Top 5 Presidential Scandals of All Time
by Aya Katz
Both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates at the moment are so scandal-ridden that it is hard to choose which of them would be more of a public-relations disaster for the presidency if the American public were gullible enough to vote them into office.
Donald Trump is a foul-mouthed womanizer, who we suspect is less than a stellar businessman, having gone bankrupt several times. In the good old days, a single bankruptcy would have been enough to send a man to debtor’s prison, and any gentleman worth his salt would rather commit suicide than admit to defrauding others by incurring debts that he could not possibly ever repay. But Donald Trump has boasted that his frequent bankruptcies are simply sound business practice.
Hillary Clinton is responsible for several openly acknowledged breaches of security during her tenure as Secretary of State, and she has been accused of being responsible, through her negligence, for the death of Ambassador Stevens and foreign service operative Sean Smith in the 2012 Benghazi attack. Clinton is also widely feared for the way people connected to her and her husband Bill Clinton keep dying under mysterious circumstances in the wake of the many scandals that each has been involved in. It seems that this year, the two front runners for the office of president are rife with scandal.
But we have had presidential scandals before, to be sure. Here are the top five.
5. Andrew Jackson’s Marriage and the Petticoat Affair Scandals
Democrats are often cited for presidential scandals involving affairs of the heart and womanizing, rather than financial misdeeds, which are traditionally the forte of Republican presidents. As our first Democrat president, Andrew Jackson began the long tradition of scandalizing the American people by failing to live up to the standards of the Moral Majority in the area of marriage. But it is worth noting that Jackson did many other things that violated the constitutional rights of Americans, and none of these was considered scandalous. For instance, during the Battle of New Orleans, when Jackson was a mere general, he suspended habeas corpus, instituted martial law, confiscated arms and other property from citizens and imprisoned members of the press and elected officials who dared to stand up to him about these violations of civil liberties. Though Jackson was fined for his bad deeds, he later contrived to get the American people to pay the fine for him, through an act of Congress.
Andrew Jackson was also responsible for the Trail of Tears in which he killed many native Americans by sending them on forced marches. That, too, was never considered a scandal. But when it turned out the Jackson’s wife Rachel had not been properly divorced from her first — abusive — husband before she and Andrew Jackson began to live together as husband and wife, this became a scandal of major proportions.
In 1791 Rachel and Andrew married for the first time. Rachel’s ex-husband then sued her for adultery. It was not until 1794 when her divorce was finalized, that Rachel was able to marry Andrew Jackson legally. Thirty years later, when Jackson was running for president, this suddenly became an issue again.
While Democrats are often accused of adultery, it is worthwhile to note how wholesome and innocent Jackson’s version of adultery actually was. He was never unfaithful to his wife. Nor was Rachel thought to have had some kind of clandestine affair. They were both living together openly in a committed relationship as husband and wife, when it turned out that the paperwork on her prior divorce had not been properly filed. This pales in comparison to John F. Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe or Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. That the American people found Jackson’s marriage to be more scandalous than the Trail of Tears is not a credit to our sense of right and wrong.
When other presidential scandals during Jackson’s administration broke along similar lines, in the Petticoat Affair, it is to Andrew Jackson’s credit that he stood by his cabinet member, John Eaton, the Secretary of War, whose wife was said to have been unfaithful to her first husband prior to his death. The Petticoat Affair led to Jackson’s break with Vice President Calhoun, so powerful was the ostracism that the second lady Floride Calhoun and all the wives of the other cabinet members undertook against Margaret Eaton and her husband, the Secretary of War. Jackson, aware that the innuendo against Margaret Eaton was a replay of what had happened to his own wife during his election campaign, replaced Vice President Calhoun with Martin Van Buren, who was the only member of the cabinet to side with the Eatons. This eventually paved the way for the Van Buren presidency.
4. Ulysses S. Grant’s Black Friday, Credit Mobilier and Whiskey Ring Scandals
As a staunch Republican, Ulysses S. Grant led the nation with a number presidential scandals that involved financial corruption and schemes to profit off of government power. No adultery for him! Instead, he reveled in the sort of government cronyism that has characterized the Federal government ever since the Civil War.
During Reconstruction, the US government issued fiat greenbacks not covered by gold, which people were required to accept in payment for Federal debt. It was generally believed at the time that eventually the government would redeem the fiat money by paying gold for it.
