Sex Lives of American Presidents

With the Fourth of July and America's 250th around the corner we wanted to revisit an episode and take a look back at the presidents from the past what we know about their sex lives. Which president was well-endowed and supposedly presented it to staff in the Oval Office? Which president had an affair on his honeymoon? And which had an affair with his wife's secretary? And no, they're not all JFK. Joining Kate today to help us find out is Eleanor Herman, author of Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sex-Presidents-Outs-White-House/dp/0062970569. This podcast was edited by Freddy Chick. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/ for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXT You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  This is Steve Covino from Covino and Rich. Quick trivia, fellas. Every guy listening is a contestant. Answer honestly to yourself. You got a belly and a little chest? Gassed by the afternoon, no drive left in the tank? You lack that confidence and mental edge? Those are classic signs that your testosterone's been sliding. And nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. So why not take matters into your own hands? Strip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma GLP-1 Booster. Every serving is packed with science-backed ingredients that crank up your natural GLP-1 production. Visit bioma.health/GLP1 and use code CRSHOW for 15% off your first order.

• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester. I am here, you are here, everybody's here, and also the lawyers are here, which is why I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now you have to consider that. Your fair dues warning. You have been warned. We're gonna get spicy. Okay, if you're still here, on with the show.

• 1:47Kate Lister?

  Hello, betwixters. I've got my voice down because I'm currently hidden in the stationary cupboard in the White House. I only came in for a pen, honest. Peeping in through the slats of the door, I can make out, "Who is that?" And would you look at that, they appear to have some female company that is not their wife. How utterly, utterly shocking. Well, I won't give away which president I'm spying on, but let's just say it's the 1950s and this guy is known for taking liberties? I'll leave you to make your own doble entendres about positions of power, but seriously, what is it about political power and sexual infidelity? Are the two linked? And how? And although I really want to know the answers to those questions, I think we need to get out of here as quickly as we can to find out.

• 2:54Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When they're not walking the corridors of power and making decisions that affect the lives of millions of people, American presidents have also been known, just once in a while, just occasionally, ever so rarely, to have an extramarital affair, or two, or three, or five, or 50. As America will be celebrating 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, well done, everybody, we wanted to dust off this episode about the sex lives of US presidents. It's just our way of paying respects to the big day. I was joined in this episode by Eleanor Herman, author of Sex with Presidents, and she helped me find out more about the bedroom antics of the commanders in chief.

• 3:39Kate Lister?

  Let's do this.

• 3:48Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Eleanor Herman. How are you doing?

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I am so delighted to be here again, talking to you, Kate. I always have such a blast. I think this is our sixth conversation.

• 4:02Kate Lister?

  You have written a book called Sex with Presidents: The Inns and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House. What made you want to write this fascinating book, Eleanor?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Well, my first book was Sex with Kings, and I looked at the sex lives of European royals. The second book was Sex with the Queen. My third book was pretty much Sex in the Vatican. And then I did a lot of other books. And then this came out in 2020, Sex with Presidents. I figured I should turn my attention to US history and really did a deep dive. You know, I'm more expert on European history, and I was shocked to learn, you know, a lot about my own nation's history.

• 4:40Kate Lister?

  Do you think, it's kind of, it's a weird one, because most of us have sex. Most of us have sex. But there is something about power and sex that goes together. Do you think with all the research you've done around kings and queens and presidents, that something happens when you get given that much power when it comes to sex?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yes, it's true. There's actually a psychological disorder. It was

• 5:04Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  accepted as such by the psychiatric community in 2009 called hubris disorder.

• 5:12Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Unlike most mental illnesses which develop in early adulthood, this one is triggered by wielding power over a period of time. And when that individual loses power, the illness subsides.

• 5:29Kate Lister?

