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Quirks and Oddities of Influential People in History

Khalid Elhassan August 17, 2019 24 min

Ulysses S. Grant - Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site

2. George H. W. Bush’s Affair With Jennifer Fitzgerald

George Herbert Walker Bush was nowhere near JFK’s or LBJ’s levels of reckless womanizing. However, he had a few discrete relationships. His wife Barbara tolerated that, mainly because he was the soul of discretion, never humiliated her, and usually carried on his affairs out of town so as not to jeopardize his marriage. For example, he kept an Italian mistress in an NYC apartment in the 1960s. However, that discretion went out the window when Bush met Jennifer Fitzgerald, a 42 year old pretty blond divorcee.

George and Barbara Bush in Beijing, 1974. Heavy

Fitzgerald worked as a personal assistant to one of Gerald Ford’s aides, and Bush was smitten when he met her. In 1974, Bush was appointed ambassador to China, and he arranged to have Fitzgerald join him there as his secretary. Bush told friends that he chose Fitzgerald to act as a buffer between him and Henry Kissinger’s State Department, but few bought it. As one embassy staffer put it: “I don’t know what skills she brought to the job. She certainly couldn’t type“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.