From various sources:
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President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt when the TWO pistols drawn by his would-be assassin, Richard Lawrence, both misfired. Jackson then lived up to his “Old Hickory” nickname by using his hickory cane to beat Lawrence nearly to death.
Jackson also reportedly said, “I have only two regrets: I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”
Calhoun was Jackson’s vice president.
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President Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Galt, supposedly once said, “When Woodrow proposed to me, I was so surprised that I nearly fell out of bed.”
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President Warren G. Harding was an old dog who had many sexual liaisons while in the White House, including a long-running affair with Nan Britton; it’s said Harding had Secret Service agents hand-deliver thousands of dollars in cash to Britton to buy her silence.
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One day the President and Mrs. Coolidge were visiting a government farm. Soon after their arrival they were taken off on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens she paused to ask the man in charge if the rooster copulates more than once each day.
“Dozens of times,” was the reply.
“Please tell that to the President,” Mrs. Coolidge requested.
When the President passed the pens and was told about the roosters, he asked, “Same hen every time?”
“Oh, no, Mr. President, a different one each time.”
The President nodded slowly, and then said, “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when running for president in 1952, failed to reveal he had nearly died three years before of a severe heart attack that put him in the hospital for a month. Ike also is said to have loathed his VP Richard Nixon so much he tried to avoid being in the same room with him. He wanted to replace Tricky Dick when he ran for reelection in 1956, but was convinced by nervous aides he would lose California, and possibly the election, if he dropped Nixon.
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Speaking of Richard Nixon, when he lost the presidency to JFK in 1960, he complained bitterly it was because Kennedy ‘stole’ the Illinois vote. In fact, even without Illinois’ 27 electoral votes, JFK would have won the election anyway with 276 electoral votes. (270 were needed to win.) Nixon went on to, unfortunately, win the presidency in 1968.
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President John F. Kennedy’s extracurricular sexual adventures were legendary. Supposedly, while he was president, he slept with Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickenson and numerous less well-known women except, of course, they didn’t do much sleeping. It’s been said JFK was trying to outdo his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who had a reputation in his day for ‘bedding’ stars and starlets in Hollywood.
JFK is also the first, and perhaps only, president to have smoked pot in the White House. In 1962, sometime girlfriend Mary Pinchot Meyer is rumored to have brought six joints with her to a secret Oval Office rendezvous. Secluded in a closet, she and JFK got high on her pot and Jack made jokes about being incapacitated should the Russians decide to attack. Mary is also said to have introduced Kennedy to LSD and, at an earlier time before he was president, actor and Rat-Packer Peter Lawford is alleged to have gotten JFK high on both cocaine and hash.
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President Lyndon B. Johnson had a well-deserved reputation as pathological womanizer, and even once propositioned a woman in front of his wife, ‘Lady Bird.’ On one occasion, Johnson invited a pretty young aide to stay overnight at his Texas ranch. In the wee hours of the morning, she was startled awake by horndog LBJ shining a flashlight in her eyes and ordering, “Move over. This is your president.”
Johnson also called his, uh, johnson, “Jumbo.”
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Rumor has it when notorious Hollywood playboy and future US president Ronald Reagan was married to his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, he once asked her if she’d be happier married to Cary Grant.
“I’d be happier married to Ronald Reagan – if he was home once in a while,” Wyman allegedly replied.
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Finally, President John Quincy Adams believed the earth was hollow and, as president, commissioned an expedition, at taxpayer expense, to prove it. Even in the early 19th century, scientists thought the hollow earth idea was complete hooey, but that didn’t deter Adams. What did was Andrew Jackson winning the presidency and cancelling the dumb expedition.
Incidentally, Adams was also an exercise freak who swam across the Potomac River every morning as president, a dip that took about an hour, and he did it in the nude.