The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House by Eleanor Herman

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House by Eleanor Herman Eleanorherman.com In this fascinating work of popular history, the New York Times bestselling author of Sex with Kings and The Royal Art of Poison uncovers the bedroom secrets of American presidents and explores the surprising ways voters have reacted to their leaders’ sex scandals. While Americans have a reputation for being strait-laced, many of the nation’s leaders have been anything but puritanical. Alexander Hamilton had a steamy affair with a blackmailing prostitute. John F. Kennedy swam nude with female staff in the White House swimming pool. Is it possible the qualities needed to run for president—narcissism, a thirst for power, a desire for importance—go hand in hand with a tendency to sexual misdoing? In this entertaining and eye-opening book, Eleanor Herman revisits some of the sex scandals that have rocked the nation's capital and shocked the public, while asking the provocative questions: does rampant adultery show a lack of character or the stamina needed to run the country? Or perhaps both? While Americans have judged their leaders' affairs harshly compared to other nations, did they mostly just hate being lied to? And do they now clearly care more about issues other than a politician’s sex life? What is sex like with the most powerful man in the world? Is it better than with your average Joe? And when America finally elects a female president, will she, too, have sexual escapades in the Oval Office? Eleanor Herman is the New York Times best-selling author of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, non-fiction works on the love lives of European royals through the centuries;Mistress of the Vatican, the biography of a woman who ran the Catholic Church in the 17th century for her reputed lover, Pope Innocent; and King Peggy, the true story of a Washington, DC secretary who became a king of Ghana. In 2015 her first YA novel came out. Legacy of Kings, Blood of Gods and Royals is the first of four books on the adventures of Alexander the Great at sixteen. It has been optioned by the WB network for a TV series. She has appeared on the National Geographic Channel, The History Channel, and the American Heroes Channel to comment about historical matters. Eleanor is so immersed in the past she is sometimes surprised to find herself in the present. She lives in McLean, VA with her husband, four rescue cats, and a dog, and sneaks out to the movies periodically, not to see the movie, but actually to eat the hot buttered popcorn.

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Max it out. You know, plenty of COVID reading. Today we have a guest I'm really excited to have on because we have a lot of serious kind of doomsday political stuff on lately. Not to discount it, but it's been pretty serious lately. And so now we have a wonderful, exciting author. She's the author of a multitude of books, and this book is going to be a fun discussion. Her book is Sex with Presidents, the Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House. Her name is Eleanor Herman, and she's with us today.

She is the New York Times bestselling author of Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, and she's with us today. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, and several other works of popular history. She's hosted Lost Worlds for the History Channel, The Madness of Henry VIII for the National Geographic Channel, and Two Seasons of America, Fact vs. Fiction for the American Heroes Channel. She lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband and rescue dog, and four, according to her, very annoying cats. How are you doing, Eleanor? Welcome to the show. I'm great, Chris. I'm so excited to be on. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have you. It's nice to talk about something other than just, like, politics.

Although, technically, I guess we're still talking about politics. So give us your plugs where people can look you up on the interwebs, please. Oh, well, um, my website is Eleanor Herman.com and there's a really hilarious video that I had put together on my new book,

sex with presidents. So click on video and it's only about two minutes long and listen to the very end with your sound. Okay. There you go. I'm not sure what that's going to be, but Sex with Presidents? Are we talking audio or something? No, I'm just kidding.

You get to hear JFK now. So give us the reason you wrote this book, if you would, please. Well, years ago, my first book, actually, was called Sex with Kings, and it looked at the lives of royal European mistresses. And I followed that up with Sex with the Queen, and it looked at European queens and their lovers. And I've always been very Eurocentric, interested in palaces and royalty and all of that. But with everything happening with President Trump and all of the sexual assault allegations, and I mean, it is known that he cheated on all three of his wives. I thought,

maybe it's time now to do sex with presidents and look at the history of sexual infidelity among our leaders, how it's changed over time, and what the most interesting stories were. And I'd heard a lot of rumors and stuff about different presidents that we'll get into, but wow, you had some eye-opening stuff in the book. So give us an overview of the book, what's inside, and all the details you put into it. Well, it starts in the 1790s when we were a very young nation. And the first political sex scandal was not a president, but it was actually Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and had an affair with a blackmailing prostitute. And from there, it goes to Thomas

