Whenever you’re talking about the Kennedy’s, a sex scandal is never far behind.
This time, though, the terminator is not a Kennedy. Maria Shriver, the daughter of Sargent Shriver, the principal architect of President Lyndon Johnson’s ``War on Poverty’’ and Eunice Kennedy, the sister of John F. Kennedy, has been in the dark for over 14 years about her husband’s adulterous affair with their housekeeper at their Brentwood estate, which led to him ``fathering a child’’
Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Mr. Universe, former California Governor, and fittingly, the star of the motion pictures, ``True Lies’’, the ``Predator’’, and ``Collateral Damage’’, now finds himself swimming in a sea of sharks as he attempts to drive back a mob of inquisitive reporters and photographers, along with trying to answer to his wife and four children on how he plans to make amends for his infidelity.
His fall from grace and rehabilitation will require a herculean effort. Whether the seven-time Mr. Olympia champion will be equal to the task remains to be seen.
If Schwarzenegger is finding any solace these days, it’s in knowing that fathering a child with your housekeeper, has a long storied history among prominent public figures.
Author William A. Cook in his biography on Pete Rose, makes mention that Babe Ruth, the ``Sultan of Swat’’, fathered a child from his housekeeper. And in March, 1923, the Babe was slapped with a $50,000 paternity suit, this one from Dolores Dixon, a 19 year-old Manhattan Department Store clerk, claiming he fathered her child. The suit, however, was later dropped.
The revolutionary socialist and German philosopher Karl Marx, author of the ``Communist Manifesto’’ and ``Capital’’ also was known to have fathered a child by his housekeeper, Helen Demuth; but the co-author of his published works, Friedrich Engels, protected his friend by claiming he fathered the child. Marx’s wife believed him enough to keep the housekeeper on the payroll. It wasn’t until he was on his deathbed, did Engels confess the truth and the details of the affair became known.
Before his death in 2003 at the age of 100, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond raised more than a few eyebrows when it was learned that in 1925, the segregationist and states’ right advocate fathered a child with his family’s 16-year-old black housekeeper, when he was 22.
The housekeeper, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired Los Angeles school teacher, decided to break her silence about her affair with Thurmond so her family would have a more accurate account of their heritage.
Of course, lurid tales of politicians fathering illegitimate children extends back to Thomas Jefferson and reports he fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.
Rumors that Jefferson fathered her children began circulating as early as 1802, when James Callender, a former supporter of Jefferson turned enemy when he was passed over for a government position, published the following letter in the Richmond Recorder on September 1, 1802: ``It is well known that the man whom it delighted, the people to honor, keeps and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY...The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.''
And in 1998, DNA testing established a definitive link to the descendents of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Plantation records show Hemings gave birth to the following children: Beverly (1798), Harriet (1801) Madison (1805) and Eston (1808.)
During the presidential election of 1884, Republican operatives charged that Grover Cleveland, the bachelor son of a minister, ``Grover the Good’’ had fathered an illegitimate child while he was a lawyer in Buffalo.
The Reverend George Ball published a letter in the Buffalo Evening Telegraph, chronicling how Cleveland seduced Maria Halpin in the cloak department of a Buffalo Department store. After becoming pregnant, according to Ball, Cleveland refused to take her hand in marriage as he previously promised and ``employed two detectives and a doctor of bad repute to spirit the woman away and dispose of the child."'. Cleveland was quickly labeled a ``moral leper’’ and in parades, strollers containing baby dolls were pushed down the street with chants, ``Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa.?’’ Cleveland finally came clean and admitted to paying child support to Halpin for their son, Oscar Folsom Cleveland.
And during a time when reporters were expected to withhold reporting salacious trysts of public officials, Jane Grey Swisshelm, early in her Washington reporting career, 1850, alleged that Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster had fathered two illegitimate mulatto children. Swisshelm wrote: ``Webster was supposed to be a moral as well as an intellectual giant," yet "his life was full of rottenness." As reward for this juicy tidbit, Swisshelm was swiftly fired by her editor at the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley.
Most recently, former presidential candidate John Edwards admitted having an affair with his campaign cinematographer Rielle Hunter, who later give birth to a girl, Frances Quinn. And former Cincinnati Reds slugger Pete Rose, and American Civil Rights leader, Jesse Jackson Jr. also fathered illegitimate children, which were thoroughly hashed over in the press.
So no, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not alone in representing yet another sordid tale of men behaving badly; but considering that he belongs to the party so proud of championing family values; his fall from grace in the age of hypocrisy, might redefine the G.O.P from the Grand Old Party to the party of``Grand Old Philanderers.’’
-Bill Lucey
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May 18, 2011
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