The post 8 First Ladies Whose “Happy Marriages” Were a Complete Myth first appeared on Crafting Your Home.
Nobody is above the program.
Not even the women standing beside the most powerful men in the country were spared the old bargain patriarchy has always offered wives: smile through it, stay quiet, and let the marriage look intact for the cameras.
Biographers, letters, and court records tell a far messier story than the arm-in-arm photo on the inaugural stage ever let on.
Below are eight marriages the public was handed as fairy tales, and what the historical record actually shows.
Eleanor Roosevelt
In 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt opened a suitcase belonging to Franklin and found a packet of letters between him and Lucy Mercer, the social secretary Eleanor herself had hired three years earlier.
According to the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University, Eleanor offered Franklin a divorce, and the couple considered it before deciding against it, largely because a divorce would have ended his political career.
They stayed married for 27 more years, but biographer Hazel Rowley described what followed as a partnership sustained more by shared ambition than romance.
Franklin resumed contact with Mercer in secret after 1944, arranged by his own daughter, and Mercer was in the room in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he died in 1945. Eleanor did not find out until afterward.
Florence Harding
Warren Harding’s affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips, the wife of one of his closest friends, ran for roughly fifteen years and produced eight hundred pages of letters that stayed sealed in litigation for over half a century, per HISTORY.com.
When Phillips threatened to go public during the 1920 campaign, the Republican National Committee paid her a monthly stipend and funded an extended trip to Asia to keep her quiet.
That wasn’t Harding’s only entanglement. Nan Britton, thirty years his junior, later published a bestselling memoir claiming she bore his daughter and that the two met inside the White House itself. A Florence Harding biographer cited by HISTORY.com puts the number of alleged mistresses at seven across the marriage.
Jackie Kennedy
John F. Kennedy’s affairs are among the most documented of any president’s, with biographers linking him to Marilyn Monroe, Judith Campbell Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and multiple White House staffers. Jacqueline Kennedy was reportedly aware of the pattern well before the presidency.
Biographer Christopher Andersen has written that what unsettled Jackie about the Monroe rumor specifically wasn’t the affair itself but the risk of public scandal reaching her children.
Lady Bird Johnson
Lyndon Johnson’s affair with Alice Glass began around 1937 and, by Robert Caro’s account in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, lasted more than a decade. Glass was the longtime mistress, and later wife, of Charles Marsh, one of Johnson’s chief financial patrons, which meant Lady Bird sometimes had to socialize with her husband’s lover at Marsh’s Virginia estate.
Associates who knew the family, including lobbyist Frank Oltorf, have said Lady Bird was aware of the relationship and chose not to confront it directly. When a Johnson biographer later referenced Franklin Roosevelt’s affair with Lucy Mercer in front of her, Lady Bird’s dry response was that Mercer had been little more than a footnote on someone else’s wedding cake.
Mamie Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower and his wartime driver, Kay Summersby, spent years in close quarters across London, North Africa, and the run-up to D-Day while Mamie remained in Washington. The Miller Center notes their prolonged wartime separation, compounded by persistent rumors about Eisenhower’s relationship with Summersby.
Summersby herself gave contradicting accounts. Her 1948 memoir made no mention of a romance; her 1975 memoir, published after both Eisenhowers had died and finished with a ghostwriter while she was dying of cancer, described a love affair she said stopped short of sex.
Historians remain split on how much to credit that account, but multiple biographers agree the relationship was serious enough that Eisenhower considered ending his marriage over it.
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Ellen Wilson
Woodrow Wilson met Mary Hulbert Peck in Bermuda in 1907 while his wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, managed a household strained by her brother’s death and Wilson’s own declining health.
Historian accounts published by Oxford Academic and American Heritage describe correspondence that continued for years and that Wilson later treated as a genuine betrayal, even if it may have stayed short of physical contact.
Ellen reportedly tried to absorb the friendship rather than fight it, at one point introducing Peck to her own daughters as a family friend. She told a confidant it was the only time in the marriage her husband had caused her real pain.
Barbara Bush
George and Barbara Bush held the record for the longest marriage in presidential history, and their public narrative leaned hard on that milestone.
Biographer Susan Page, drawing on interviews with Barbara Bush herself, reported in The Matriarch that Barbara fell into a depression severe enough that she pulled her car to the roadside to resist the urge to crash it, a period that coincided with aide Jennifer Fitzgerald’s rise in her husband’s inner circle.
George H.W. Bush repeatedly denied any affair with Fitzgerald, calling the claim a lie during his presidency, and Fitzgerald has denied it as well. Page’s book doesn’t resolve the question definitively, but it does establish that the fairy-tale framing obscured a period Barbara Bush described to her biographer as one of real crisis.
Hillary Clinton
Unlike the others on this list, the Clintons’ story played out under subpoena. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s report to Congress in 1998 laid out, in exhaustive detail, Bill Clinton’s relationship with then-22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, following his earlier denial under oath.
Hillary Clinton stood publicly by the marriage through impeachment and has defended that decision since.
In a CBS News interview years later, she rejected the idea that the relationship amounted to an abuse of power. She pointed to Lewinsky’s status as an adult.
Friend and biographer Diane Blair, in notes later reported by the Washington Free Beacon, wrote that Hillary believed a string of personal losses, including the death of Vince Foster, had worn on the marriage well before the scandal broke.
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