Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Before she has sold one copy, Stormy Daniels has already broken a publishing record: the fastest publication of a book authored by a presidential mistress. Full Disclosure is scheduled to hit the shelves on Tuesday, the 621st day of the current administration, eclipsing Gennifer Flowers’ Passion and Betrayal by 211 days.

But how will Daniels’ book stand up when compared with the other works in the “kiss-and-tell” presidential canon? Will it prove to be as historically consequential as Judith Exner’s My Story? Will it carry as important a social message as did Nan Britton’s The President’s Daughter? Will it humanize the president as much as did Kay Summersby Morgan’s Past Forgetting or Gunilla von Post’s Love, Jack? Will it have as powerful a life lesson as did Mimi Alford’s Once Upon a Secret? Or will it be marred by reckless conspiracy theorizing, like Madeleine Duncan Brown’s Texas in the Morning and Flowers’ Passion and Betrayal? Most of all, will presidential historians and the general public believe that Full Disclosure is, as the title suggests, accurate?


Of course, where Full Disclosure will stand in the eyes of history can’t be determined yet. Such are the risks of real-time publishing. If Stormy Daniels contributes to the downfall of the Trump presidency, then her perspective on the events that led to her legal crusade will be pored over for decades to come. If Trump survives politically, the whole matter might be relegated to a historical footnote. But the emotional heart of Full Disclosure stands on its own, and the book is sure to find an admirable place in the canon of presidential mistress memoirs.

At the center of every presidential mistress memoir is a plea to be believed. And most of the time, you should believe the women. The accuracy of these books—and yes, I’ve read them all—tends to hold up in the eyes of history. It took 88 years, but DNA tests showed that Britton was telling the truth when she said Warren Harding was the father of her daughter. Love letters revealed years after publication backed up the stories of Summersby’s wartime affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower and von Post’s pre-presidential fling with John F. Kennedy. Alford’s affair was documented in a 1964 oral history interview given by Kennedy’s deputy press secretary and publicized decades later by historian Robert Dallek.

Daniels is sharp enough to recognize why most people pick up books by presidential lovers. “Okay, so did you just skip to this chapter?” she begins Chapter 3, the one that describes in comically nonerotic detail the single instance she and Donald Trump are said to have had sex. But the book is as much a coming-of-age-in-the-porn-industry story as it is a presidential kiss-and-tell, and it packs a bigger emotional wallop than voyeuristic readers may expect.

Still, even when there’s proof of an affair, that doesn’t make a book, or a mistress, an unassailable source. No one can dispute that Flowers and Bill Clinton had an affair; Clinton himself admitted it in a deposition. But her claims that Clinton inhaled marijuana and used cocaine as an adult in Arkansas have not been confirmed anywhere else. And while Flowers quoted Clinton saying that Hillary has “probably eaten more pussy than I have,” there has never been any evidence that Hillary is a closeted lesbian.

Flowers casually speculated about other Clinton conspiracies. “Maybe [Vince] Foster knew too much” she mused about the White House aide and Clinton friend who committed suicide. “It had been reported that the state troopers who worked for Bill often threatened and roughed up Bill enemies,” she wrote without citing any actual reports. For one example, she pushed a tale that a man in her apartment building named Gary Johnson was savagely beaten after telling people he had video of Clinton visiting Flowers. This is one of the many far-fetched stories that swirl around anti-Clinton circles, but the fact-checkers at Snopes reported years ago that “we could find nothing on this incident or even this man’s life.”

Full Disclosure does not suffer from these flaws. In trying to cover her entire life story, Daniels achieves both literary highs and lows. It’s impossible not be affected by Daniels’ recollection of being repeatedly raped as a child for two years by a neighbor, then being pressured by her derelict mother to hide it from the police for fear it would lead the authorities to put her in foster care. And she comes as close as anyone has to successfully illuminating the emotional toll taken by harboring a presidential-level sex secret.