  Oh, my God.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  And some of the characteristics of the disorder are recklessness, narcissism, believing that you're some kind of a Messiah, that God has appointed you and you can do nothing wrong, not listening to the very good advice of your cabinet, feeling that you're a kind of god, only you can save the nation. The interesting thing about it is it affects women as well as men. I mean, if you look at Maggie Thatcher, in her last year or two, she was, she was whacking that handbag of hers on the cabinet table, threatening to fire everybody. It happened with Golda Meir. It happened with Indira Gandhi. With men, however.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  The the sexual recklessness comes into play. I I haven't found in my research that that any national female leader was say a JFK, for instance.

• 6:24Kate Lister?

  Does that make sense to me? Because one of the questions I was gonna ask you as we're going through this is is why are they so stupid when it comes to sex? I know we haven't like spoken about anyone in particular yet, but this will become a theme as we're going along. The recklessness of it and the entitlement of it and the fact that at any point, if this scandal got out, it could bring down a government. I've never understood why people risk that.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  They think that they can get away with anything. Their minds are are not working. There's no logic there. They think even if it gets out, it won't really matter. Everyone loves them. They're this messianic figure, but they do risk everything. Their their family, their legacy, their political career. It's really crazy.

• 7:10Kate Lister?

  My friend, I was talking to my friend about this just the other day, and she just looked at me and she said, Kate, there is nothing stupider on this planet than a horny man. And so maybe that's true.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 7:23Kate Lister?

  But I'm glad that it actually has a name. Like, what's that hubris syndrome? So let's talk about one of the the big American presidents. The first one, actually, I think. Washington, George Washington. This, what do I know about George Washington? He was tall and he had false teeth. That's what I know about him.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And he actually did not cut down a cherry tree, or was it an apple tree? But anyway, this story about George Washington and his so-called love affair is really a nothing burger. There's really no there there, and I'm surprised that that this is actually a thing. The story is when he was a young man, late teens, early twenties, he was staying with his brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon, and they would often visit their neighbors, which was George Fairfax, who was a fabulously wealthy British gentleman, and his young and pretty wife Sally. This couple would educate Washington on good manners and polite society, which I think indicates he must have been a bit

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Of a hayseed, they would provide him with books to read. He developed quite a crush on the wife, Sally, and nothing happened. And when he was twenty five, he married Martha Custis, and the two couples socialized till seventeen seventy three, when the Fairfax's returned to England. And he did write Sally a couple of letters saying that some of the happiest moments in his life had been spent in her company, and that's it.

• 8:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, okay. That doesn't sound too scandalous. There doesn't sound, so there might not be too many skeletons in George's closet there.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  I don't think there's a one, really. I think he was probably very boring sexually.

• 9:02Kate Lister?

  Okay, all right. So, George, okay, let's move across to Thomas Jefferson. Hmm.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Right. So, so Thomas Jefferson, though he was a founding father of the United States and a brilliant man in several different respects, he was really not a decent human being, in my view. I was shocked to discover that. But he had an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings. He had gotten her pregnant when she was sixteen. She ended up having

• 9:32Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  seven children with him. And when he was president in the early, the first decade of the eighteen hundreds, his political opponents got a tabloid journalist to dig into this story. I mean, many people knew about it. You know, they would see his son, who looked just like him, a shade or two darker, waiting on the table and that kind of thing. And so these stories got out there. But, you know, Jefferson was such a successful president in many ways, and he doubled the size of the country by organizing the Louisiana Purchase. And so in the next election, people, you know, the voters just didn't really care that he had this relationship.

• 10:15Kate Lister?

  Was it scandalous at the time? I mean, I know that he was the president and his political enemies were on the hunt for anything that they could get their teeth into. But a slave owner having a family with an enslaved woman, how scandalous would that have been? The time.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Well, I I think it was quite common, quite common indeed. I think the difference with Jefferson is that he was president. And there were certainly people who who disapproved, especially up in the the non-slaveholding states in New England, for instance. They they thought it was pretty disgusting.

• 10:47Kate Lister?

