Sex In The White House–Not This Time Around. Where Are JFK And Donald Trump When We Really Need Them?

The Biden White House is as buttoned-up, proper, and upright as any in recent memory.  Jimmy Carter, man of rectitude and propriety, was faithful to his wife although he admitted to having ‘lust in his heart’ and looked desirously at beautiful women.  Before that one has to go back to Harry Truman for faithfulness and before him Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Coolidge, McKinley and Hoover.   Obama was honest and true more than likely, especially since the last thing he wanted was to fire up the sexual prejudice that persisted against black men; but that’s it, a handful of faithful of all the forty-six presidents, at least as far as the historical record and press archives suggest. 

On the other hand, feminists who trust no man, say ‘nothing doing’ - every president has his side dishes, only some are more careful than others in concealing them.  Henry Kissinger who was proudly open about his sexual life famously said that power was ‘the ultimate aphrodisiac’, referring both to women’s attraction to powerful men and those men’s supercharged sexual desire. The fact that this fat, ugly intellectual whom no woman would look twice at, was surrounded by women who wanted nothing more than to experience his White House lightening, attested to the fact.

McKinley’s fidelity was especially known because of his loving and special care for his dying wife – a duty he never neglected even at his most preoccupied.   Of course even that moral story has to be looked at with some circumspection given Kissinger’s aphorism and the tomcatting of Senator and Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich who cheated on his cancer-ridden, dying wife.  So maybe McKinley was as constant in his devotion as the public and press had assumed; or maybe it was only a good cover for his own sly dalliances.

One presumes that most of the most faithfully dutiful presidents must have had pre-marital affairs, although most people wrongly assumed that no woman would ever look twice at parson Coolidge or nuts-and-bolts Hoover. Jimmy Carter was married at age 22, one month after he graduated from the Naval Academy, and one assumes that his rectitude and prim sexual propriety did not take leave during his time at Annapolis; so he probably never joined in his classmates’ midshipman flings on the Patuxent, but again, given men’s nature, that was unlikely.  

The movie An Officer and a Gentleman offers a pop culture peek into Navy goings on.  The local girls were all hot to hook a flyer training at flight school in Pensacola and for trainees the booty was tempting indeed.  It couldn’t have been much different in Annapolis in 1946.  In any case what can be sure that Carter repented for whatever sinful dalliances he might have had, straightened out, and returned to the straight and narrow when he met Rosalynn.

Harry Truman, a man of good Midwestern stock, and born and bred with the same solid Protestantism as Carter, might well have had a farm girl or two in the hay loft; but his sexual propriety and overt faithfulness to Bess during his White House years suggested otherwise.  Some men, women concluded despite their best instincts, are just good, plain and simple.

Given Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood career, there is no doubt that he like all other male stars of the studio era bedded bright, young starlets.  His charming and disingenuous screen character was apparently well suited to Reagan the President, and women must have found him particularly appealing. George Bush II, given his alcoholic bad boy youth, came clean about his sexual misadventures not with any Kissinger-esque pride but out of repentance.  The born-again Bush was heartily sorry for his sins and would never again commit them. Or so he says.  The history of male behavior belies the notion.

All of which to say is that Joe Biden most certainly had groupies on his way up the political ladder as much as any other politician in those uncensored times, but found the climate changed and inhospitable to stepping out.  In fact as he rose higher and higher in the political ranks of Washington, and especially when he served as Vice President to Obama, he saw that sexual opportunities were things of the past.

By the time he became President, the mood of the country had gone more hysterically fanatical than old Salem, and righteous latter-day progressive preachers went after even the suggestion of sexual impropriety.  Men were drawn and quartered, strung up, and burned at the stake, caught up in a wave of sanctimony and moral opprobrium.  No Means No morphed into MeToo, and women everywhere called for castration.  Not going to touch that, Biden said, not with a ten-foot pole.

Of course Biden was pushing eighty when he took the oath of office and has more and more seemed distracted and absent.  Sex is certainly the last thing on his mind, however apt and competent that mind might be.  Not only is sexual impropriety an emasculating sin, but everything is sinful in the current political climate.  The Left’s banging and hammering about race, gender, and ethnicity; its colorless, featureless, and humorless Puritanical, dissembling cant; and its dogged, pant-leg obstinacy are everywhere; and the White House has bought – embraced – the nonsense  with no exception.  The Oval Office and both wings of the White House have been transformed into the progressive movement’s showrooms and have become the most dour, cheerless, and dismal places on Pennsylvania Avenue.

So not only is sex gone, it is disparaged as a macho tool for oppression, abuse, and neglect.  It can be talked about and referred to only if such comments refer to this innate, distorted, brutal male expression. Not a fun place to be.

Not only were the Donald Trump years notable for his aggressive pursuit of a conservative social, economic, financial, and international agenda, they were cheered for their political incorrectness, their glitz and glamour, their unabashed embrace of beautiful women, pageantry, yachts, and money.  Trump, never accused of sexual dalliance during his presidency made it clear that it just wasn’t his thing for the moment.  After all, he said, he had squired the most beautiful, the most elegant, the most sexually endowed women on the planet before he arrived in Washington.  He had a model, runway-ready young wife, and was surrounded by the best, the brightest, and most alluring women of the country.

The Trump years were halcyon years of delightful excess, showmanship, Las Vegas glitter, and movie fantasy.  As much as the Eastern establishment hated Trump, his entourage, and all that he stood for (i.e. not Main Line Philadelphia, Park Avenue, Beacon Hill, or Groton Long Point), middle America (Walmart, McDonalds, and Piggly Wiggly) loved him.  They wanted to be him, wanted his arm candy, his resorts, and his penthouses.  Two jobs, three kids, a trailer, and rattletrap beater car – hell no, give us what he has.

There were no holds barred at the White House, nothing incorrect, nothing off limits.  The President let fly his zingers at will.  He was as hilarious as Jackie Mason, Henny Youngman, or any of the Borscht Belt crowd.  He was defiant of the unctuous and smug progressive harpies, dismissive of their claims and fanciful propositions. He was shamelessly and defiantly macho. 

America misses him, especially since they see what the children’s crusade has wrought – a dour, spiritless White House giving away bags of money, touting unholy sexual transformation, dismissing religion and faith as foundational principles, and looking dazed and confused on the world stage.

Most Americans today are too young to appreciate JFK’s sexual allure– his bedding of starlets and spies; ingenues and matrons; daughters and wives.  Kennedy was young, handsome, and alluring; and the public loved him for his grace, charm, wit, and sexual allure.  The press kept his affairs quiet, but there was no way of keeping his adventures behind closed doors.  Despite his patrician, Harvard past; despite his wealth and family influence, he was America’s president. America felt good about having this virile, sexually active, and confident man in the White House.

Kennedy was a European man, a president like France’s Sarkozy and Mitterrand, both of whom made no bones about their lovers.  Who said that a French president, just because he is president, must lose that ooh-la-la French thing, that cinq-a-sept ethos, that sexual permissiveness and rejection of Anglo-Saxon sexual opprobrium?

So, here we are, trapped for four years in the humorless, forbidding Biden years; the sexless, emasculated, emotionally skeletal years.  But already one year has past, Biden has not surprisingly faltered, and the chances of a Trump re-election are looking very good indeed.  So, a little patience, and a second round of the halcyon years will return.