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The first presidential mistress book, The President’s Daughter, was published four years after the death of Warren Harding. It shocked the nation with its accusation that then-Senator Harding conceived Britton’s “love-child,” Elizabeth Ann, in his Senate office. It wasn’t widely believed at the time. But the 2015 DNA test and an analysis of Harding’s love letters to another mistress, by The Harding Affair biographer James David Robenalt, shows his travel schedule lined up with the dates and places in Britton’s account.

It’s worth reading the tell-all through modern eyes. Britton’s infatuation with Harding began in 1910 as a schoolgirl crush—when she was 14 in Marion, Ohio, and Harding’s sister Daisy was her teacher—and her worshipful appraisal never wavers. But today’s readers will be horrified at the development of their relationship.

When Britton’s father told Harding on a Marion streetcar that his young daughter was obsessed with his campaign, Harding replied, “Bring her into my office sometime!” A few months later, as Nan was sauntering home with a pail of milk, she crossed paths with Harding on the sidewalk. When their affair began seven years later, as Britton warmly recounts, Harding confided that his “desire to possess me had been born in his heart upon that occasion.”

In fall of 1916, Britton moved to New York City, and she wrote Harding, now a senator, for help finding a job. He proposed a meeting in a New York hotel, and “we had scarcely closed the door behind us when we shared our first kiss.” He recommended finding her a job in New York, not Washington, so “he would feel more at liberty to be with me.” She unwittingly made clear her emotional and intellectual youth when she asked Harding early in their relationship why people have navels. It fell to Harding to explain to her where babies come from.

Britton claimed she wrote the book to end the stigma of “illegitimate” births and to promote “legal and social recognition and protection of all children in these United States born out of wedlock.” Unable to find a willing publisher, Britton published it through her own “Elizabeth Ann Guild” and shared the profits with other unwed mothers.

Still, Britton understood that sex sells. On July 30, 1917, in a hotel room facing Broadway, she writes, “I became Mr. Harding’s bride—as he called me.” The moment was sullied when two men from a vice squad barged in the hotel room, but they let Harding off the hook once they recognized him. After Harding made it to the White House, he would bring her to a “small closet in the ante-room” and “many times in the course of my visits to the White House, and in the darkness of a space not more than five feet square, the President of the United States and his adoring sweetheart made love.”

Nearly 50 years would pass before another presidential mistress would write a tell-all book. Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower was written by Kay Summersby Morgan (with the help of ghostwriter Barbara Wyder) as she was dying of cancer and published posthumously in early 1977. The Irish-born Summersby was Eisenhower’s driver during World War II, and the only female member in the general’s tight-knit inner circle.

Eisenhower was attracted to her on the spot, but he kept his feelings in check for a year. When her fiancé, Dick Arnold, died in the war, Eisenhower delivered the news and comforted her, and she writes that she recognized that Ike knew her better than Dick ever would have. Soon after, Eisenhower’s feelings boiled over when Summersby tried to refuse the gift of a new uniform: “Goddamnit, can’t you tell I’m crazy about you?” Their first kiss “was like an explosion.”

Their physical relationship was limited, both by the demands of war and by Eisenhower’s erectile dysfunction. But apparently the relationship was emotionally significant. Harry Truman spilled, in an oral history published in 1973, that after the war ended Eisenhower wrote a letter to the Army chief of staff asking to be relieved of duty so he could get a divorce and marry Summersby. He was angrily denied permission, and the relationship faded. The Truman revelation wasn’t universally accepted at the time, but it prompted Summersby to tell her truth.

It’s too early to judge the accuracy of Stormy Daniels’ entire account, and Gennifer Flowers’ credibility doesn’t hold up well next to that of Nan Britton and Kay Summersby. But none of them scrapes bottom like Madeleine Duncan Brown. In Texas in the Morning, Brown not only alleges a 21-year affair with Lyndon Johnson, but she also claims he’s the father of her youngest son, despite a failed paternity suit. And for good measure, she throws in that he had John F. Kennedy killed.

