6 shocking presidential scandals that rocked the White House: from the Petticoat Affair to Clinton-Lewinsky
The history of the US presidency is littered with tales of extra-marital affairs and allegations of corruption. Jonathan Wright turns back the clock to examine half a dozen of the biggest presidential scandals to have engulfed the White House during the 19th and 20th centuries
The Petticoat Affair (1829–31)
Andrew Jackson
It might seem astonishing that so much political energy could be consumed by what came to be known as the Petticoat Affair, which began in 1829 when members of Andrew Jackson’s cabinet and their wives (dubbed the ‘Petticoats’) ostracised the secretary of war, John Eaton, and his wife, Peggy.
The couple had married just nine months after the death of Peggy’s first husband, John B Timberlake, a purser in the US Navy. This was a scandalously short period of mourning. Suspicions John and Peggy had been conducting a clandestine affair compounded the sense of impropriety, especially when combined with rumours Timberlake had taken his own life over the supposed liaison.
Politically, it might have been easier had Jackson followed his cabinet and distanced himself from Eaton. Instead, he took the Eatons’ side – perhaps because he himself had been bruised by accusations that he had lived in sin for a time with his late wife, Rachel (the pair had wed bigamously after mistakenly believing that Rachel’s divorce from her first husband had been granted).
The upshot was that Jackson, a man who had come to power off the back of being an energetic general in the War of 1812 against the British, found himself bogged down on a political battlefield. The Petticoat Affair rumbled on for 30 months until, eventually, Jackson found an opportunity to demand the resignation of most of his ineffective and fractious cabinet.
The Whiskey Ring (1875–76)
Ulysses S Grant
By 1875, Ulysses S Grant, the commanding general who had led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War, had been president for six years. While he personally worked diligently to push reforms, he led an administration that had become synonymous with sleaze, backroom deals and corruption.
The Whiskey Ring was among the worst of the scandals to beset Grant. The story first hit the news in May 1875 after the secretary of the treasury, Benjamin H Bristow, realised that millions of dollars in tax revenues due from whiskey distillers were never reaching the government’s coffers.
Instead, in a conspiracy centred on St Louis and involving prominent Republican politicians, government agents and those working in the liquor industry, the money was being stolen. At the centre of the criminality was General John McDonald, a man Grant had, in 1869, appointed as revenue collector of Missouri District.
Bristow and Grant’s attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont, set about bringing those involved in the conspiracy to justice. Not only did they secure 110 convictions, but they recovered $3 million in pilfered tax revenues.
Unfortunately for Grant, he received no political dividend from his officials’ work; his own private secretary, Orville E Babcock, was among those indicted. And while Babcock was found not guilty, Grant’s testimony on behalf of his friend was widely regarded as an embarrassment.
For many years, historians rated Grant as a poor president, but in recent years his contribution has been reassessed. For all his faults, Grant was an essentially honest man governing in a post-conflict era of huge turmoil.
The Teapot Dome scandal (1921–23)
Warren G Harding
In a mechanised era, the military needs fuel. Accordingly, when William Taft, during his presidency (1909–13), designated a number of oil-producing regions as naval reserves, it must have seemed a sensible idea. But as subsequent events proved, it was a decision that left space for corruption.
The Teapot Dome scandal began in 1921, when the president, Warren G Harding, issued an executive order transferring control of three oil fields, including the Teapot Dome field in Wyoming, from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. The order was implemented in 1922, at the behest of interior secretary Albert B Fall.
At this time, it was legal for drilling rights to be leased without competitive tender and, in late 1922, Fall leased oil production rights at Teapot Dome to the industrialist Harry F Sinclair of Mammoth Oil. Fall leased the Elk Hills and Buena Vista reserves to another tycoon, Edward L Doheny, in a similar fashion.
Not only were the leases highly favourable to the oilmen, but Fall personally benefited from the transactions, sums equivalent to millions of dollars today. But Fall wasn’t subtle enough in spending the bribes and his improved financial circumstances soon attracted suspicion.
What followed was a slow-burning scandal that, in 1929, resulted in Fall being found guilty of accepting bribes and sentenced to a year in jail. Congress gave itself the power view the tax records of any US citizen, regardless of their position. While Fall was to blame for what happened, the Teapot Dome scandal continues to stain the reputation of Harding, who died in office in 1923.
