there is a theory that when came Hart-time, the journalistic profession was swollen with people who'd watched the film All The President's Men, and who went into journalism primarily because they wanted to Get a president, just like Robert Redford.

But instead of exposing Nixon-like criminality, they obsessed over ephemera, like where Gary Hart happened to park his penis. This nonsense of course culminated, some years later, in the literal lunacy of the House of Representatives actually impeaching a penis.

I suppose someone could make a pretty penny, inscribing a tome with a title something like The Presidential Penis.

There was JFK, who snorted cocaine off Marilyn Monroe's thighs down by the White House swimming pool. Who also liked to take his wife's personal secretary up against the wall. And who, when "the little death" approached, as he bucked beneath some lass astride him in the bath, would summon a Secret Service agent to suddenly thrust the woman's head underwater, thereby inducing vaginal contractions that increased the intensity of the presidential orgasm.

Somehow none of this made the nightly news at the time.

Lyndon Johnson's sexual appetites, which ranged from gleefully cuckolding major campaign-contributors to grinningly twisting the nipples of women randomly encountered in elevators, seeped into ink only in a 1961 roman-a-clef by former Johnson Senate staffer William Frammer, The Gay Place, with only Murray Kempton publicly pointing out the connection between the book's "Arthur Fenstemaker," and LBJ.

Only when his superiors threatened to drum him out of the service did Dwight Eisenhower abandon his plans to divorce wife Mamie and marry the British jeep driver he'd cohabited with throughout World War II; over the years Harry Truman, among others, spread the news to dozens of reporters and intimates, but the story never entered print until Merle Miller’s 1968 Plain Speaking.

Warren G. Harding, the Bill Clinton of his time ("it is a good thing I am not a woman," Harding once confessed, "as I would always be pregnant, for I cannot say no"), could endure with smirking good humor the occasional allusive eruption from the odd outraged journalist—editor William White once denounced him as a "he-harlot"—for he knew that no scribe of the day would go public with details of his extended sexual relationship with Carrie Phillips, both parties married to other people, or reveal that while president he frequently smuggled into the White House Nan Britton, who first conceived an attraction for Harding when she was 12, and who gave birth to his daughter Elizabeth Ann in 1919, the year before Harding entered the White House. Harding and Britton most often got jiggy in a darkened coat closet off the Oval Office; then he would send her away, stocking-tops stuffed with money. Britton gathered in additional coin via an office job proffered by Harding's friends at US Steel.

Upon receiving the 1884 Democratic nomination for president, Grover Cleveland was accused by an obscure Buffalo newspaper of siring an "illegitimate" child. Cleveland settled on a novel response: telling the truth. He admitted the "youthful indiscretion," stated he financially supported the boy, and immediately became the vortex of a vicious campaign in which Republican operatives roamed the streets chanting "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" and paid young boys to attend Cleveland rallies, worm up close to the stage, and tug on Cleveland's pantleg while plaintively whining, "Daddy! Daddy!"

George Washington, who married Martha solely for her money, dallied with at least seven women during the "Revolutionary" War alone. One was a British spy, who, after she left his bed, promptly reported Georgie's pillow-talk to her British handlers. Amusingly, Washington, known as "the father of his country," was in fact sterile, and so could not, in truth, father anyone at all.

Etc.

very amusing. Your sudden and touching fidelity to "[c]onventional understanding."

Try this one:

The letter is marked "personal and private" and is addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary, Grace Tully, who was with the ailing chief executive in Warm Springs, Ga., that Thursday in 1945.

The writer was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who decades before had been FDR's mistress and who now was making arrangements for what would be their last fateful meeting at the president's rural retreat.

Elegantly handwritten, the letter never mentions Roosevelt by name—her love letters to him had been their undoing a quarter-century earlier. He is just "the subject," or "the 'B,' " for boss. But the arrangements worked out, and a week later the two former lovers were together again on the day he died.

But by the 1940s, the affair had secretly been rekindled. Rutherfurd apparently began visiting the White House, under the code name Mrs. Paul Johnson, Goodwin has written.

In April 1945, Rutherfurd arranged for herself and an artist friend to visit FDR in Warm Springs, where the artist would paint the president's portrait. In the letter to Tully, Rutherfurd explains the details, asking, "will you ask the 'B' if that meets with his approval?"

"If you change your mind and think it would be better for me not to come—call me up," Rutherfurd wrote. "I really am terribly worried—as I imagine you all are."
Roosevelt, though only 63, was in extremely poor health, appearing gaunt and exhausted in photographs at the time.

Rutherfurd's concern was not misplaced. Seven days later, as the president chatted with her and the artist worked on his portrait, he collapsed. Rutherfurd quickly departed. FDR died about three hours later.