Brown claims to have been at a party the night before the assassination that also had Johnson, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and several wealthy Texas oilmen on the guest list. After a closed-door meeting during the party, Johnson re-emerged to “growl” in Brown’s ear: “After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat, that’s a promise.” Such charges have made Brown’s book required reading in Kennedy assassination conspiracy circles but have not endeared it to reputable historians.

I wish Texas in the Morning were more credible, because it provides the most comically unromantic pornographic passages of the presidential mistress memoir genre to date. Only Daniels’ description of sex with Trump as “getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart” comes close. According to Brown, Johnson engaged in atrocious pillow talk, such as “I met a reformed cannibal one time, and he told me what part of the human body was the tastiest,” and “Why can’t we do like the Chinese and fuck all the women we want and populate the world like the good Lord wanted us to?” When Johnson bought her a gift—a doll with a sash inscribed “Miss Pussy Galore”—Brown writes that he charmingly said it’s because, “I think you deserve a pussy award for all that wild fucking.” Sometimes Johnson didn’t have time to talk, telling Brown, “We’ve got to fuck in a hurry because Jack Benny’s coming on TV.”

Daniels’ Full Disclosure doesn’t suffer from crazy conspiracies. But it does suffer from being a rush job, like Judith Exner’s My Story, her account of her affair with John F. Kennedy. Both books contain too much personal trivia in the furious chase to fill pages. The reader does not need to know the different ways Exner and Frank Sinatra liked their scrambled eggs (“I’m a garbage scrambled egg eater—I empty the refrigerator and dump it all in.”). Nor is it interesting to learn what foods Daniels ate and what TV shows she watched while she was pregnant.

Both Exner and Daniels seem to take needless pleasure in settling nonpresidential scores. Exner characterizes Rat Packer Peter Lawford an “ass,” a “flunky” and “the one with the least talent.” Mort Viner, Dean Martin’s manager, is gratuitously dubbed “Mr. Average—average height … average intelligence, average looks.” Likewise, Daniels declares, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that it “is important for the world to know” that “the intake nurse at St. Rose Hospital was a fucking bitch.” And she can’t let go of a grudge against Jessica Drake, a porn actress Daniels’ boyfriend was dating behind her back.

Despite the gossip and score-settling, My Story stands out as the most historically consequential of the mistress memoirs, piercing the “Camelot” myth and revealing the reckless, chaotic nature of the Kennedy presidency. Yet My Story also has the distinction of being the only book by a presidential mistress later disavowed by its author. Exner told Vanity Fair’s Liz Smith in 1996, “My stupid book haunts me.” The book was “as told to” journalist Ovid Demaris, but Exner told Smith she didn’t bother reviewing Demaris’ manuscript and so certain details are wrong, such as “saying Jack wanted us both to run away to a desert island. Or saying Jack played the Camelot music for me.”

Exner never disavowed the connective tissue of the book: She had a brief fling with Sinatra and they remained friends. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Sinatra introduced her to both Kennedy and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, with both of whom she would become romantically involved, though more heavily with Kennedy. Speculation would follow that the Mafia helped Kennedy pad his vote total in Illinois’ Cook County. And Giancana and his associate Johnny Roselli were later contracted by the Kennedy’s CIA to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro (failing repeatedly).

However, My Story portrays Exner as a kind of Forrest Gump figure, on the periphery of such events but not directly involved. She would later claim otherwise. Exner’s book followed her 1975 appearance before the Senate’s Church committee, which was investigating CIA involvement in assassinating foreign leaders. The resulting report’s section on Cuba mentioned a “close friend” of Kennedy, Giancana and Roselli, and Exner was soon exposed by name in the Washington Post. At a subsequent press conference, she acknowledged a “relationship” of a “close, personal nature” with Kennedy, but that her personal ties to Giancana and Roselli “in no way related to or affected my relationship with Jack Kennedy. Nor did I discuss either of them with the other.”