Jefferson, who had a 30-year relationship with Sally Hemings, his enslaved woman. Up through Grover Cleveland in the 1880s, he had raped a woman and impregnated her. Up through characters that you would be more familiar with, like Franklin Roosevelt and JFK and Clinton and Trump. Well, let's get right down the dirty. What's the most salacious stuff? Okay, so there was a lot. I think the most disgusting stories are in the JFK chapter

because that guy was just pathological in his need for sex. Several times a day with strange women. He would drive the Secret Service crazy. When his wife Jackie was not there, these women would just show up and say, the president is waiting for me. And he didn't want to wait to have them vetted. There were knives up in the kitchen in the residence. And the creepiest detail about this is that he would have sex with these women, not on his own bed. Cause there's both a president's and first lady's bedroom in the white house residence. He would take them into his wife's bed, do it there. Right.

And then he, he wouldn't even have the sheets changed. He would have his staff and the secret Service pick hairs and bobby pins off of these dirty, used sex stain sheets. And so his wife would come home to this. And one time, there's a very funny story. She goes to bed, puts her arm under the pillow, and comes up with a pair of women's panties, dangles them from her finger and says, would you please shop these around? They're not my size. There's another great when he was entertaining women in the evening, he would tell the staff don't come up to the residence, right? So there was this electrician who was going to change a light bulb and he pressed the wrong floor and the the elevator

doors opened in the residence and he said he wrote he saw this young blonde woman running completely naked breast swinging towards him with jfk behind her and he kept quick trying to push the close the door button to get out of there you know i that that blew my mind when i when i took a look at the book because i was you know we you know we'd always hear the rumors of jfk and and them and then madeline monroe did you did you get into any of the manil monroe stuff or is there anything sure yeah they had an affair and it actually ended um after the night of his birthday uh at madison square garden where she was singing happy birthday mr president and in that um that skin tight gown and apparently it was just so obvious to everybody that they were just oozing

sex right it was like in here that he realized it was becoming too obvious. And so he dumped her. But it was more alarming. He had affairs with socialites and divorcees and his employees in the White House. But there was one particularly tragic story where there was a 19-year-old intern who was working in the White House press office. And he invited her up to see the residents, you know, where they lived. And, you know, she just had stars in her eyes. And he pushed her down on Jackie's bed, of course, and had sex with her. And she said she wouldn't exactly call it rape, but she was so shocked she, like, froze. You know, she didn't cry out. And on her way home that night in a cab, she was sort of sad and thought, gee, I'm not going to be a virgin on my wedding night.

So, you know, he was really a lousy human being in some respects as far as I'm concerned. There's a real, I'm not sure what the psychological word is, but when you're having sex with women on your wife's bed, you're trying to send her a message too. Like, I don't know if it's narcissism or some kind of weird sadomasochist message of a nephew. I don't know. Psychologically, there's something really twisted and nasty. Yeah, that's really like when you're that overt where, yeah, I mean, and what's amazing is like Jackie O was a beautiful woman. I mean, Jackie Kennedy at the time, I should say. But, I mean, she was a beautiful woman.

Like, I wouldn't cheat on her. She seemed nice. But going through your book, well, so let me ask you this. Did Bobby have sex with Marilyn too? Yes, apparently when Jack Kennedy dumped her, he asked Bobby to please comfort her because he didn't want to scandal. You know? Distract her.

And so Bobby comforted her very well indeed. She transferred her affections from JFK to Bobby. And then Bobby had to dump her too. Apparently the mafia J. Edgar, discovered, or at least said he discovered, that the mafia had recordings of them in bed. And so it was best just to dump her.

And then shortly after that, she died, killed herself, whatever. Do you have a theory on that yourself or anything in the book about maybe mob hit? There are some odd things. And, you know, Bobby, there are some stories that Bobby was in the neighborhood when that happened. Nobody exactly knows where Bobby was. And she apparently was discovered dead with a White House phone number in her dead hand. And by the time she went to the coroner's room, that's gone. And all of her phone records were taken from the local phone company. So there was no proof as to who she was talking to. Really? Yeah.