Watergate (1972–74)
Richard Nixon
The scandal that brought down Richard Nixon (and gave every subsequent scandal its suffix) began on 17 June 1972 with a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington DC. At a time when campaigning during the presidential election was in full swing, the offices housed the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
From this small beginning, things gradually unravelled. Five men were apprehended at Watergate. Money found on them was connected to the Committee for the Re-election of the President – CRP, an acronym that morphed into CREEP as news of slush funds and illegal wiretaps targeting the Democrats spread – a fund-raising organisation for Nixon.
In the immediate wake of the break-in, White House officials sought to cover up what had happened. This was at least in part because they were alarmed at connections between the five who had been detained and the ‘White House Plumbers’, a covert Special Investigations Unit charged with investigating and preventing leaks of secret information, but who came to be known as Nixon’s ‘fixers’.
How much Nixon knew specifically about the break-in ahead of time remains unclear but, not least because of reporting by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, he eventually came under near-intolerable pressure. Nixon’s habit of recording phone conversations and meetings didn’t help his cause either.
In 1974, the so-called ‘Smoking Gun’ tape was released, which proved Nixon and his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, had discussed a cover-up as early as 23 June 1972.
Facing impeachment, ‘Tricky Dickie’ resigned from office in August 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon, but the former president’s reputation was destroyed forever.
The Iran-Contra Affair (1985–87)
Ronald Reagan
The idea that, between 1981 and 1986, Ronald Regan’s administration secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran is, to say the least, counterintuitive. And yet, despite an arms embargo and the two nations’ habitually pugnacious stance towards each other, the US shipped more than 2,000 missiles to Iran without Congress being informed – at a time, moreover, when Iran was at war with its neighbour, Iraq.
There were two distinct strands to the story. The first is centred on the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). In 1982, as the conflict raged, the Islamist group Hezbollah had begun to take hostages, including Americans, in Lebanon. Hezbollah had strong links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the administration hoped that, in return for the arms, Iran would help secure the release of American hostages.
What to do with the money raised? Vietnam veteran Oliver North, a National Security Council staffer, came up with a cunning ruse, to give proceeds from the sales to the Contras, counterrevolutionaries opposed to the ruling – and Soviet-backed – Sandinistas in Nicaragua. From the administration’s perspective, the ploy was necessary because, in 1982, Congress had moved to limit US assistance to the Contras, a group notorious for its human rights atrocities.
In November 1986, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the US arms sales to Iran and, under political pressure, Reagan formed the Tower Commission to investigate what had happened. Although a final 1993 report by special counsel Lawrence Walshe found no direct evidence Reagan had known about aid going to the Contras, it highlighted how the Cold War warrior had “created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others”.
The Clinton-Lewinsky Affair (1998–99)
Bill Clinton
In a strong field, it remains one of the most infamous utterances ever made by an American president. On 26 January 1998, speaking at a press conference, Bill Clinton declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky.” There was just one problem: between 1995 and 1997, the president had most definitely been having an affair with Ms Monica Lewinsky, an intern.
The scandal that overshadowed the latter part of Clinton’s second term broke in part because of another case. In January 1998, civil servant Linda Tripp learnt that Lewinsky had sworn an affidavit in the Paula Jones case, in which Clinton had been sued for sexual harassment (a case settled in November 1998), and denied a physical relationship with Clinton. Tripp, Lewinsky’s confidante and co-worker, had secretly recorded conversations that contradicted this denial.
Tripp delivered the tapes to Ken Starr, then investigating Clinton on other matters such as the Whitewater controversy, centred on real estate investment made by the Clintons. Via such salacious details as a semen-stained dress, the Republican-dominated House impeached Clinton in December 1998. He was accused of “high crimes and misdemeanours”.
A trial in the Senate followed, but a two-thirds majority was required for conviction and Clinton’s removal from office. He survived to complete his presidency, although the vice president, Al Gore, blamed his own defeat in the 2000 presidential election partly on what had happened. In 2018, Monica Lewinsky wrote an essay for Vanity Fair in which she looked back. Her older self, she said, regarded the affair as a “gross abuse of power” on Clinton’s part.
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