Black Friday 1869 was Grant’s first presidential scandal. Responding to businessmen James Fisk and Jay Gould’s attempts to corner the market on gold, thus raising its price, Grant flooded the market with government gold, causing many to lose considerable sums of money as the price of gold plummeted. Many people lost their savings, and it was seen at the time as scandalous that the president of the United States should act against the interests of the public as a direct market participant trying to influence the value of commodities, using Federally owned gold. Since then this scenario has been enacted countless times, as fiat currency has become the norm rather than the exception. Every time the price of gold rises, encouraging investors to buy gold, rather than leave their money in fiat currency, the US government floods the market with gold in order to make people rely on fiat money, instead. It’s good to remember the Republicans started this, whenever they claim theirs is the party of fiscal responsibility.
Other presidential scandals ensued. Credit Mobilier was a construction company in which Grant’s Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, and many members of Congress owned stock. When it was discovered that Credit Mobilier had been paying kickbacks to the Vice President, the Secretary of the Treasury and other politicians in order to charge the First Transcontinental Railroad unusually high rates, the scandal broke. The reason it was possible for business to be conducted in this way was that the United States government had financed the railroad under the Pacific Railroad Act. When people today talk about robber barons in the context of building the railroads across the US, they forget that this was not the free market at work, but a classic example of crony capitalism.
In the Whiskey Ring scandal, government officials were found to be pocketing Whiskey taxes. Grant moved swiftly against all those caught red-handed, except, of course, his personal secretary, Orville B. Babcock, whom he spared.
All in all the Grant presidential scandals fit well into the stereotype of the sorts of sins against the public that Republicans can be expected to commit. There is less sex but lots more financial chicanery.
3. Grover Cleveland — “Ma, ma, Where’s My Pa”
As a true Democrat, Grover Cleveland contributed to our lore of presidential scandals by fathering a son out-of-wedlock. No financial shenanigans for him!
When he was running for office, the news broke that Cleveland had had an affair with a widow named Maria C. Halpin, who gave birth to his son, Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Cleveland was paying child support for his son, who was placed in a orphanage, after his mother could not care for him.
The chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”, was an early form of negative advertising in the presidential political campaign of 1884. But since Cleveland was honest and admitted what he had done and took responsibility for his son, the attempt to smear him backfired, and he won the election.
2. Warren G. Harding’s Teapot Dome
Since Warren G. Harding was a Republican, you can well imagine that his contribution to our store of presidential scandals was of a financial nature, but not staying quite true to the Republican standard, Harding also had a few mistresses, one of whom managed to involve him in scandal posthumously. However, Harding’s romantic scandal did not break until after he had died, while his financial scandal broke while he was in office, its the Teapot Dome Scandal that counts.
In the Teapot Dome scandal, Albert Fall, Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, sold rights to Federally owned oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming and other locations in return for personal payments to himself of money and cattle. When Fall was caught, tried and sentenced to jail, this did not reflect well on Harding. The problem, of course, was not simply corruption, but the fact that the Federal government had oil reserves to sell, in the first place. People do not get in trouble if they are selling oil rights to something they themselves own. But when the government owns something of value, all bets are off.
Of all Harding’s mistresses, Nan Britton was the one who helped tarnish his name. In 1928, after Harding had died, Britton revealed in a book that Harding had fathered her daughter Elizabeth Ann Britton Harding Blaesing, while he was serving in the senate, a year before he was elected president. At the time, this was not necessarily taken as a proven fact, but the allegation have since been confirmed by DNA testing.
Until the Watergate Scandal broke, Harding was considered one of our worst presidents in terms of scandal.
1. Richard Nixon and the Watergate Scandal
Richard Nixon broke the mold on the usual Republican presidential scandals. He was not caught trying to make money off the government like the Republican wrongdoers before him, nor was he unfaithful to his wife, along the lines of the Democratic tradition of presidential scandals. Instead, Nixon was caught spying on others, something that government regularly does today, without creating any sort of scandal.
In 1972 five men were caught breaking into the Watergate Complex, where the Democratic National Headquarters were housed. Their purpose was not to steal anything. They were breaking in to wiretap. They were engaged in “campaign intelligence.” They wanted to know what the rival political party was planning. When it was learned that this intelligence gathering mission was approved of and overseen by the president, Nixon resigned. He has gone down in current history books as our most crooked president. But was he?
Today, the NSA spies on each of us all the time. When Edward Snowden revealed the magnitude of the violation of all our rights, the government labeled him a traitor and a criminal. This did not cause a scandal for the current administration nor the one before it. Nobody is scandalized all. It’s business as usual.
We still like our scandals, but they usually revolve around small time titillation. Somebody said something lewd, or somebody did something crude. Or money was stolen or somebody took a bribe or did not report income on his or her tax forms. But the real scandal is that we are allowing all our rights to be abrogated, while arguing which flavor of corruption we like best: Democrat or Republican.