I mean, it could have been that they didn't kill her, but she was still calling the White House and they didn't want it to get out. I don't really know. It's a great mystery. Wow. So is it possible that Jackie maybe had had jfk killed because you know revenge i think she would have liked to have killed i made some women angry in my time and yeah they've told me that they would like to kill me so and i can't blame them i wasn't the greatest

um so this is pretty interesting you get into all the sordid history i i believe you know, my history of being an American is most times we've always assumed that, you know, these guys are pretty old and decrepit in their old age, and they shouldn't be that virile, especially in the pre-Viagra days. Oh, that was the other question I was going to ask you. Kennedy had a bad back. He always needed that special chair. Was that really the reason he had a bad back? It was because he was so busy. So there were two reasons that Kennedy had a really bad back he always needed that special chair was that really the reason he had a bad back there were two reasons that kennedy had a really bad back i mean sometimes he was so debilitated he was on crutches he he would bring like a rocking chair to dinner parties uh that he went

to because it just hurt to sit in a regular chair um one reason was that he had something called addison's disease which really it's like to kind of destroys the background. And then the other thing was he had been a hero during World War Two when he was a PT naval captain and it got hit by a by the Japanese. And that really even messed up his back even more. But the result was that he was a very lazy lover and he expected the women to do all the work, I guess you would say. And the actress Angie Dickinson once reportedly said that Jack Kennedy was the best 60 seconds of her life. Oh! Oh! Several of his women reported that he was just the worst lover ever.

Wow. And he was young. He was only in his early 40s when he was president so do you find that uh there's a correlation between ultimate power narcissism i mean most most everyone who runs for president is some kind of narcissist and oh they'd have to be what normal person would think that you know you could run the whole country yeah right that's the one thing i've learned in my study especially of like religious leaders there's and i and i know because i'm a man there's three things that that are the the triad of men money power and sex and there's nothing that drives a man more insane if if he has money and power but he can't have unregulated sex and if he's got you know a wife of 10 or 20

years and she's not interested anymore then he's got a serious problem on his hands um and if he's got you know a wife of 10 or 20 years and she's not interested anymore then he's got a serious problem on his hands um and uh that's what you see when you always catch some you know jerry falwell sitting in the corner so um let's uh so you've you found that's pretty much a narrative of stuff who who have all the presidents had the most was having the most sex sounds like it was jfk maybe it was jfk and then i guess a close second would be warren harding and he was um president uh in 1920 and there was you know he was a he was a good-looking man even when he got portly and gray in his 50s he was handsome handsome. He had these chiseled Roman features. But there was something about him. I don't know if it was pheromones he was exuding, but women ran after this guy like howling cats in heat, right?

Like all types of women, teenage girls, opera singers, wealthy socialites. They were banging on his door saying, please have sex with me. And he almost always obliged them. Now, the problem with Warren Harding is that he loved to write these 50-page pornographic love letters, right? And so these women had them. And when he became the nominee and then president, they would say, you need to pay me a lot of money if you don't want me to go to the press with these with these love letters. And so a group of wealthy donors for the Republican National Committee would buy them and they spent an awful lot of money doing that. And so he felt that he had to reward these donors by giving them cabinet positions once he became president.

And then they robbed the country blind. And there were a lot lot of scandals even though he didn't know about it but it totally ruined his uh his legacy if we put a if we put a female in the office are we not going to have these problems or what do you think you know chris i really doubt it i work so hard to find a sex scandal with a female national leader. And when you look at the ones that spring to mind, I mean, Margaret Thatcher, right? Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Angela Merkel. There's not a whisper of a rumor about any of these women, you know, having love affairs. I remember the look that Angela Merkelkel gave george bush when he rubbed her shoulders kind of suggestively it was pretty it was pretty awful it was like i'm like dude you just crossed the line man you just like why did she let him know as well she should have

there's a very funny uh warren harding story so he was bringing these women into the white house and his wife florence was older than he was and extremely jealous. You know, like she was just watching him every minute. Most of the wives, like Jackie Kennedy, like they knew what was going on. And they would just leave as often as possible or, you know, pretend not to notice. But Florence Harding was like, where's Warren? You know, so she heard one day from her Secret Service agent that Warren had a girl in the Oval Office. So she runs down there and she's banging on the door.

