[/b]TIGER IS NOT ALONE: he is not the first nor the last and not the only famous person to try this:
John F. Kennedy is known to have engaged in numerous extramarital affairs, several of which took place during his tenure as president, from 1961 to 1963. The affairs became public at various times after his death in 1963. Most prominent was Judith ("Judy") Campbell, reputed girlfriend of Mafia boss Sam "Momo" Giancana. Although she wrote about her affair with JFK in her 1977 book My Story, Campbell's recounting of the relationship changed over time. Other women include artist Mary Pinchot Meyer; Pamela Turnure, Jackie Kennedy's press secretary; and actress Marilyn Monroe, with whom Kennedy reportedly carried on a relationship well into his presidency.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's almost thirty-year affair with Lucy Page Mercer, his wife Eleanor's social secretary for a time, probably began in the summer of 1916. Several years later, in 1918, Eleanor discovered some of the love letters Mercer had written to Roosevelt, and confronted her husband about the affair. Although Eleanor offered her husband a divorce and Roosevelt promised to stop seeing Mercer, he continued the affair, intermittently, until his death in 1945. While not the only affair that Roosevelt engaged in (he also had a long-term relationship with his personal secretary, Missy LeHand, for many years), it is the one that seems to have had the most profound effect on their marriage.
Most accounts mention that after Eleanor first learned of her husband's affair with Mercer, she began to create a life for herself outside of her role as "Mrs. Roosevelt." She grew more independent and became a pioneering first lady by becoming active in significant social causes, carving out a niche for herself in the White House. Rather than a traditional marriage relationship, Eleanor and Franklin developed more of a partnership, and Eleanor drew emotional support from other women. Her relationship with Associated Press reporter and lesbian Lorena Hickok, who moved into the White House in 1941 and shared a working relationship with the first lady, has been the source of some gossip.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy Bill Clinton will leave America is the elevation of sex becoming a household word and topic of discussion. While we have had numerous leaders in the past with similar less than moral character as Bill Clinton, before leaving office he blazed a trail of adultery and deceit never before seen in the highest office of the United States.
In Jan. 1994, The American Spectator published an article detailing claims by two Arkansas state troopers who facilitated extramarital affairs and claimed to have seen then-Gov. Bill Clinton in compromising positions with dozens of women. Trooper Larry Patterson stated that since 1987, there were numerous long-term liaisons with women including the now well-known relationship with Gennifer Flowers. These included a staffer in Clinton's office; an Arkansas lawyer who was a Clinton appointee to a judgeship; the wife of a prominent judge; a local reporter; an employee at Arkansas Power and Light, and a cosmetic sales clerk at a Little rock department store.
There were also many brief affairs and one-time encounters involving Clinton and numerous women. The Arkansas state troopers said they were often called upon to act as intermediaries to arrange and conceal Clinton's extramarital encounters. They said they frequently picked up and delivered gifts from Clinton to various women, and often drove Clinton to meetings with women. "We were more than bodyguards. We had to lie, cheat and cover up for that man," said Larry Patterson.[Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 1993]
http://www.clintonmemoriallibrary.com/value_of_women.htmlhttp://mentalhealth.about.com/library/sci/0901/bladultery901.htmAthletes' Wives Must Cope with "Adultery Culture"
CORVALLIS, OR - Many wives of professional male athletes have to consider the possibility of their husbands' infidelity, particularly during a long season with numerous road trips. How they handle their fear and stress varies and may depend on their motivation for marriage, a study suggests.
A "culture of adultery" permeates professional sports today, says Steven M. Ortiz, an assistant professor of sociology at Oregon State University. Ortiz presented the findings of his research on the little known survival techniques of athletes' wives at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association on Monday, August 20, in Anaheim, Calif.
"At home and especially on the road, these athletes deal with boredom, peer group pressure, team loyalty, opportunity, sense of self-importance, and the availability of women who seem to be irresistibly attracted to professional athletes," Ortiz said. "There clearly seems to be a 'fast food sex mentality' among professional athletes."