But in the book there are several discussions about Kennedy with Giancana, who at one point says, “Listen, honey, if it wasn’t for me, your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House.” In a 1988 interview for People, Exner claimed a more direct role as a courier between Kennedy and Giancana, setting up meetings at Kennedy’s request during the 1960 campaign that might have influenced the critical West Virginia primary, as well as the Cook County returns for the general election. And she carried messages between Kennedy and the mob during the presidency, which she later believed had to do with the effort to assassinate Castro. (Liz Smith said the 1975 Senate investigators asked Exner the wrong questions, probing whether the mob reached out to Kennedy, but not asking whether Kennedy reached out to the mob.)

The whole story is so bizarre that many found it unbelievable, especially because Exner’s story kept changing. She may have had a good excuse though; she didn’t want to end up wearing a pair of concrete galoshes, which is what happened to Giancana and Roselli. Giancana was murdered just before he could testify to the Church committee, and Roselli was killed shortly afterward. White House logs show Exner was a regular caller and visitor—you can see them in this ABC News “20/20” interview with Exner—and recently released classified documents show the CIA did contract Giancana and Roselli to kill Castro.

My Story was written by someone in the prime of her life desperately trying to salvage her reputation, and perhaps earn a few bucks. The two other books by JFK mistresses were written by women in their later years, able to bring life experience, accrued wisdom and historical context to their youthful recollections.

For those interested in reading about Kennedy’s affairs in chronological order, and seeing how his professional ascent tracked his moral decline, start with Gunilla von Post’s Love, Jack. She was the 21-year old daughter of Swedish aristocrats when she met Kennedy by chance on the French Riviera in 1953. After an enchanting evening capped with a moonlight kiss by the water in Antibes, she writes that the young senator came clean and told her he’s getting married next week, though “If I had met you one week before, I would have cancelled the whole thing.”

Still, neither could shake the other. They traded letters and phone calls for two years, until Kennedy visited Sweden in August 1955 for an intensely passionate week. Before he left to continue his European travels, Kennedy professed his love, according to von Post, and he promised to talk to his father about getting a divorce so they could be together forever. But a few weeks later, he called to report that the conversation “wasn’t a very pleasant” one, as his father exploded: “You’re out of your mind. You’re going to be president someday. This would ruin everything.” Kennedy tried to keep the long-distance affair going, von Post writes, and she considered a visit to America, until Kennedy called with the flame-dousing news that his wife was pregnant.

While Love, Jack portrays Kennedy as a philanderer from the beginning of his marriage, it also shows him displaying sincere emotion and sympathy. When von Post told him she needed to be able to start her own family, he eased off: “I wasn’t thinking enough about you. Only about me.”

Mimi Alford’s Once Upon a Secret, in contrast, shows Kennedy at his abusive worst. It begins in the summer of 1962, when Kennedy’s relationship with Exner was fading. Alford, then known as Mimi Beardsley, was a 19-year old college student. She was a White House intern for four days when Kennedy’s personal aide Dave Powers invited her for a swim in the White House pool. (Two White House secretaries were also in the pool; unbeknownst to Alford at the time, they were also mistresses.)

She was then invited to a late-afternoon staff soiree and given two daiquiris by Powers, before Kennedy arrived. The president invited Alford on a private “tour of the residence,” she writes, and then without obtaining verbal consent, he had sex with her. It was her first time. (She discusses in the book how others frequently tell her the encounter was rape, but she writes: “I don’t see it that way … I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love. But I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual, either.”)

