By Stanley K. Schultz
The American public long has reveled in tales of the sexual misconduct of its Presidents. Alleged and real sexual hi-jinks and the American Presidency have intertwined and endured in an intimate relationship from the earliest days of the Republic. Opponents of President John Adams, during his reelection campaign of 1800, accused him of employing his vice-presidential running mate, Charles C. Pinckney, as a pimp. The President, opponents charged, had sent Pinckney to England to "procure four pretty girls as mistresses, a pair for each elderly gentleman." An amused Adams wrote in a letter to a friend that "I do declare upon my honor, if this be true, General Pinckney has kept them all for himself and cheated me out of my two." Adams lost the election to Thomas Jefferson, but not because the voting public believed the sexual allegations.

No sooner had Jefferson taken over as President than a number of journalists began to publish accounts of the Virginianâs own lack of moral restraint around attractive women. Labeling the new President a "libertine" since college days, the writers reported that Jefferson had tried to seduce the wife of a close friend and neighbor (Jefferson later admitted to "improper" behavior toward the beautiful young woman), had carried on illicit affairs with two different married women while serving as a diplomat in Paris, and had fathered children by one of his own African-American slaves, a young woman named Sally Hemings (which the master of Monticello apparently had done). These accusations did not destroy Jeffersonâs political career, nor did the outlandish claim of the President of Yale University that the Presidentâs reelection in the campaign of 1804 "would make our wives and daughters the victims of legalized prostitution." Jefferson won office for a second term. He remains firmly enshrined in the pantheon of the nationâs great heroes.

The litany of licentiousness surfaced time and again against occupants and would-be occupants of the Oval Office. Opponents reviled Andrew Jackson as a home-wrecker, falsely damned Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant for fathering a daughter by a Native American girl, and trumpeted during the campaign of 1884 that Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child by a Buffalo, New York prostitute while serving as the reform mayor of that city. Cleveland admitted the truth of the charge, stated that he was supporting the child and mother financially, won the election (for reasons other than his honesty about his ill-fated affair), and served honorably for the next four years. Although many Americans professed moral outrage at Clevelandâs behavior, the voting public elected him President again when Cleveland sought the office in 1892.

When President Woodrow Wilson began courting an attractive widow, Edith Bolling Galt, some seven months after the death of his wife in 1914, media rumor-mongers and Republican critics portrayed the bookish, former college professor as a philanderer whose secret affair had driven his wife to her death. A lack of evidence did nothing to squelch the gossip or public interest in it. Wilsonâs successor, the immensely likable and handsome Warren G. Harding, apparently gave his womanizing urges free rein throughout the years of his marriage and his Presidency. He sustained at least two different long-lasting intimate relationships: Hardingâs political advisers bribed one of the women with cash and an all-expenses paid vacation abroad with her husband to be out of the country during the campaign of 1920; Harding himself financially supported a child whom his second mistress claimed was the Presidentâs and, from the White House, stayed closely in touch with her through a Secret Service agent. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all carried on illicit relationships with mistresses; apparently Kennedyâs hormones raged out of control as much as had Hardingâs before him. Rumors and titillating tidbits circulated constantly among Washington, D.C. insiders about the sexual appetites of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George Bush. And so the story goes.

What does all this mean to us today? Certainly, an unharnessed sex drive has not steered the behavior of every President of the United States, at least not that historians know about. History records few sexual peccadilloes or large moral lapses among most of the men whom historians regard as caretakers rather than as active law-makers or dynamic leaders in the office. What the brief discussion above does suggest is that real or alleged sexual improprieties of our Presidents have endured as part and parcel of our political discourse throughout the nation's history. Trying to describe an attitude he believed central to understanding the American public, the often cynical journalist H. L. Mencken once defined "Puritanism" as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Of course it was Mencken who also noted that "nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse."

Link to the text of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report to the Congress on potentially impeachable offenses by President Bill Clinton. [ link to the Starr Report]