Presidential Divorce

Divorce And The Presidency: Adlai Stevenson To The Present

The news of the death of Happy Rockefeller, the second wife and widow of former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, brings to mind the issue of “domestic bliss” or the lack of it in our politicians, past and present.

Rockefeller was thought to be the leading Republican candidate for President in 1964, but when he divorced his first wife and married his second wife, his chances for the nomination evaporated very quickly.

Only Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, had been a nominee and been divorced before Rockefeller’s situation came along a decade later.

This did not mean that there were never liaisons and love triangles before, as Warren G. Harding had been cheating on his wife, but never had thought of divorce.

And Franklin D. Roosevelt had stayed with Eleanor Roosevelt, knowing that if he divorced her, his chances for a political career were over.

There was plenty of sexual “hanky panky” throughout American history, without any thought of divorce, including, besides Harding and FDR the following: Franklin Pierce, James A. Garfield, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton, and others.

But none of them ever considered divorce seriously, and Stevenson was hurt by his divorce, as was Rockefeller.

But that changed when Ronald Reagan ran in 1980, and had been divorced more than 30 years earlier.

And since Reagan, we have had Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain, all divorced, but nominated by their parties, although no other divorced person has been elected President.

So divorce, so common in politics now, is no longer an issue, as it was throughout our history!

The Issue Of Presidential Sexual Scandals And The Candidacy Of Newt Gingrich

The controversy surrounding former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s private life has multiplied, with the revelation by his second wife of Newt’s desire for an “open marriage”, so that he could carry on an affair with the woman who became his third wife, since his second wife disagreed with his desire for an open marriage. This issue arose when the second wife was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, just as the move by Newt to divorce his first wife came when she was diagnosed with cancer.

Have Presidential candidates and Presidents before now been involved in sex scandals? Of course, the answer is yes, but only becoming public knowledge and controversy in the past 25 years with the candidacies of Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, and Newt Gingrich, and the planned but aborted candidacies of Mark Sanford and John Ensign.

Have Presidents had affairs in the past, in or out of office? Of course yes is the answer, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Buchanan, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, that we are aware of. But ONLY Bill Clinton was revealed to be involved in such scandals before he was elected, and during his Presidency, as news and gossip on other Presidents was kept well hidden from the news media and the general public.

Have Presidents or Presidential candidates ever been divorced? The answer is yes, although only Ronald Reagan has been elected. But Adlai Stevenson, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain all were married for the second time when they ran for the White House.

Has any candidate ever been married THREE times, and openly cheated on his first two wives, other than Newt Gingrich? The answer is NO, and the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich is that he pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-1999 while pursuing his own affair outside of marriage.

No President or Presidential candidate has openly pursued the idea of a “open marriage”, although one could argue that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, at the least, seemed to accept such a concept in the sense that they knew their husbands were involved in cheating and did not choose to break up their marriages.

Other First Ladies and wives of Presidential candidates MAY have silently agreed to their husbands committing adultery and staying married, but that is all speculation at best.

The point is that the second wife of Newt Gingrich, in revealing the “open marriage” idea of her former husband, made it clear that Newt had said that Callista, the third wife, had no problem with “sharing” Newt.

So what this means is that IF Callista Gingrich becomes First Lady, we will have the first acknowledged believer in an open marriage, who has no concept of a problem with adultery. In the past, there were choice words for such a woman, which will not be used here. It indicates the likelihood of an “open marriage” between Callista and Newt from the beginning of their marriage, and the excellent possibility that there would be sex scandals in the White House, something we do not need to occur, or to learn about.

In a country in which many “religious” people claim to believe in the sanctity of marriage, and the importance of “family values”, to have Newt and Callista Gingrich in the White House would be a mockery of the concept of marriage and loyalty, and a degradation of the Presidency as an institution.

And for conservatives, such as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh to ignore this, and to support Newt, indicates the total hypocrisy of the Right, which was only too eager to remove Bill Clinton from office on moral grounds.