America's 10 horniest presidents

Is there any job more alpha than Commander in Chief? It's no wonder the Oval Office has seen so many out-sized libidos. And contrary to what Newt and friends would have you believe, William Jefferson Clinton was a choirboy compared to our most potent POTUS's (several of whom also happened to be our greatest presidents). The following is an excerpt from Karl Shaw's 5 People Who Died During Sex (Broadway Books), in bookstores now.

1. George Washington (1789-97)
The original "philanderer-in-chief." Among the women with whom Washington was known or suspected to have had adulterous relationships were Kitty Greene, Lucy Flucker Knox, Elizabeth Gates, Theodosia Prevost Burr, Kitty Duer, Phoebe Fraunces, Eliza Powell, Mrs. William Bingham, and Mrs. Perez Morton. Officially, Washington died of a chill that he caught riding his horse in the snow. According to a more likely interpretation, he caught his death when he jumped out of a window trouserless after an assignation with an employee's wife at Mount Vernon.

2. Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809)
He lectured his fellow men on the dangers of associating with women and "the depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue," but the effect was slightly undermined by the fact that he slept with slave girls. Jefferson had a 20-year sexual relationship with a slave called Sally Hemmings who was thirty years his junior. She bore him six children who were also kept as slaves. Jefferson also had adulterous affairs with Elizabeth Walker while her husband, General John Walker, was away fighting in one of the Indian Wars, and with Maria Cosway, wife of the famous English painter of miniatures Richard Cosway.

3. James Garfield (1881)
President Garfield said his marriage to his wife Lucretia was "a great mistake" and vowed to spend as much of his time far away from her on business trips as he possibly could. In 1862, he was caught in an affair with an 18-year-old reporter from the New York Times, Lucia Calhoun. Mrs. Garfield made him choose between staying married and faithful or getting a divorce and damaging his career. Garfield chose the former, but during the 1880 election the press reported his frequent visits to a New Orleans brothel.

4. Grover Cleveland (1885-89, 1893-97)
Cleveland was one of the very few presidents to enter the White House a bachelor. In 1884, just as his first presidential campaign was getting under way, he was exposed as the father of an illegitimate son by a 33-year-old widow, Mrs. Maria Crofts Halpin. His campaign team urged him to "lie like a gentleman," but Cleveland ignored their advice and owned up. His supporters, taunted throughout the campaign by the Republican chant "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa," responded with "Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!" In the 1893 election, Cleveland's political enemies circulated a leaflet accusing him of bestiality, wife-beating, and "habitual immoralities with women." He was reelected with a healthy majority.

5. Warren G. Harding (1921-23)
Ruggedly handsome and immensely popular, Harding won the presidency by the biggest popular vote margin ever, then spent his time in office conducting random adulterous affairs, including a 15-year relationship with Mrs. Carrie Phillips, the wife of a friend. He began an affair with a 17-year-old, Nan Britton, when he was 53, passing her off in public as his niece. When she gave birth to his daughter, Harding tried to buy her silence by paying her $20,000 plus a monthly allowance. It didn't stop her from cashing in with a best-selling kiss-and-tell book, published in 1927, that detailed clandestine trysts in seedy hotels, in the Senate Office building, and once, memorably, in an Oval Office cupboard. Harding died suddenly at 57 on a speaking tour of Alaska; his last words were, "How do the bull seals control their extensive harems?" The news of the seemingly robustly healthy Harding's death was a shock, and a rumor attributed his death to a sexually transmitted disease. It was also claimed that he had been poisoned by his wife, Florence, possibly in revenge for 20 years of dedicated infidelity. The poisoning theory could be neither proven nor refuted, as Mrs. Harding pointedly refused to permit a postmortem examination. It may have shed some light on another, unconnected medical mystery; a White House doctor during the Harding administration once told a reporter that the president had three testicles.

6. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45)
Roosevelt lost the use of his legs after being paralyzed by polio in 1921. He lost the use of his wife's legs three years earlier when she found a pile of love letters linking him to her 22-year-old secretary, Lucy Page Mercer. Roosevelt promised to break off the relationship but, with his marriage effectively over, lived more or less openly with his personal secretary Marguerite "Missy" LeHand at his retreats in Florida and Warm Springs, Georgia. In 1945 the world was informed that the 63-year-old president had died of a brain hemorrhage while having his portrait painted by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a friend of Lucy Page Merer, with whom Roosevelt had renewed his affair and was spending the weekend. According to unconfirmed reports, he actually died of a heart attack during oral sex.

7. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
"Ike" had an affair with 24-year-old Kay Summersby, who was assigned to be his driver during World War II and later became his personal secretary. Eisenhower told his young mistress he would divorce his wife and marry her as soon as the war was over, but he never followed through on his promise, and after the war the two lovers never saw each other again.

8. John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
Kennedy is famously quoted as saying, "Ich bin ein Berliner"; less famously, "I'm never through with a girl until I've had her three ways." "Shafty" as he was known in his Navy days, enlisted White House staff to help organize the unending procession of women who participated in "entertainments" including regular nude swimming parties in the presidential pool. Kennedy attributed his confident and relaxed famous first live televised debate with Richard Nixon to the fact that he had prepared by taking horizontal refreshment with a prostitute in a nearby hotel room minutes before the cameras began to roll: JFK was so pleased with the result that he decided to repeat the trick before all his TV debates. His technique was not, however, the stuff of legend, and he was by repute a quick and selfish lover, his efforts undermined by stress and recurring ill health; actress Angie Dickinson said her fling with the president "was the best twenty seconds of my life."

9. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
The 36th U.S. president, by reputation a distant second in the White House adultery stakes behind the man he replaced, was said to have "the instincts of a Turkish Sultan." LBJ was genuinely aggrieved that John F. Kennedy's reputation as a stud was greater than his and complained to friends, "I've had more women by accident than he's had on purpose." The Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos was once informed by his wife, Imelda, that she was being groped by LBJ on the White House dance floor. Marcos replied, "Ignore it, Meldy. It's in a good cause."

10. William J. Clinton (1993-2001)
In 1992, a cabaret singer from Little Rock, Arkansas, Gennifer Flowers, became the first of many former lovers to kiss and tell when she revealed intimate details about her twelve-year affair with Clinton in Penthouse magazine. Subsequent allegations of sexual misconduct included affairs with the wife of a judge, a salesclerk from a Little Rock department store cosmetics counter; a prostitute, Bobbie Ann Williams, who claimed that Clinton fathered her child; and a former Miss Arkansas who alleged that her affair with Clinton had ended with the offer of a $40,000-per-year job if she kept quiet and the offer of broken legs if she didn't. In 1994, Clinton's private parts went public when a typist from Arkansas claimed that the president had dropped his trousers and exposed himself to her at a Democratic Party conference. According to Paula Jones, the First Phallus had a "distinguishing characteristic." In 1998, Clinton became the second U.S. president to be impeached, accused of instructing a 24-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky to lie under oath. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty of the charges brought against him. He apologized to the nation and continued to have unprecedented popular approval ratings.