  It's just awful. The thing that I can't get my head around that. I mean, it's just, you just keep going and it just gets worse and worse. But how could you enslave your own children? That blows my mind.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  I think he wanted them around him. He promised her, see, she was in, they were in France. He was the US ambassador. When she first became pregnant at sixteen, she had gone there with his, to bring his daughter over. And he told her, you know, she knew that if she stayed in France, she would be free because France did not recognize slavery. And he said, if you come back with me, I'll, you know, provide for you and the child, and I'll free all the children when they're twenty one. Well, she ended up having seven kids, four of them survived infancy. And, you know, when they were twenty one, there was no freedom. Now, he did not put them in the fields or in the very arduous task. He taught them how to be carpenters so they had skills, they could earn money.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Some of them, you know, served in the in the house, but, you know, at a certain point, they all just left without his permission. They just, they just left. Two of them could pass as white and they they changed their names and disappeared.

• 11:55Kate Lister?

  Wow. And what happened to Sally? What do we know about her, Sally Hemings? Was she ever freed? Did he ever free her?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  She was, there was a legal thing that they did where she was just sort of freed. And and that's what happened to her. But, you know, he spent his last few years entertaining lavishly, and he did not have the money. And he knew as he was getting older that when he died, hundreds of his enslaved people were going to be put on the auction block. And sold off and families split up. And that's exactly what happened to them. Instead of, you know, trying to free them, which wasn't always easy at the time legally. He just figured out, you know, that they'd be sold and then the money would go to his his daughters, pay off his debts for entertaining.

• 12:39Kate Lister?

  Just. And at the time, this seems like it was quite a scandal. It seems like it was quite an open secret. But it was one of those kind of did they, didn't they? What was really going on? Is it just a vicious rumor for a long, long time? But they did actually prove this with DNA evidence, didn't they? That this is what happened?

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, when DNA first came out in the 90s, there were tests done. You know, the thing about DNA is, is sometimes it just gives you a general idea of where the DNA came from. So people who did not want to believe our founding father had had all these children with his enslaved woman, said it could be his brother. You know, and according to the DNA, it could have been the brother, except Thomas Jefferson kept a list every day of everything that went on in his household, on his plantation, who visited, how long they stayed. His brother lived some distance away. And, you know, over, over a period of a couple decades, he visited a handful of times, not one of which would have been

• 13:43Speaker 02

  around the timeframe when Sally Hemings got pregnant. So I think it's really safe to say that Thomas Jefferson was the father of her children.

• 13:51Kate Lister?

  I think we could go out on a limb and say that. I think I would agree with you there, Eleanor. Right. So he, Thomas Jefferson is a jerk, then, and that would be putting it very, very mildly. Is he the worst one that you found in your research? Was he the worst one that just made you go, oh, God, no, no, put it away, keep it in your pants, you horrible man?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  The worst one was JFK.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Two fearless historians. Me, Matt Lewis.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:11Kate Lister?

  God, we have spoken about JFK before. Ha, ha, ha.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  JFK was pathological with his promiscuity. And when he was running for president, his advance team would go to a town where he would be visiting the next day, and they'd pick six prostitutes, the type, usually blonde, that JFK liked, and they'd have them lined up on the tarmac so that when the plane landed and the candidate got off, he would pick two or three of them, go to a hotel, then speak at various events, looking very relaxed and refreshed.

• 15:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, he was, and he didn't ever, ever stay faithful to his wife Jackie, like, not even a little bit, did he?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Not even on the honeymoon, Kate.

• 15:59Kate Lister?

  Jesus Christ.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  They were at a, they went to Mexico for their honeymoon, and they were at a very lovely soiree at some wealthy person's house, and he disappeared into a guest room with a blonde, while Jackie's standing there feeling like a complete idiot.

• 16:19Kate Lister?

  Like, it's, it's, it is pathological, like, when, because in the episode that you came on, and we spoke specifically about JFK, is that when you're laying it all out, I'm actually hearing it, thinking, these aren't the actions of a well man. Like, this isn't normal behaviour by any means. This is weird behaviour.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Well, you know, in the White House, just as in Buckingham Palace, the male leader and the spouse each had separate bedroom suites. So there's the president's side of the residence, and then the first ladies. So when Jackie was away, which was frequently, she just needed to get away from him, JFK would bring women up. Do you think he took them to his own bed?

