this scandal a particular sleazy cast is the alleged role of J. Edgar Hoover, America’s foremost drag queen, in exploiting the affair to gain leverage over Nixon. As the story goes, one of Liu’s closest friends was a general in the Communist Chinese army. In 1969, Liu moved to Nixon’s hometown of Whittier, CA, and denied that there ever had been an affair.
Before his assassination in November 1963, Pres. John Kennedy reportedly had numerous sexual affairs that were a wink-and-a-nod public secret, widely known but discreetly hidden by the media. After his murder, JFK’s dalliances, both consensual and commercial, became fodder for gossip columnists and others and were artfully turned into a celebrity sensation and morphed from scandal into presidential lore. Some even claim that JFK had an out-of-wedlock “love child,” Jack Worthington II, with Mary Evelyn Bibb Worthington.
After his assassination, Kennedy’s sexual affairs became the stuff of myth. It was revealed that he had affairs with movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Angie Dickinson; Inga Arvad, a Danish journalist; the stripper Blaze Starr; Judith Exner Campbell, mistress to mob boss Sam Giancana; and White House secretaries Priscilla Weir and Jill Cowan, who were fondly referred to as “Fiddle” and “Faddle.” The full list of his consensual engagements will likely never be known.
And then there is Lyndon Johnson, who once boasted: “I have had more women by accident than he [JFK] has had on purpose.” Among his reported conquests were Madeline Brown, who claims that they had an affair that lasted more than two decades and that LBJ fathered her son. Brown insists that their affair was purely physical and remained hidden from Lady Bird Johnson.
In his biography of LBJ, Robert Caro revealed that he also had a thirty-year affair with Alice Glass. Their friendship began in 1937 when she was living with her common-law husband, Charles Marsh, and their two children. Marsh was a newspaper mogul and one of his papers, the Austin American-Statesman, was an influential LBJ supporter. It is rumored that Glass ended her affair with LBJ in 1967 over her opposition to the Vietnam War. She also appears to have burned their love letters.
Looking back from the vantage point of 21st century morality, one can well appreciate what the fear of public exposure has on politicians. Pres. Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment, serves as much as a warning for those challenging Christian conservative hypocrisy as an indicator of the barbarity inherent to partisan politics. And it says as much about the ability of those with powerful political connections, like George Bush, to suppress questionable behavior, whether involving sex, drugs or dubious military service.
At the end, however, presidents from Washington to Trump are but all-too-human men struggling within the deeper crisis of repression, the battle between what Christian propriety demands to maintain patriarchy and the deeper forces of the unconscious to overcome sexual repression. Each president’s behavior is not unlike that of ordinary Americans caught in the cultural vise that deforms us as civilized people. Their lessons should not be lost on the nation’s 250th birthday.