And his Secret Service agent, who knows very well what he's doing in the Oval Office, is, oh, you can't go in this door. You got to go in the other door, you know, through the secretary's office. So she runs around while she's doing that. the Secret Service agent calls in, hey, Mr. President, your wife's on the way. So they spirit the girl outside to a waiting car. He pulls up his pants. By the time Florence gets into the Oval Office, he's sitting quietly at his desk perusing some papers.

I think we need to pay the Secret service a lot more because they're taking more bullets than, and they're like the ultimate paid wingman at this point, really. And they're picking hairs off of sheets. So yeah, I agree. Right now they're picking up diapers out of Trump's office.

So I guess the next big question we need to ask is, is Trump getting any from a, hold on, I had this joke set up earlier. Is Trump getting any from Mayor Giuliani? How much sex are the two of them having? Well, I don't know about that. But I do think in terms of women, I just think with the stress and the White House, certainly in the early days was leaking like a sieve. And I just, I don't know that he's in the physical condition yeah that would be my suspicion we need to work on that because uh we need to get that heart uh some activity he's having those

mini strokes i mean worst case scenario anyway um so basically what you're saying is Melania ain't having nothing to do with that. Who knows, right? It's just my opinion looking at this. Was George Bush Jr. and Sr. where they both chased? They both seemed like pretty religious dudes. Well, Sr. had an affair with the secretary of 20 years named Jennifer Fitzgerald. Grandma Barbara? No way. Yeah, and it really saddened Barbara. Jennifer Fitzgerald. A grandma Barbara? No way! Yeah, and a really saddened Barbara.

Jennifer Fitzgerald, yeah, was his secretary. They were very close, and they traveled around together even before he became vice president. And they would stay together often in the same room, which made their hosts uncomfortable because everybody loved Barbara. So apparently he did have that one relationship. Wow. And then did George Clinton have anything more in office?

I know previous he was partying there. Bill Clinton, you mean? Yeah, yeah. Bill Clinton, did he have more than just Monica Lewinsky or in office? Certainly beforehand he did. And the story is that when he first became president, he behaved himself because he just knew the public eye was on him and things can leak.

And then when he had this cute flirtatious intern, which was what, 1995, I think, when she started there, he just couldn't help himself anymore it had been three years and and that's how that relationship developed but I think other than that he probably did his best to behave himself yeah I think the grossest thing I ever heard was that Lyndon Johnson was sexually active in the White House. Oh, yes, he most certainly was. According to the stories, he had six presidential secretaries, and he was having sex with four of them.

Now, there's a very funny story where one day Lady Bird, who had accepted her husband's philandering and loved him despite that, walks into the Oval Office, and there is her husband, Lyndon, having sex on a sofa with one of the secretaries. Lady Bird being Lady Bird, very sweet and genteel, is like, oh, I'm sorry, and she backed out. Well, Lyndon was still humiliated and very upset, so he had a buzzer system installed so that next time Lady Bird was rounding the corner to go into the Oval Office, the Secret Service would buzz him and give him enough time to pull up his pants, sit at his desk, the secretary pull up her pantyhose, and sit there next to him pretending to take dictation.

Sort of doing a Warren Harding. I had heard that, and I looked at Lyndnda johnson and i'm like that's just gross anyone to have sex with you kind of like donald anyone have sex with him when you see oh johnson was a gorgeous young man he was really oh when he's young yeah he was with black hair and white skin of black eyes and he was very tall like six foot four and very personable he just sort of turned into a bulldog as he aged. Yeah. Yeah. He didn't age well.

