Fdr sex scandal and the press

Before , when presidential contender Gary Hart was brought down by the media for a sex scandal, the private lives of politicians and presidents were considered just that: private. Bill Clinton's missteps became topics of discussion in households all over the country. Politics was never so icky The sex lives of our political leaders may have no bearing on their abilities to perform their jobs, but they sell a lot of newspapers and popular books. Because of the antics of Hart and Clinton, we can be sure that, abilities be damned, no politician today gets a free pass with any sexual skeletons hiding in the closet.

Porn star Stormy Daniels ' allegations of an affair with President Donald Trump are some of the most salacious to be made against a president. Daniels, an adult film star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, says she had an affair with Trump at a Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in Former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal recently made similar allegations against the president, who prior to taking office was accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women. Trump denies all of the allegations against him. While those allegations have garnered much media attention, and have followed the president throughout his first term, they are far from the only such allegations made against an occupant of the Oval Office. Trump is no stranger to such scandals, and neither is the presidency. More than a third of the men who've occupied the Oval Office have been either accused of sexual misconduct, alleged to have had an affair, fathered a child out of wedlock with someone they were conducting such an affair with, or boasted of their extramarital sexual escapades.

One chilly winter evening in , I was the lone journalist among a small clump of voters gathered inside an old meeting hall in Manchester, N. I was there, mostly out of curiosity, to witness the spectacle of a man desperately clinging to a shattered dream. The dream was the presidency. The man was Gary Hart.

A novelist who has just spent several years with them tells a moving story of love: public and private, given and withheld. It is covered with a penciled note in the kind of cryptic shorthand I and most writers I know use when insight or inspiration strikes. Unlike a chronology of events I later unearthed, the note was not a new discovery. Yet when I came across it, I heard the subversive rasp of a key turning in a lock. Eleanor Roosevelt might have been a saint, but she was a saint with a faddish bent and a powerful peasant breath.