While media accounts of the sexual exploits of athletes aren't new, little has been written about how wives respond to adultery - and to the possibility of adultery. Ortiz conducted his study as a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1990s, where he worked with noted scholars Arlie Russell Hochschild and Harry Edwards. As part of that study, over a four-year period, he interviewed the wives of 47 different professional athletes in the four major team sports - football, baseball, basketball and hockey.
What emerged from those interviews were profiles of adaptation, as wives developed coping strategies that often evolved over time. The wives who were interviewed also identified a category of wives who were drawn to marriage more for the glamour and money than for love or the relationship.
"It may be that women who marry the 'athlete' more than the 'man' tend may be more accepting of their husbands' affairs," Ortiz said. "Not only do they fear losing financial security and the affluent lifestyle, they often possess low self-esteem."
Women who married before their husbands became professional athletes - including most of the interviewed wives - did not tolerate long-term extramarital affairs, though many were forced to deal with their spouses' one-time only "one-night stand."
Ortiz found a major difference between new wives and wives who had been married to an athlete for 10 to 15 years.
"The majority of the new wives truly didn't know what they were getting in for," Ortiz said, "and often they have to learn the ropes from the veteran wives. The wife of a baseball player who has been married and 'in the league' for 15 years can be fairly hardened. She has seen, or heard, it all."
And when she hears from her husband that he's had an affair, Ortiz says, she has to make a decision - to cope with it, or to dissolve the marriage. Most will give the husband the benefit of the doubt, he pointed out, though the wives will use the incident to set a few ground rules.
"One thing that I learned from the interviews is that these women are strong," Ortiz said. "If they don't know what the lifestyle is like, they quickly learn. And then they develop strategies to manage that ongoing stress. The strategies vary in confronting the 'possibility' of marital infidelity since the possibility is always there, though the infidelity may not be.
"Some of the wives use humor, while others may change the boundaries of trust in the relationship," he added. "Whatever strategies they rely on, they continue to manage the family life. Most of the wives are very strong, intelligent and resilient. That's why the men married them in the first place."
Ortiz said some strategies for handling the stress of possible infidelity have negative consequences. Some wives are in denial and don't want to talk about it. Others acknowledge the issue constantly and may feel like they are pressuring their husbands for constant reassurance.
"Many wives of professional athletes engage in 'suspicion management,'" Ortiz said. "It's all in their approach to the issue. Some wives look for signs that their husband has been unfaithful; others may deny the possibility by avoiding the issue completely. They are different strategies of dealing with the same fears."
The sexual lives of professional athletes is an area that the management of most teams would like to ignore, and by and large, they do, Ortiz said. However, media scrutiny transcends privacy issues in instances like the Gold Club racketeering trial, and public affairs endured by star athletes.
Outsiders tend to view those incidents as the tip of an iceberg, and Ortiz says that depiction may be accurate. There exists a culture of adultery, he said, that managers and coaches usually ignore, that fellow players may often encourage, and with which the wives must contend.
"These men spend so much time together practicing, working and traveling, that they bond very closely," Ortiz said. "I would argue that in certain ways, many of them are closer to their teammates than they are to their wives and families. Yet it is the women who become the support system without which many men could not survive.
"I talked to one woman who learned on the radio that her husband had been traded to a team across the country. He didn't call her because he was trying to catch a plane to his new team. It is the wives, though, who must pack up the furniture, pull the kids out of school, sell the house and move the family. And this is very common in their world, as it is in other career-dominated marriages."
Ortiz, who recently joined the faculty at Oregon State University after teaching simultaneously at Sonoma State University and U.C.-Berkeley, specializes in the marital relationships of professional athletes. He is working on a book about sport marriages.
As a former athlete, coach and long-time sports fan, he admits to a curiosity about the private lives of these public husbands.
"As a society, we love our sports heroes," Ortiz said. "Like other celebrities, we want to put star athletes on a pedestal. And then, if we want them to have feet of clay, we pull them down. The wives, though, are there through it all."
---American Sociological Association