• 17:01Kate Lister?

  Oh, no. Oh, I would hope that he did.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  He did not. He always took them to Jackie's bed. Where they would have sex on her bed and then the staff, and this is the weirdest part which I don't get, they wouldn't change the sheets. I don't know if they weren't, he didn't want them to, or if he, he used so many pairs of sheets every day with these women that they're, they just didn't have enough of a supply. So the staff would have to pick hairs and bobby pins off of the sheets. And they would often complain, why didn't he bed brunettes? Because then Jackie would just think, well, they're my hairs and my bobby pins, but he always seemed to take blondes. One night Jackie found a pair of underpants under her pillow and she fished it out and said to her husband, can you find

• 17:47Speaker 02

  the owner of these? These are not my size.

• 17:49Kate Lister?

  Jesus, wow. So Jackie knew, I mean, how could she not know what he was up to? But she was, she kind of did that thing that a lot of women married to powerful men have done down the years, just sort of made their peace with the fact that, yeah, if he stands still long enough, he's going to have a go at it.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yes. She became severely depressed. You know, she had been warned before the marriage by his friends who really liked her, saying, you know, this is not a good idea. He's never going to be faithful to you. I mean, not on day one. And she saw it as a challenge and thought, you know, wealthy and powerful men may have an affair. I'll change him. Yeah, she, she thought she would change him, or, or maybe he'd have an affair now and then. I think she had no idea how sick his sexual behavior was, but, you know, she got depressed and, and back in the 60s, doctors were just prescribing pills, uppers, downers, all kinds of, of pills. And so she, she got addicted to, to pills because of her depression.

• 18:46Kate Lister?

  Why didn't the press get Kennedy on this? Because like any journalist, they wouldn't have even need to research this very hard to have discovered, hang on, the president is running around America like a dog with two penises here. Like, why didn't that hit the press? Why, why wasn't that a scandal?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  I'll tell you why. It's, it's a very fascinating story. Ever since the advent of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets in the 1500s, the press had been very salacious, always seeking scandal because it sold them, right? Printers and publishers made a lot of money from these stories, whether it's witches in New England in, in the 1600s, or the sex lives of, of kings throughout all of those centuries. And then About nineteen hundred journalists decided that they were going to be, you know, more respectable. The National Press Club was founded about that time and they came to a kind of agreement

• 19:45Speaker 02

  that they would not report on these scandalous stories, that gentlemen reporters did not report on gentlemen politicians' love affairs. And so they just clammed up. They didn't report on Woodrow Wilson's mistress around the time of the First World War. They didn't report on Warren Harding in the early nineteen twenties. He was right there behind Kennedy, I would have to say. All of his women. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had several mistresses. Everyone knew. And then, of course, the worst was JFK. And reporters would come into a hotel suite, see some naked actress running around or lying on the bed, and they were not allowed to report it.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Now, what changed this was a few events. The Vietnam War really shook journalism and the reporters realized how they were being lied to. Teddy Kennedy goes careening off a bridge, swims to safety and leaves the young woman he was with to drown. That really shook a lot of journalists who knew for years he was just a drunken mess, you know, waiting to harm someone and they had never reported it. And then the final nail in the coffin of this hands-off approach to president sexual peccadilloes was Watergate. And after that, journalists felt that presidents were not to be protected and respected, but to be investigated.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  So suddenly, you know, all of these stories came out. This was only about a decade after the JFK scandals and those people who were witnesses to his misbehavior or were his mistresses suddenly gave press interviews, wrote books. So that's how come we know so much about JFK.

• 21:32Kate Lister?

  Wow. Yeah, he's got to be up there, hasn't he? With like the most, I don't even know what the word is because it's not the fact that he had a lot of sex. People can have a lot of sex. It's just sexually, morally repugnant with what he was doing. Cheating on his wife, taking advantage of people. Like you laid it out in the last episode that you came on, like really not even being nice to these women that he's having an affair with, really. He's just using them like a conveyor belt.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Right, and he did not seem to be capable of understanding how much he was harming his wife. One of his friends said, you know, you are really hurting Jackie. And Kennedy said, no, I'm not. I give her everything she wants.

