BOOKS WRITTEN BY THE MISTRESSES OF PRESIDENTS

It's a bit unclear why I should even care about this subject since I couldn't be farther from the demographic (I'm an old tubby small town former cleric. The group addressed here is announced in the title:  "I Read Every Memoir by a Presidential Mistress. Including Stormy’s" by Bill Scher in Politico.com, a bold website.  Clearly the gloves are off, so part of the attraction is finding out what has been censored.  My friend calls me "Miss Marple" because of my appetite for such things, which is linked in my experience with the opening of doors into another world, sort of like learning to read.

I've talked earlier about some of the things revealed to Animal Control officers and other emergency responders like police or ambulance attendants.  AC was specific about bestiality though at the time I was there no law existed against it.  When "Blaze Starr" had an act with two great dane dogs, the police asked us for help, suggesting cruelty to animals, but all we could say was to consider the expressions of the dogs.  They seemed happy.

But we also sort of accidentally knew who was sleeping around "humanly."  That is, big shots and politicians.  This was the time period when the mayor was screwing the babysitter (13), something that has haunted him ever since.  He had a second marriage after that which has been removed from Wikipedia.  About the same time we once spent an interesting hour watching a county commissioner with his lady friend in a nearby booth.  He was a regular every close-of-business in this hotel bar.

It was less interesting to realize that the stuff on our AC truck seats was semen.  The manager at that time was earlier than the conscientious one that replaced him.  The earlier one was separated and believed in taking advantage of sex workers since he had the money, not from the job but from an inheritance.  He was related to a county commissioner.

This was the beginning of the sexual revolution, but it was a very mixed and incomplete change.  One of the first sermons I heard at the First Unitarian Church was a guest preacher, a female and highly prestigious lawyer, who made an impassioned plea to save a handsome young man who had gotten his underaged girl friend pregnant.  I still remember this sleek older woman's vivid description of his despair behind bars and her belief that he had been prevented from his noble natural destiny.  She didn't say anything about the girl.  I remember her own fine suit and flashing jewelry.  Like Trump, she simply didn't consider the offence that important.

There are revelations in this article by Bill Scher, who is liberal but on his own terms.  I haven't read any of these books, but I'll make you a list of what he read and treated as much literarily as historically and politically.  If you want to read the article, here you go: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/30/stormy-daniels-memoir-220804

"Full Disclosure" by Stormy Daniels

"Passion and Betrayal" by Gennifer Flowers

"My Story" by Judith Exner

"The President's Daughter" by Nan Britton

"Past Forgetting" by Kay Summersby Morgan

"Love, Jack" by Gunilla von Post

"Once Upon a Secret" by Mimi Alford

"Texas in the Morning" by Madeleine Duncan Brown

From the article:  "It took 88 years, but DNA tests showed that Britton was telling the truth when she said Warren Harding was the father of her daughter. Love letters revealed years after publication backed up the stories of Summersby’s wartime affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower and von Post’s pre-presidential fling with John F. Kennedy. Alford’s affair was documented in a 1964 oral history interview given by Kennedy’s deputy press secretary and publicized decades later by historian Robert Dallek."

Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower was written by Kay Summersby Morgan (with the help of ghostwriter Barbara Wyder)  Morgan wrote as she was dying of cancer.  Claims include Eisenhower's struggle with erectile disfunction and Truman, who evidently had no mistress and didn't consider it proper, denying Ike permission to divorce Mamie and marry Morgan. Lyndon Johnson, as we already knew, was crude and outrageous.  Once in Manhattan I happened into a dirty book store that included photos of famous woman getting out of cars with spread legs.  Part of the appeal of these books is like that, but there's more.

The Kennedy stories are sad.  In some ways it is a father/son story and it is the prospect of inheritors that curbs Jack's appetite.  It is tragic in the sense of a Greek tragedy that Jack Jr., his heir, evidently died of hubris, believing he could fly into a storm in a small under-equipped airplane.

This article's political relevance is obvious.  It makes Kavanaugh look juvenile and silly, which he is.  No adult mistress has been revealed.  Maybe he isn't important enough to attract one.  Maybe he prefers the company of men.  In the immature event we're examining he requires a witness or accomplice -- an act that is witnessed.  Boasting is natural to him, but it doesn't require actually achieving anything to boast about.

Notice that we still don't talk about male "misters" though there surely must have been some back through history.  Are there books?  Several by Renault.  I mean, this side of Greeks and Romans in the time of the Emperor?  My mother's favorite book as a high school girl was the pillowbook of an historical Chinese inamorata.  There has always been freedom to read about such distanced sexual power.  These tales were always related to politics, often at the level of war.  Or maybe just murder.  Consider Japanese movies and stories about theatre genres where men play women.

Often these stories are about power on the personal level, where one is big and the other is little.  The big uses and subsumes the skills of the little; the little is protected and present in the life of the big.  This is what worries me about Kavanaugh.  I don't care about his physical or even emotional sex life.  I worry that he's always been a "second" to powers, men who control him.  Emotionally he is so underdeveloped that he could be dangerous to mentors who feel betrayed.  There's such a thing as being so small that a big can easily dispense with him when he's no longer useful.  

So -- would Kavanaugh be useful on the Supreme Court?  Maybe, but already he has become a door into the world of the insane men pretending to be Republicans.  Maybe he could reveal the sex lives of his powerful controllers, but it would be Sampson pulling down the Temple on his own head.  Maybe it already is.  Classic drama.  Many books.