What about Nixon? That's the last person I'll bug you about, Nixon. Nixon. Okay. So he had an affair in the late 50s, early 60s with a Hong Kong cocktail waitress of Chinese descent. And it got attention at the FBI because, you know, as a cocktail hostess, she wasn't a waitress, you know, she was earning like little more than minimum wage. And it turns out she owned property in China and her best friend's father was a red Chinese

general. And so there were some suspicions that she had been a, that she was a spy planted in that lounge to try to get close to powerful American men. This probably explains why he was trying to make peace with China. He did also have that one young lady who was the, she'd married a rich guy. He'd passed away. I forget her name, and she actually was a liaison when he was trying to keep the Vietnam War peace talks from, Johnson was trying to wrap up with the peace talks. He was trying to keep them going because he wanted to settle the war when he became president, if you remember that story.

No, I don't remember that story. But evidently she didn't. But yeah, this is pretty interesting. Eleanor Roosevelt, she was rumored to be a lesbian. Yes, I think it's clear that she was. She never really enjoyed sex with FDR. And when she found out that he had been having an affair with Lucy Mercer, her social secretary. She just stopped

sleeping with him altogether. And after several years, she started to have an affair with a woman named Lorena Hickok, called Hick, who was a very talented Associated Press reporter covering the campaign in 1932. That's one hell of a scoop. Right? Yeah. She ended up moving into the White House. Yeah. And it was a funny thing because, you know, the White House staff is there from one administration to the next.

Some of them were there for 30 years. And I've read the books they've written about their experiences in there. But they said that this was really odd that FDR had a long-term, a 20-year relationship with his secretary named Missy LeHand, and she lived in the White House. And she would come down at all hours of the night in her nightgown to take dictation, they said, but often she was not holding her steno pad and pencil. And then Lorena Hickok would spend the night on the daybed in the First Lady's room. So they're like,

this is really confusing. We've never seen anything quite like this. Alright, so we covered lesbians. What about, was there any gay sex that went on in the presidential suite? There was a gay president, but I think his relationship was over by the time he

became president. He was James Buchanan, and he was the president in the late 1850s that just made such a mess of things that Abraham Lincoln came in and the Civil War started, right? And he had had a 13-year love affair with a man named William Rufus King, who had been vice president in 1853. And he actually died in office. He wasn't vice president very long. But the two of them were well known as a couple in DC social and political circles. They were called Mr. and Mrs. Buchanan and Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy. So those were terms used to denote gay men at the time. And neither one of them ever married. It's extraordinary how much you talk about how the Secret Service is playing wingman and dodgeball.

I mean, just imagine the conversations these guys must have amongst themselves over coffee. Right. Yeah. We had to do last night. You'll probably never hear of that. You know what I had to do last night? You won't believe what I had on last night. Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's astounding. So which president was the best in bed and which was the worst? Okay. So worst would be JFk because of the back probably trump because well the only reference we have is uh stormy daniels the adult film star wrote her autobiography of course and she describes their one night stand and it it lasted like two minutes and she said it's probably the uh the least impressive sex i ever had and she's probably had sex with thousands and thousands of men so

that's really saying something and i detail all of you know what it was like to be in bed with the various men on the video on my website which is why it's so funny i have quotes there and everything i think the best in dead would have been Warren Harding because the way he writes about sex with these women, I mean, it's practically orgasmic just reading the stuff. I mean, it was the most beautiful pornographic writing. It was just like poetry. I miss this calling writing for Playway. Does, did in any of these cases, did you, did you look at them and go,

I mean, it sounds like you saw some disturbing, um, uh, similarities between how they presided as presidents and the things that they did and how effective they maybe were or weren't based upon how much sex they were having. Um,

you know, I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think history has judged JFK to be a good president. So maybe we should be having presidents, you know, getting in on it. I don't know that it plays a role. So, like, there are basically two different kinds of stories. One is just, like, the sick, twisted stuff, like, JFK with the women in his wife's bed.

