Some friends and I last night were discussing various president’s pecadillos and wondering why no First Lady ever dumped her husband. Off the top of my head I know that FDR, JFK and Clinton cheated on their wives. I’m not sure about LBJ (he had an affair while a congressman and married the woman but I’m not sure how he behaved while in office). Perhaps there were other presidents diddling women other than their wives but I don’t know.
One possibility that came up (and the reason for this thread) was whether a woman could sue the president of the United States for a divorce. We all had a vague notion that the President is immune to civil suits while in office (correct me if we were wrong about that). We also figured a divorce constitutes a civil suit. As such, if the president is unwilling to give his wife a divorce (or vice versa if a woman were ever president) is the woman just SOL till he leaves office?
[sub]Note: We realized there can be many other reasons for a wife to stay with her husband. She might forgive him, she might simply like the power of being first lady and unwilling to give that up and so on. IIRC Eleanor Roosevelt held FDR’s affair over his head (blackmail) and pushed FDR into some social reforms Eleanor wanted to see happen that FDR likely would not have done himself. At least that’s a story I heard. [/sub]
I thought the Paula Jones thing (if that’s the one) was allowed to continue because the issue occurred before he was president. Even then I thought this was open to debate whether he could be sued. I’m still pretty sure the president is generally immune from civil suits while in office (maybe even criminal prosecution but I don’t know and certainly these things can wait and get the president upon his leaving office either via impeachment or normally).
As for Eleanor I got the story from some feminazis who weren’t so much opposed to FDR as they were fans of Eleanor. Generally these women were well eduactaed and didn’t usually make stuff up but considering the source I’ll accept it may well be untrue till I hear better confirmation.
I thought the Paula Jones thing (if that’s the one) was allowed to continue because the issue occurred before he was president. Even then I thought this was open to debate whether he could be sued. I’m still pretty sure the president is generally immune from civil suits while in office (maybe even criminal prosecution but I don’t know and certainly these things can wait and get the president upon his leaving office either via impeachment or normally).
As for Eleanor I got the story from some feminazis who weren’t so much opposed to FDR as they were fans of Eleanor. Generally these women were well eduactaed and didn’t usually make stuff up but considering the source I’ll accept it may well be untrue till I hear better confirmation.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in their unanimous decision for Paula Jones in Clinton v. Paula Jones, said,
That the alleged misconduct occurred before Clinton became president is only mentioned in passing; it does not seem to have been important in the Court’s decision.
Walloon:
I’m no legal expert but reading what you quoted gives me the impression a wife could sue the President for divorce as it is not related to official acts he has done as regards the office of the President (getting a blowjob in the Oval Office I don’t think counts). I would also gather that if the President punched me for no reason I could sue him.
That’s how I would interpret it. The family of someone who died in the Gulf War couldn’t sue George Bush for wrongful death for sending the guy over there, because that was an official act. He was acting as the POTUS, not as George Bush. If, however, he walked up and punched me, he would be acting as an individual, not as the office he holds.
As for the FDR thing, I did a research paper on Eleanor Roosevelt in high school. All the sources I could find agreed on two facts: FDR died in the company of his mistress, and Eleanor was a driving force in a lot of the social policies he set. Most of the stuff I read put it more in the view of her making suggestions over the dinner table than blackmail, but that may have just been more flattering to her. I don’t know.
I have to wonder, though, how she could have blackmailed him, as I was under the impression that his indiscretions were pretty public knowledge anyway. If everyone already knew, she couldn’t have very well threatened to call in the press. What would the threat have been? The stigma of divorce, maybe?
CrazyCatLady, I have never heard that FDR’s dicking around was public knowledge. To me, public knowledge implies that the general populace was aware of the fact that FDR was unfaithful, which is something I have never seen proof of.
Whack-A-Mole,
LBJ most certainly dicked around on Lady Bird.
Nixon had an affair with a close associate of Mao’s.
Isenhower was banging the shoes off of his secretary all through WWII and continued to do so after he got in the White House.
Regarding Presidential affairs, there was Dwight Eisenhower’s long affair with his WAC driver, Kay Summersby. That lasted from WWII all the way thru his 2 terms as President.
And to go way back, Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave Sally Hemings is well documented – there are living Hemings descendents whose DNA connects them to the Jeffersons.
Hello?? He married the woman?? He and Lady Bird married before he went to Congress, she’s still alive, and they never divorced. I don’t think bigamy was among his vices, though screwin’ around on Cousin Claudia Alta was one of them…
She actually loved the man, and stayed with him no matter what. Bless her heart, she married a schoolteacher and ended up as First Lady, something she never wanted.
Personally, i’da done blowed his butt off with a shotgun…
In some sense, this is a really strange question. The First Ladies who stayed married despite their husbands’ infidelities did so for the same reason that most married woman then, especially fairly well-off ones, stayed married even if their husbands were unfaithful. Did you honestly think that fifty to a hundred years ago that there was less adultery? People screwed around then just as much as now, even though there was less divorce. People didn’t get divorced as much because there was too much social embarrassment involved in divorce, even in those places where it was legal. The people who weren’t well-off sometimes simply ran off with their lovers, leaving their spouse to spend the rest of their life calling themselves “widows” or “widowers,” even though many people knew that their spouse wasn’t really dead. Others simply decided to do their best to publicly ignore the adultery. The more well-off the couple was, the harder it was for them to get divorced because it involved so much social and financial problems. Besides, a First Lady had even bigger problems with divorcing her husband. She knew that she would be destroying his political career if his adultery became public, and she respected him enough politically (even if not personally) that she didn’t want to do that.
This keeps coming up so it is important to note that the affair is neither well documented nor does any solid proof exist that Jefferson fathered any children at all by Sally Hemings. While some groups have concluded that the 1998 DNA analysis of descendents other members of the Jefferson family along with other evidence indicates that Jefferson was the father of Sally’s last child, Eston, other groups have come down hard on the other side.
No matter what the scholars say, most people today who have heard of the matter probably believe that Jefferson had an affair with his slave. Most people probably believe the story about Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, too. There’s probably nothing about Kennedy or Clinton that people won’t believe.
We’ve moved from a cultural belief that people as distinguished as the presidents weren’t guilty of sins to a belief that any rumors about them were true.
I expect that the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.
Thomas Jefferson was not cheating on his wife during his Presidency. He was a widower by the time he was elected. He never remarried, so whatever his relationship with Sally Hemings was, it wasn’t adultery.
To further complicate the issue, Sally Hemings was Martha Jefferson’s half-sister. Martha’s father, John Wayles, was also Sally’s father, by one of John’s slaves.
