10. The Bland George H.W. Bush Was a Hound Dog
President George Herbert Walker Bush came across as pretty bland. However, there was some spice and salacious fodder in his private life: the long-term mistresses he kept for decades. Before he became Ronald Reagan’s vice president and succeeded him in the Oval Office, Bush I’s public service life included stints as a Congressman, an ambassador, and as CIA Director. Bush’s campaign platform included a family values plank, and he was endorsed by The Moral Majority, had mistresses. In a nutty twist, throughout his decades-long political career, he kept mistresses.
Bush was not a compulsive womanizer – nowhere close to the levels of a JFK or LBJ. Instead, he maintained a few discrete relationships. His wife Barbara generally tolerated them, because he was discrete, never humiliated her, and usually carried on his affairs out of town so as not to jeopardize his marriage. But he did carry on affairs – and they tended to be long term ones. An example was one he carried out with an Italian woman, whom he kept in a New York City apartment in the 1960s.