Certainly allegations of sexual assault are totally yucky and creepy. You know, that goes for Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. But then there are really beautiful love stories. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer, the one he had an affair with in 1916, and really wanted to divorce Eleanor to marry her. But they stayed close until literally the day he died. She was with him secretly when he had his fatal stroke in April of 1945. Did she give him a fatal stroke? No, because there were other people in the room when he had it. And then there's a really beautiful, tragic story of Dwight Eisenhower and his driver and aide,

who was a very lovely woman named Kay Summers to be in her 30s, when he was the Supreme Commander in Europe trying to stop Adolf Hitler. And that was just a beautiful and sad love story. It was sad because by the time they finally tried to consummate their love, and this is two years into working 16-hour days, he couldn't divorce his wife Mimi and marry this vital young woman that, you know, she needed somebody who could satisfy her sexually. And so he, in a cowardly way, dumped her and it haunted her the rest of her life. But there are some really beautiful love stories. It's not all like really gross and disgusting. Nice. At least there's some love in there.

You read the letters Churchill used to write to his wife or girlfriend. He was really in love with her. His wife, yeah. As far as I've heard, he never had an affair. He just adored his wife. He wrote these most beautiful letters. I remember one timeored his wife. Yeah, and he wrote these most beautiful letters.

I remember one time that she was on a ship somewhere, and he kind of got the impression maybe she was having an affair on him. But, yeah, the love letters and stuff. You know, it's an interesting thing. We have to realize that presidents, I guess, are human too, so they have the same sort of urges and everything. We're just kind of like, well, you have to give up all that fun stuff if you want to be president. But it is interesting now that we've entered this era where, geez geez you look at how the whole country was just aghast bill clinton had

sex in the office with an intern now we've got this guy and uh you know it's a wonder we don't have uh spirit rhinos being run out of the west wing you know things have changed, right? And my book looks at that. So the one thing that's really huge to change was the press's coverage of political sex scandals. So in the 1790s, when Alexander Hamilton had his affair, up through about 1900, journalists were very muckraking. You know, they would cover, like, just the most disgusting, salacious details. So all of his story came out in the press. Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings out in the press. Grover Cleveland raping poor Maria Halpin out in the press. And then, starting around 1900,

journalism became a profession rather than a trade. And the National Press Club was formed. There were standards of acceptable journalism. And from like 1900 up until Watergate, the press just did not report on this. And they all knew about Kennedy and all of his women and Roosevelt and his girlfriend. Everybody knew about this, but it was not reported. And Watergate sort of blew the top off the whole thing. Then all the stories started coming out about JFK and Roosevelt.

All these stories started coming out. So that's one thing that really changed. The guy who really didn't understand that journalism had changed was Gary Hart, who in 1987, right, had an affair with a young woman named Donna Rice and he felt it was nobody's business. And they caught him and he was just very high-handed and holier than thou,

and he ended up having to drop out of the race what what polls showed was that americans didn't care if he had sex with a blonde model but they didn't want to be lied to right so then clinton comes along and he lies about uh monica lewinsky and but then there's this kind of sexual mccarthyism where he gets impeached, not for the sex, but for the lying, right? And most Americans are like, you know what? We've all done something sexual we shouldn't have at one time or another, and we all lie about it. And who cares, right? This is a political witch hunt. And oddly enough, Clinton's popularity, the week of his, the final week of his impeachment process, was the highest ever in office. It was 73%. Think about that. I mean, Trump hasn't gotten much above 40, right? 73%. So people didn't care, which is a good thing for Donald Trump. I mean,

even evangelicals these days don't care. So I think that to American voters, policy has always mattered more than a politician's sex lives. You know, are you going to raise my taxes? Am I going to have a job? Are my kids going to have a brighter future? These are the things that American voters care about. They always have. But at this point, I think it's more clear than ever. Yeah. And then it was John Edwards, the John Edwards extramarital affair, which is pretty bad because I think it's more clear than ever yeah there was john edwards the john edwards extramarital affair which is pretty bad because i think his didn't his wife have cancer oh she was really sick with breast yeah that was that's what really made that messed up yeah well but also that he impregnated his girlfriend who was single right so he is with his big belly and then

