Libertines

J. Michael Martinez is the author or editor of 15 books on American history and law including the Rowman & Littlefield titles A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II (2016), Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present (2012), Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow (2011), and Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux, Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (2007).

Historian Martinez asks why American politicians keep getting caught with their pants down in this brisk roundup of sexual imbroglios. Covering more than 200 years of U.S. history, from Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds to Donald Trump’s tryst with Stormy Daniels, Martinez sketches the origins, unmasking, and ramifications of each scandal…. This sober-minded survey shows that political sex scandals are as old as the U.S.

• Table of ContentsPrefatory Matter (dedication, epigraph, table of contents)Photograph CaptionsIntroduction and AcknowledgmentsChapter 1: “My Real Crime is An Amorous Connection with His Wife”: Alexander Hamilton and Maria ReynoldsChapter 2: “Dreams of Freedom in His Slave’s Embrace”: Thomas Jefferson and Sally HemingsChapter 3: “She is as Chaste as a Virgin”: Andrew Jackson and the Petticoat AffairChapter 4: “You Have Dishonored My House, and You Must Die!”: Daniel Sickles and Philip Barton Key IIChapter 5: “I Never Kissed Miss Tilton, I Never Told a Lie!”: Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth TiltonChapter 6: “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha!”: Grover Cleveland’s Illegitimate SonChapter 7: “It’s a Good Thing I’m Not a Woman. I Would Always be Pregnant. I Can’t Say No”: Warren G. Harding, Carrie Phillips, and Nan BrittonChapter 8: “She had the WAYS; he had the MEANS”: Wilbur Mills and Fanne FoxeChapter 9: “If Anybody Wants to Put a Tail on Me, Go Ahead. They’ll be Very Bored”: Gary Hart and Donna RiceChapter 10: “This Shadow Life Made a Mockery of My Marriage”: Bob PackwoodChapter 11: “I Did Not Have Sexual Relations with That Woman, Miss Lewinsky”: Bill Clinton and Monica LewinskyChapter 12: “Out of Respect for My Family, and Out of a Specific Request from the Levy family, I Think It’s Best That I Not Get into Those Details”: Gary Condit and Chandra LevyChapter 13: “If Only He’d Hired a Hooker Like a Normal Congressman”: Anthony WeinerChapter 14: “Who Would Have Thought That 90 Seconds with Donald Trump Would Turn into 90 Percent of My Life?”: Donald Trump’s Sex ScandalsAfterwordReferencesAbout the Author