Musings are thoughts, the thoughtful kind. For the purpose of these articles, a-musings are thoughts that might amuse, entertain and even enlighten.
[dropcap]D[/dropcap]onald Trump will be the latest in a proud procession of Presidential Pussy Grabbers. Thomas Jefferson was apparently against slavery despite having slaves of his own on his plantation at Monticello. Sally Hemings was his light-skinned slave. He fathered five of her children.
Grover Cleveland was one of three presidents to get married while in office. In 1873 he took sales clerk Maria Halpin out for dinner and, according to her, he raped her “by use of force and violence and without my consent”. Six weeks later she discovered that she was pregnant. Cleveland had Maria arrested and committed to an insane asylum.
James Garfield, who was assassinated 100 days after he assumed office in 1881, had many mistresses and was obsessed with sex, homosexuality and masturbation. He frequently took cold showers to ward off temptation.
Woodrow Wilson married in 1885. In 1907 he went to Bermuda where he met Mary Peck who caused him to put aside “standards of honourable behavior”. When his wife died he began seeing Edith Galt. The Washington Post ‘accidentally’ reported, “The President has been entering Edith Galt regularly,” clearly a typographic error for “entertaining.” A popular joke poked fun at the situation: “What did Mrs. Galt do when the President of the United States proposed to her?” Answer: “She fell out of bed.”
Warren Harding was President for only three years. He died of a heart attack though some people believed his wife poisoned him because of his numerous affairs that he didn’t even bother to keep secret. The President had told reporters: “It’s a good thing I am not a woman. I’d always be pregnant. I can’t say no.”
The true love of Franklin D. Roosevelt was Lucy Mercer who was with him when he died. At one point the President and First Lady Eleanor, who was said to be in a lesbian relationship, might both have had mistresses living in the White House.
Dwight D. Eisenhower fell for his personal driver Kay Summersby, a former model from Great Britain.
It’s no secret that John F. Kennedy had his fair share of extramarital affairs.
Lyndon B. Johnson was by all accounts a “dirty old man”. One of his many partners was Madeline Brown who became pregnant with his son Steven. The affair lasted 21 years. Lady Bird Johnson was quite pragmatic. “My husband loved people. He loved all people. Now, half the people in the world are women. You don’t think I could have kept my husband away from half the people in the world, do you?” After she walked in on her husband having sex with one of his secretaries in the Oval Office, the Secret Service installed a buzzer system to alert the President whenever his wife was nearby.
Bill Clinton probably went through the most publicized sex scandals in history. The affairs began when he was Governor of Arkansas. Arkansas troopers assigned to guard him recalled seeing him in “delicate situations” with several different women. The most famous instance was his encounter with 21-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.
James Buchanan, the first (and so far last) bachelor president, was no pussy grabber. For 23 years he lived with Senator William King, sleeping together in the same room. As Buchanan, America’s first openly homosexual president, wrote to a friend after King’s departure for France: “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.”
The Washington Post once noted that political aide Jennifer Fitzgerald had “served President-elect George Bush in a variety of positions”. In 1992, the tabloid New York Post repeated the allegations. In her book The Power House, journalist Susan Trento claimed that a US ambassador had arranged for Bush and Fitzgerald to share a guesthouse during an official visit to Geneva in 1988. The Bush family denied the allegations.
So the world may rest easy at Trump’s ascension to his fantastic, terrific, incredible presidency of the greatest failed democracy the world has ever seen. The born-again, redneck American people will get the pussy-grabbing, much-divorced, oft-times bankruptcy-seeking president that a minority of the electorate voted for, and the country will be “great-again”.