then he gets uh an aid a friend of his to say say, I'm the father. Well, this guy was married and had two or three kids, you know, and it was just lies after lies. And my advice for future politicians would be, you know, if anyone comes around and says, look, you know, we know you had this relationship or whatever, just admit it. Like, yes, I owe an apology to my wife. I owe an apology to the American people. I didn't live up to my own high standards. If Donald Trump had done that when the Stormy Daniels, he was afraid Stormy Daniels was going to go to the press shortly before the election and the playboy playmate of the year, Susan McDougal. If he had just, you know, let it let the chips fall where they may admit it if he needed to. I think

it would have been far preferable than lying and paying these women off. And there's still legal issues going forward. There's still court cases, right? Just tell the truth. Yeah. I think Anthony Weiner tried it, but the problem he did is he went back and did it more. Oh, Anthony Wiener. I mean, yeah. With a minor, right? He was like Instagramming pictures of his genitals to some 16-year-old or something. He ended up in jail. You get caught once. Like, come on, man.

People will forgive you once if you go up with tears in your eyes and you beg forgiveness. But, you know, the second time, nah. So what was the most important thing you learned from your book or what was what really stood out for you yeah so my so i thought that americans you know we had this streak of prudery and i think it's from our pilgrim ancestry 400 years ago somehow that's just kind of stayed with us when you compare us to like France and Italy and other countries. And I think there is more squawking, has always been more squawking if a political sex scandal comes out. Like, ooh, how could he do that? But still, people vote on the issues.

That really surprised me. I thought, so in 1884, when Grover Cleveland was running and everything came out in the press, he raped this woman 10 years earlier, impregnated her, threw her in an insane asylum so people wouldn't believe her story. Anyway, and then her story came out because she was she was counterattacking in the press and everybody in the country knew this story. He didn't even deny it. Right. And so he still won the presidential election. This was at the height of the Victorian era, right? Because people knew that he was not financially corrupt. He was going to reduce taxes. He was going to put crooked politicians in jail. And that's really all they cared about. They didn't care about this poor woman. I think we need to have more women in office. I've been a big supporter of that,

especially since 2018, when I looked at the whole dais of all the idiots that are in Congress. And I'm like, there's way too many men here. No wonder we have so many problems and wars. And so in 2018, I was really promoting voting all women across the ticket, especially in Nevada, where I lived. And we actually voted in the largest amount of women into the legislature there, I think, of any legislature ever. And they're doing great work. I don't know if there's any affairs going on, but they're doing great work. And so it seems like, you know, they're busy doing work.

But, yeah, I think we need more women in office. I do too. And in my research, I read some books on the psychology of politicians, you know, and most men control laws or something like that. It's not as much an ego-driven phenomenon when women enter politics. Yeah, I can see that because I'm a guy. I know how the whole brain up there works. And like I say, it's the triad of the thing. Most people, when they go into politics, they don't really get in for the money except once you get to the higher levels so really it's about power and then those two always equate to sex there's nothing worse than a man can do you see that religious things all the time where they get power and they can't go have sex and then one day we wake up and it's like what he's on a thing

with a guy in meth and I thought you hated people. And so it's interesting to me. What are some other aspects of your book that you want people to know? So my last chapter looks at political sex scandals in other countries, right? England has been a bit more conservative, I think, you know, because we're, there's a similar culture to ours, certainly the same language, whereas the French and the Italians, they just don't care. As a matter of fact, it's the reverse. They think that when a politician, a male politician is having lots of love affairs, it means he's virile, and he's healthy, and he'll be a really strong, energetic leader. The funniest story that I found in my research was about the President of France in 1899. And his name was Felix Farr. He was in his

50s. And he was having an affair with a 27-year-old socialite named Marguerite Steinhild. And she would come into the presidential office once a week to help him write his memoirs and they locked the door. Well, apparently he had a fatal heart attack during a sex act and his hands locked into rigid fists in her hair and she couldn't get them out and so she had to scream and the guards knocked down the door and they had to cut her hair like really short to get and as the presidential palace descended into uh into chaos and the first lady

was was running towards them uh marguerite grabbed her clothes and and ran out the door uh with a very unattractive new haircut unfortunately she left her corset on the floor which the first uh lady found but anyway as far as i know president far was the only world leader who came and went at the same time oh wow we need a little drum kick there. This sounds like a fun book to read, man. You get all the palace intrigue and the dirt and details and sex. This could make a great movie, maybe. I don't know.