• 22:13Kate Lister?

  There you go. Look at that. Look at that.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  So to get back at him, she would spend wildly. And at the last minute, as first lady, she would often refuse to go to events where people were lining up looking forward to meet her because she knew it drove him crazy.

• 22:25Kate Lister?

  Wow. And of course, you've got issues of national security. If he's having at it with anything with a pulse, is, you know, sweet, what do they call them, honey trap spies?

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Well, there are two issues of that. One is there was a potential for spies. You know, back in World War II, he was having an affair with a Swedish woman who was thought to be a spy for Hitler.

• 22:48Kate Lister?

  Brilliant. Well done.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  The Olympics, and she thought he was a man with a very kind heart. She wrote Hitler was a man with a kind heart.

• 22:55Kate Lister?

  Jesus Christ.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  And so the FBI bugged their sexual encounters, and so he was transferred to the Pacific. But even when he was president, 20 years later, he had an affair with a woman who was thought to be an East German spy. And another woman called Judith Campbell, known as the Mafia Mole, she was having, she was the mistress of the crime boss of Chicago, the fellow who had taken over from Al Capone.

• 23:22Kate Lister?

  Jeez.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  So he was just setting himself up for blackmail, completely reckless. The other security issue is that these women would show up at the White House door and say, you know, the president invited me. And the Secret Service knew he was not gonna wait happily for them to, you know, check these women out. I mean, there was no internet. There was, I mean, how are you even gonna check these women out at the door? So they would let them up. And they were very worried because even if they didn't have a weapon on them, after sex, Kennedy would, he'd have some cold dishes prepared in the little kitchen up in the residence. And there were butcher knives up there. And the Secret Service was

• 24:04Speaker 02

  very much afraid they'd find the president stabbed to death in the shower one day, and there was nothing they could do about it.

• 24:11Kate Lister?

  There is nothing stupider on this planet than a horny man. That and JFK just exemplifies.

• 24:19Kate Lister?

  So he is an absolute dirtbag. For all his politics and he was great and he was fabulous, but he was still sexually a dirtbag. Let's talk gay presidents. Has there ever been a gay president, Eleanor?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yes, there was one. It's not widely known. His name was James Buchanan and he was the president before Abraham Lincoln. He's best known for just muddling politics so badly that he helped bring on the Civil War soon after he left office. He was the only US president to remain a lifelong bachelor, but that didn't mean he led a celibate life. When he was a young man, he met William Rufus King, who was what we might call flamboyantly gay, and they developed a lifelong relationship and often lived together. King was a senator from Alabama. So, over the course of their 23 years as

• 25:12Speaker 02

  a couple, they would often socialize in Washington and they were known as Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan or Aunt Nancy and Miss Fancy. So those were terms usually used to denote gay men. And when King went to France to serve as US ambassador in the 1840s, Buchanan wrote to a friend that he was very lonely and that he'd gone a-wooing to several gentlemen, but they had all turned him down. So William Rufus King became vice president and died in 1853 and then a few years later Buchanan became president. And when Buchanan died, his nieces and nephews

• 25:53Speaker 02

  went through his papers and his desk and they were so horrified by whatever it was they found there that they lit a big bonfire in the backyard immediately.

• 26:02Kate Lister?

  No. No. As a sex historian, how often do we read that? That a family found papers after they died and then was so horrified they had to burn it? And we're always going, "No!"

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Right, right. And it happened with Warren Harding in the early 1920s. When he died, his wife found, you know, these 50-page pornographic letters that he had written and women had written him. And she took... Took her several days. There was a big bonfire in the backyard of the White House. And she'd come in after 12 hours of burning these things with soot and ashes all over her face.

• 26:37Kate Lister?

