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American History

What Lincoln’s Pockets Held When he Died and Other Presidential Oddities

Secret Service agents bust counterfeiters in 1879. United States Secret Service

The White House. History

21. A Scandal’s Mysterious Disappearance

In a nutshell, while George H. W. Bush served as vice president and as president in the 1980s, male and female sex workers (SW) routinely waltzed in and out of the White House. Even if Bush himself had not partaken – and the Washington Times hinted that he actually might have – it is highly unlikely that he was unaware of what took place all around. Especially since he had once headed the Central Intelligence Agency. Pentagon officials told the Washington Times that, throughout the 1980s, military and civilian intelligence were worried that “a nest of homosexuals” high in the Reagan and Bush administrations might have been penetrated by Soviet agents.

The concern was that young male SWs were used to compromise senior officials, and render them vulnerable to blackmail. It was a huge story, and then… it simply disappeared. The US Attorney in charge of the inquiry, who had initially cooperated with the Times, suddenly clammed up, and the newspaper’s access to details dried up. The investigation quietly gathered dust, before it was finally shelved, and just as quietly, dropped. It illustrated how Washington could effectively circle the wagons to snuff out a scandal that threatened to splatter dirt far and wide.

Written by

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.

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