While she admits to wrongly believing she had to accept subsequent invitations in order to keep her internship, she also became a willing mistress for the summer and beyond. Kennedy regularly called her at college, identifying himself as “Michael Carter” to the unaware campus switchboard operator. And, thanks to arrangements by Powers, she was driven to the airport in a limo (where she did her homework) and flown to the White House on weekends for trysts. She was even summoned to the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though the president worked too late and Alford fell asleep before they could have sex.

One of the most disturbing passages of the book depicts Kennedy in the summer of 1962 urging Alford to give oral sex to Powers on the edge of the White House pool while he watched, “a pathetic, sordid scene” that she describes as emotional abuse. In the fall of 1963, at a Boston fundraiser, Kennedy made the same proposal, but this time for Teddy Kennedy. She defiantly refused. She considered it a “turning point” in her life.

Along with a window into Kennedy’s character, the book offers a deeper message regarding the corrosive nature of secrets. Alford’s affair with the president overlapped a budding relationship with a college student, who proposed to her in September 1963. She didn’t reveal the affair to her fiancé until Kennedy was assassinated, as it made her so distraught that she had little choice but to explain why. He was livid, and made their forthcoming marriage conditional on her never speaking of the affair to anyone ever again.

Their 26-year marriage ended in divorce, and she concludes, “My affair with JFK and Tony’s demand that I bury the subject forever were like two pathogens that we introduced into our marriage and that slowly, painfully, led to its death.” Only years later, when Dallek’s biography of Kennedy mentioned an affair with a college intern, did a New York Daily News reporter track down Alford, now 60, and ask if she was the one. She didn’t flinch, and let the secret go. The journey of Alford’s unburdening, combined with her lucid perspective, makes Once Upon a Secret the best of the presidential mistress genre.



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So how does Stormy Daniels’ Full Disclosure compare? While much of Daniels’ story about Trump is already known, Daniels uses the book to explain why she toggled back and forth between confirming and disavowing the rumor of her tryst, eventually embarking on the legal course that has shaken the Trump presidency.

Like Alford, she never wanted to tell her husband, Glen, about it, even though the one-night stand happened before their relationship began. Daniels was pressured to talk by In Touch magazine in 2011, on the grounds that the gossip would be published with or without her participation, so she might as well get paid for her side of the story. When, soon after her baby was born, she was warned in a parking lot to keep quiet, allegedly by a Trump associate, she decided her husband’s post-partum emotional state was too fragile and kept the incident to herself. When the article was spiked, she breathed a sigh a relief.

She writes that she considered talking during the 2016 campaign, out of an irrational fear fed by a friend that she might otherwise die in mysterious circumstances, like Marilyn Monroe or Vince Foster. So when she gets paid off by Trump and Cohen, she again was relieved: “They can’t murder me. And I don’t have to tell Glen!” When Trump’s money arrives in Glen’s bank account, Daniels explains that Trump paid her off so she won’t talk about being in a hotel with him, because “dinner with a porn star would look bad.” She falsely assured Glen, “Nothing happened.”

Daniels’ attitude about going public shifted again when the Wall Street Journal uncovered the news about the payment in January 2018 (yes, it was less than a year ago); and one month later Michael Cohen announced plans to write a book covering the episode. She writes: “This dim bulb Cohen was out there selling a book on my name, but I was the only person taking this NDA seriously? I can’t comment, profit, or defend myself?” (Yes, if Cohen didn’t shop a book, his whole legal mess might not have happened.)

Glen learned about the sex with Trump, and the subsequent parking lot incident, along with the rest of America, while watching Daniels’ 60 Minutes interview, and promptly went “ballistic.” In a very brief epilogue, Daniels explains that Glen recently filed for divorce, and at one point filed a restraining order and “vanished with our daughter.” She painfully recognizes the irony. “The whole reason for everything I had done—to protect my family—was suddenly blowing up in my face,” she writes. They’ve since agreed to share custody, but by concluding Full Disclosure with the breakup of her marriage, Daniels emulates Alford by powerfully, if not as elegantly, sharing a cautionary tale about the danger of secrets.