  12 hours?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, this went on for several days. And there were still so many more that she took all of these boxes of, you know, some of them were official White House documents to her friend's house across town. And they spent several more days burning them, which led Congress to pass the Official Records Act, that you cannot steal, or damage, or destroy any official records, because there's actually very few left from the Harding administration. She had burned them all, just to make sure all the pornographic stuff was gone.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  And me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, so Buchanan, for your money, and to be honest, I think I'm going to agree with you. He was a gay man, and it seems at the time it was well known. Now, there have been rumours, just whispery, sneaky rumours, about Abraham Lincoln, maybe he was a gay man. And what do you think of that?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Well, let's just examine the story and how it came about. When he was a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, he needed a couple of rooms to rent, and he Met a young man named Joshua Speed and they became roommates and they slept in a single bed, which was very customary for the time. People didn't have their own space the way we do now. If you were a young man, if you were a man traveling and booked a bed in an inn, you might find two or three other people in the bed, complete strangers. Now, that didn't mean you were having a gay orgy. It just meant that's, that's what the sleeping arrangements were for the time. Kings and queens in Europe almost always had a member

• 29:12Speaker 02

  of the same sex, a lady in waiting, or a gentleman of the bedchamber sleeping with them, if only for warmth in the winter. It was, it was usually so cold. So that's the story. They had a lifelong friendship. And then in 1999, a gay activist and historian net named Larry Kramer claimed that he had dug up Speed's diary and all of these salacious letters about him and his sexual relationship with Lincoln. He never showed them. And he wrote, he wrote a novel shortly afterward about this relationship. I think he was just doing this hoax to sell his novel. Now, if anyone found this material, that, that should

• 29:55Speaker 02

  be a nonfiction work, which would sell millions of copies. So I, I think that it's just a hoax.

• 30:03Kate Lister?

  The evidence for Lincoln then seems to be that he had, historians always, people take the mick out of us for going, they were just close friends. But he did have a very close friendship with this guy.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:15Kate Lister?

  Was it Speed? And they shared a bed and it wasn't just for a night. It was for quite a while that they were doing that. But that's sort of the, the extent of the evidence for that, isn't it? Really?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they were, they were roommates and, and good friends. I just, I don't see it as being a. A gay relationship, especially, you know, and the rumors didn't really come out till this man said he found the diary that he never showed anybody.

• 30:39Kate Lister?

  Oh, so there were no rumors at the time. It wasn't like with Buchanan where it was Miss Nancy and Miss Fancy.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  Nobody at the time. Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's mildly disappointing. I was really hoping there that you would say, yeah, he was definitely a fabulous gay man. Oh, do you know the one that I was really upset about was FDR. I thought he did stay faithful to his wife.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  No, and you know, I don't blame him to tell you the truth. I mean, that wasn't a situation like with Harding or with JFK where they were just sexually depraved. FDR, you know, he married, he was a wealthy socialite in New England and New York, and he married Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a distant cousin of his, because, you know, she was just very intelligent and very serious and not like the flighty debutantes. But soon after the wedding, they realized they were just very poorly suited to one another. He loved sex. She hated it. He liked feminine frilly women. With each year, she seemed to be getting

• 31:45Speaker 02

  a bit more masculine in her appearance and tastes. He had a great sense of humor. She had absolutely no sense of humor. And so, over time, he fell in love with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, and they had an affair. And what happened was Eleanor found out, instead, I'm going to divorce you. And he was very happy to divorce Eleanor, despite all of the children they had by that time. But his mother wanted him to become president and said, and she controlled the purse strings in the family. She said, you know, I'm never going to give you another dime. You're going to ruin your political career. So it was a political marriage from that point out. Eleanor never had sex with

• 32:29Speaker 02

  him again. And he soon started having an affair with his secretary, Missy Lahand. And then Lucy comes back into his life after he becomes president. She was actually With him the day he died in nineteen forty five and Eleanor was aware of it and had, you know, had her own relationships, but you know, it was a.

• 32:49Kate Lister?

  What did she have affairs?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Well, she had a gay affair with a woman named Hick, who was a reporter for a few years. She just became too busy, I think, as first lady to keep that going. And maybe she was afraid of scandal. But, you know, she supported Hick until her death. She got diabetes, Hick, she went blind. And Eleanor always took care of her and loved her. And then there were some rumors about some men, some dashing men too.

