Greetings to Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights. American politics is highly partisan these days and every President in recent years have been subjected to allegations of sleaze and corruption. Conspiracy theories circulate with no basis in fact. But go back in history - and US Presidents were mired in very real scandal. From the 18th century onwards…
When I was eleven years old, President Nixon became the only President so far to step down because of scandal. The Watergate affair had lapped around the White House for over a year and finally implicated the man at the top.
It all started when five men were caught red-handed by police breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building in Washington DC as part of an illegal wiretapping operation.
An increasingly paranoid president had decided to play dirty against his political opponents. Listening to the White House tapes of Nixon’s conversations released after Watergate was fully exposed, it’s depressing to see the president sinking in a quagmire of his own making. Once he had committed to this criminal approach to politics - there was no going back.
Two Washington Post reporters - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - were given information on Watergate by a mysterious character they met in the shadows codenamed “Deep Throat”. Decades later revealed to be FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt - a man convicted in 1980 for illegally ordering agents to break into the homes of members of the militant organisation, the Weather Underground.
This was the biggest presidential scandal since the Teapot Dome affair under President Warren Harding in the 1920s. Harding’s problem was the people around him - the so-called “Ohio Gang”. Possibly the most notorious of these characters was Harding’s Attorney General, Harry Micajah Daugherty.
Daugherty had secured Harding’s nomination to run as the Republican candidate for president through some Machiavellian tactics in late night party negotiations that resulted in the term “smoke-filled room” - to mean, backroom deals. But that was nothing. This was a man who held high federal office and yet during Prohibition was accused of involvement in bootlegging. It’s hard not to chuckle at the sheer cheek of the man.
At a Senate Investigation Committee, it was alleged that Daugherty ran a kind of protection racket for bootleggers where they would turn up at a New York hotel room and drop the required amount of dollars into a fishbowl. It was claimed that US$7 million was collected. Meanwhile, Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was up to something arguably far worse.
His criminal activity became known as the Teapot Dome. In a nutshell, Fall arranged for two friends of his in the oil industry to obtain drilling leases on government owned Naval Reserves without a competitive tender. The lease terms were very generous and Fall’s friends lined his pockets accordingly with bribes. Unfortunately for Fall, this was all exposed and he was sent to prison for a year.
Another president who appointed dreadful people to top positions was Ulysses S. Grant. A war hero having commanded the Union forces during the American civil war, he was a sad proof that generals don’t necessarily transition into successful civilian leadership roles.
Several scandals erupted during his terms of office - 1869 to 1877. The Whisky Ring affair involved the illegal manipulation of liquor taxes by government officials, retailers and others to defraud the Treasury. The Credit Mobilier scandal centred on the creation of an investment firm that allowed the backers of the new Union Pacific Railroad to pay themselves twice the actual cost of construction. Kickbacks and fraud plagued the administration right up to the top and tarnished Grant’s record.
Sex scandals have always swirled around Washington DC. Power is after all a great aphrodisiac. One of the most unusual incidents was the accusation of bigamy against President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837). That is the claim that he was married to a woman who was already legally hitched to another man.
The woman in question was Rachel Donelson Jackson. The White House website still carries the official version of what happened:
“Rachel Donelson was a child of the frontier. Born in Virginia, she journeyed to the Tennessee wilderness with her parents when only 12. At 17, while living in Kentucky, she married Lewis Robards, of a prominent Mercer County family. His unreasoning jealousy made it impossible for her to live with him; in 1790 they separated, and she heard that he was filing a petition for divorce.
Andrew Jackson married her in 1791; and after two happy years they learned to their dismay that Robards had not obtained a divorce, only permission to file for one. Now he brought suit on grounds of adultery. After the divorce was granted, the Jacksons quietly remarried in 1794. They had made an honest mistake, as friends well understood, but whispers of adultery and bigamy followed Rachel as Jackson’s career advanced in both politics and war. He was quick to take offense at, and ready to avenge, any slight to her.”
Well, not everybody buys that account. Some believe that Rachel was a headstrong and plucky frontier spirit who left a going-nowhere husband and hooked up with the ambitious and driven Jackson. They eloped to what was then the Spanish-controlled town of Natchez in Mississippi and pledging allegiance to the King of Spain were able to bypass American bigamy laws.
Whatever the truth, Rachel conveniently died before Jackson’s inauguration - just as his enemies were plotting to use the bigamy smear against him. She was buried at Nashville in 1829 wearing the white dress made for her husband’s presidential inauguration - which she would never see. Her niece, Emily Donelson, was then invited to become Jackson’s First Lady - a rather unusual move by today’s standards.