Well, we're already discussing TV rights with two different groups. But, look, you know, I think in this life, you can either laugh or cry. I choose to laugh. And I always look for the humor in a situation. And I try to write with a great deal of wit. A lot of my readers say they just burst out laughing on every page. And so yeah, I do really try to make it fun. I think it's pretty interesting. I mean, there's so much of it you cover in the book and yet we think most of our presidents are so chaste or like you'll have like... Why would you think that?

Yeah, we have people that are like, our president is like Jesus. And you're like, no. Oh, you mean with Donald Trump? There's something else going on there. I'm not quite sure. Have you ever seen the videos of him and Rudy Giuliani where Giuliani's dressed in drag? I saw the beginning of one, but I had to turn it off.

There you go. Anything more we need to know about you and your book before we go? Well, I would recommend the entire Sex with series, Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, Sex with Presidents. I wrote one book. I wanted to call it Sex with the queen, sex with presidents. I wrote one book. I wanted to call it Sex with the Pope, but they wouldn't let me. So I ended up calling it Mistress of the Vatican. It's about a long-term affair of a pope in the 1600s. And yeah, it's all really fun and entertaining.

And you will find yourself educated without going through a lot of boring, slogging stuff. I do that in my research. Some of it's pretty dull. And it's just a load of fun. So I hope that your viewers will check out some of my books and laugh with me about all these funny people in history. I think it's hilarious and it's great. And you've got a wonderful other set of books, too, as well,

that you've written about. A lot of palace intrigue. If you love palace intrigue, you like romance, you find out all this, all this stuff about the, about the presidents. Wow.

Okay. There's really very little, I mean, I look at sexual relationships and very little sex in the books. I'm just, I'm fascinated with, with people. Like,

why do they make the decisions often like bad decisions that they do why do they think it's a good why did bill clinton think it was a good idea to do that with monica lewinsky there's so many questions and i just i try to try to get in there and understand people and perhaps at the end of the day it'll help me understand my own life a little bit better is it kind of like rock stars? You know how women are really attracted to rock stars and throw themselves at rock? Oh yeah.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, right? You know, Henry Kissinger, who was really not a, a classically attractive man was very powerful in the sixties and seventies. And he had the most beautiful Hollywood starlets on his arm all the time. It's not

because of his looks, right? Yeah, I would say. Plus his gait of talking and was like, I mean, I don't see him picking up chicks at the bar really with that sort of smoothness. I guess you got power. Note

to self, run for office. Screw Tinder. That's great. Yes, yes. You should tweet that. I need to enhance my love life. I'm going to run for office. So there you go.

Well, guys, check it out. Sex with Presidents, the Ins and Outs of Love and Lost in the White House with Eleanor Herman. Eleanor, give us your plugs again so we can find you on the interwebs. Okay, www.eleanorherman.com. There you go. Check it out, guys. Also, see our coverage of books that have been on the show. You can go to amazon.com.

You haven't shown the title, have you? Oh, show the show. You can go to amazon.com forward slash shop forward. Just Chris boss. You haven't shown the title. Have you? Oh, show the book. Yeah. Look, it's got all kinds of pictures in it of the different presidents and their, you see this.

Can you see Lyndon Johnson? Oh, wow. He was kind of a good looking. Right. Yeah. It's got tons of fabulous. This is Warren Harding, by the way.

Oh, yeah. He's kind of good looking. He's got the dark eyebrows. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, check it out. Check it out. Order it up.

And also, you can go to thecvpn.com for your friends and as well as you can see the video version of this at youtube.com for chest chris voss order the book sounds like a lot of fun in a hoot especially with what's going on these days i mean lighten up your 2020 and it will be out on hardcover uh september 22nd of 2020 you can of course get all the different variations as well so you can pre-order it and get available then. Thanks for tuning in guys. And we'll see you guys next time. Thanks Chris.

Thank you.