• 33:19Kate Lister?

  One of the ones I want to talk to you about is we're kind of drawing it to where we have going to have to stop talking about people because they're still alive. But Lyndon B. Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson. Now, one of the things I do know about, or at least I read it about him. Apparently he had a huge penis and he called it jumbo and liked to show it to people.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yes, when he got really mad at people, when he was in the Senate or the White House, he would take it out and wave it at them, I think, as a show.

• 33:47Kate Lister?

  So weird.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Very weird, but he was very, he was a big, tall man and a rugged Texan. He was crazy about his wife, Lady Bird, but he just couldn't help himself when it came to women. One day, Lady Bird, as first lady, comes walking into the Oval Office and he's there having sex with one of his secretaries on the sofa. And Lady Bird knew all about this and forgave him because she loved him and knew he couldn't help himself. So she just said, excuse me, and walked out. And Johnson was livid and had a buzzer installed so that his staff could ring it and let him know to pull his pants up by the time Lady Bird walked into the Oval Office. So that pretty much settled that.

• 34:32Kate Lister?

  Wow, that's, I mean.

• 34:36Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay, okay. Going forward for this, because I'm just thinking about powerful men, presidents and the sex that they have. Do you think that they will learn their lessons from history, mentioning no names in particular? But there are current sex scandals around presidents or former presidents that could threaten to take down an organisation. And I'm just wondering, now when we've got so much tabloid journalism and the internet and everything is under scrutiny in a way it's never been before, do you think it'll stop them?

• 35:07Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I think the hubris syndrome is too strong. It is a psychological disorder. It's like telling an addict, don't take that drug, or an alcoholic, hey, don't take this drink right in front of you. I also think, despite the scandals that have erupted in the past about a candidate's sexuality, ultimately, I don't think we care. When I look at, say, the Thomas Jefferson election, you know, he'd had a relationship and several children with his enslaved woman, but he doubled the size of the country and he was very popular. You know, the country was going very strong economically. They didn't care about his sex life. People vote for it in their own interests. Nowadays, we don't even really squeak and squawk as much as we did. I just don't think we care.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  When you look at certain public officials and all these scandals, people just don't care anymore. I do think it would be interesting, you know, when you look at female leaders around the world, I have never uncovered a sexual scandal with any of these women while in office, or even before, as far as I can remember. I mean, Maggie Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Theresa May, they don't have this history. I don't think that the overweening sexuality that comes with a hubris disorder and power attacks them in the same way that it does men.

• 36:32Kate Lister?

  And they would never be elected in the same way. Like, if a woman ran for the Prime Minister in the UK and she had multiple ex-partners and ex-husbands and wasn't even sure how many children she'd actually had. There's no way she would get elected. There's just no way.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Right, right. Which is my last book, Off With Her Head, Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power. The standards are just completely different for men and women.

• 36:57Kate Lister?

  And as a final question, in all the research that you've done about presidents' sex lives, not counting any who are living, was there any that were nice? Was there any that you looked into and you went, oh, he just really loved his partner and he just, yeah, and he was just happy to stay at home and there was no cheating? Was there anyone like that?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Jimmy Carter, who this week is celebrating his 100th birthday, he married when he was, what, 19 or 20? She was 18, Rosalind, she just died a year or two ago. They were together something like 80 years. That was probably the sweetest. The Reagans too really adored each other. And you know, the thing about these happily married presidential couples is that you don't really think about their marriages because they're not on the front pages of the newspapers.

• 37:47Kate Lister?

  Eleanor, you have been wonderful to talk to. Again, you always are. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?

• 37:54Speaker 02

  I'm at EleanorHerman.com. Look me up. I'd be happy to hear from you.

• 38:00Kate Lister?

  And we will get you back on when your next book is published. That sounds fascinating.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 38:06Kate Lister?

  Thank you for coming on again. You are wonderful.

• 38:12Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Eleanor for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. We've got episodes on everything from the real Sylvia Plath to gladiators, sex lives, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.