Respected Politicians Who Were Actually Terrible People

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president and an almost comically racist human being. But wait, wasn't everyone a racist back then? Probably, but Wilson was bad even for back then, so it was pretty terrible. Vox says under his leadership the federal government was resegregated after it had become more integrated than you might expect. He viewed segregation as a "benefit." Wilson also fired almost all his Black employees and unilaterally defeated an amendment at the Versailles Convention recognizing the principle of racial equality. On top of this he wrote a history book that was sympathetic to the KKK that was even quoted in the famously awful film "Birth of a Nation."

Then there was his problem with women. Women who wanted to vote, to be exact. According to the Los Angeles Times, Wilson basically hated women, and women felt the same about him. It is extremely ironic that the 19th Amendment was ratified while he was in office. He was outspoken about his beliefs. He told his staff that he was "definitely and irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage." Wilson also stated that a "woman's place was in the home, and the type of woman who took an active part in the suffrage agitation was totally abhorrent" to him. Even a woman who just spoke in public made him feel "chilled" and "scandalized." Honestly, he probably would have been a lot happier if he'd been around pre-Civil War.

Some of Lyndon B. Johnson's jerkish exploits are famous, like the fact that he liked to whip out his "Jumbo" (his nickname for it) and wave it around in an attempt to assert dominance. Or how he would take people out in his car, drive straight into a lake, and laugh at their genuine panic before they realized it was an aquatic vehicle. But Johnson's power games went so much further than that. There also were plenty of questionable things about Johnson's presidency.

You did not want to be a woman in Johnson's world. He needed to control everything about them. One biography says he would pick out his wife's clothes, select her haircut, and force her to wear lipstick. His secretaries received the same treatment, being made to do their hair certain ways, and he even picked out their bathing suits. According to Texas Monthly, he was such a control freak he even told them how much hairspray to use. And they better have wanted to see him naked, because he was naked a lot. One writer said that "what would be sexual harassment today was part of the everyday atmosphere of Johnson's office."

Men had it almost as bad. He once suddenly pulled down his pants and made his chief domestic policy expert check to see if he had a boil on his butt. The Stranger tells how he would make people follow him into the bathroom while he went poop. He was the king of negging and would aggressively feel people up to get in their heads. It worked.

While there are plenty of presidents who cheated on their wives, John Kennedy is easily the most famous for it. He could not keep it in his pants. All That's Interesting says many historians have described him as a "compulsive womanizer." He slept with movie stars and secretaries. And it was absolutely terrible because of the pain it caused his wife.

Jackie Kennedy is famous for being the perfect first lady, the ever-dutiful spouse. But Jackie was aware of many of John's affairs, and she was having none of it. According to the book, "Jackie, Janet and Lee" (via People), even senators knew Jackie was always on her husband about his cheating. She made it perfectly clear that she "was sick of it and she didn't like it." In fact, she considered divorce at least twice. The first time was in 1956 when JFK left his pregnant wife at home to go on a Mediterranean cruise. That was probably annoying enough, but when she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, her loving husband couldn't even be bothered to cut his vacation short and come home to her. Every time she thought of ending it, Jackie was talked out of it by her family. Her sister pointed out that their father had cheated on their mother and that worked out all right. Her mom said it was just the price Jackie paid for being married to a powerful man. No excuses, John. You were just a jerk.

Storm Thurmond was revered enough to be reelected to the Senate for 49 years, the longest-serving senator in United States history, at the time of his retirement. But for all his constituents loved him, he had some terrible views about Black people.

His obituary in The Guardian recounts how Thurmond ran for president in 1948 on a state's rights and segregationist platform and managed to get over a million votes, 39 in the electoral college. And he continued his fight against equality when he got to the Senate. In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed some basic civil rights laws, but Thurmond was having none of it. He filibustered all on his own for a whopping 24 hours and 18 minutes, still the longest speech in Senate history.

But what makes Thurmond much worse than your run-of-the-mill racist was that he was also a raging hypocrite. Because according to The New Yorker, the whole time he was declaring that Black people and white people should be separated in every way, he was hiding a mixed-race daughter of his own. Thurmond was just 22 when he knocked up a 15-year-old Black domestic worker. He ignored his child completely until she was 16, after which he started giving her money from time to time, partially to keep her quiet, as he knew exposure could ruin his political career. And she did stay silent, until 2003 and after her father had died. Apparently, Black people were not good enough, unless Thurmond himself wanted to sleep with them, in which case it was fine.

Everyone knows about Bill Clinton's dealings with Monica Lewinsky, perhaps one of the most famous affairs of all time. There was a severe power and age imbalance, but at least it was consensual. That was allegedly not the case with some less famous interactions Clinton had with women.

In 1991 Clinton was the governor of Arkansas and attending a conference in Little Rock. According to Vox, he invited a woman named Paula Jones back to his suite. After talking for a few minutes, he allegedly reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her close. He then ran his hand up her thigh and tried to kiss her neck when she stopped him. But he didn't. Instead Clinton undressed and started ordering her around. She refused, and as she escaped the room her told her to keep what happened quiet.

Kathleen Willey went to the Oval Office for professional advice in 1993. The Atlantic reports that once there, Clinton groped her, grabbed her crotch, and rubbed himself on her.

But the worst accusation comes from Juanita Broaddrick. Another Vox article says she was volunteering for Clinton's gubernatorial campaign in 1978 when he invited her to have coffee in his hotel room. Once there she claims he assaulted her. Clinton was never charged, and everyone just kinda shrugs it off today.

The late Sen. John McCain spent time as a POW in the Vietnam War and endured torture, served in Congress for 35 years, and received the Republican nomination for president in 2008. His funeral was a major event, with some 2,000 of Washington D.C.'s most important people attending the service in the National Cathedral. 

However, there were controversies. He was one of the "Keating Five" implicated in a savings and loan scandal in the 1980s. In his personal life, he left his first wife Carol for the decades-younger Cindy Hensley, proposing to her while still married. In a documentary on her ex (via People), Carol said, "I had no idea what was going on. I was pretty much blindsided and it broke my heart."

Most concerningly, McCain's use of racist language was a constant issue. He regularly used a slur to refer to the Vietnamese, before finally being called out on it in 1999. He did apologize, but only after doubling down and getting even more criticism. Yet he doubled down again when called out for a racist tweet about the Iranian president in 2013. When running against Barack Obama in 2008, McCain often included his opponent's middle name, Hussein, when speaking about him, among other dog whistles he was accused of using. All this was in addition to voting against both the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983 and the 1990 Civil Rights Act.

Indira Gandhi is the only woman to have been prime minister of India, and she is often ranked highly in polls of the greatest Indians of all time. In 1999, a BBC poll ranked her the greatest woman of the millennium. She was just as revered during her lifetime; a 1971 Gallup Poll found she was the most admired person on Earth.

Gandhi was the daughter of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. She continued the nepotism trend by elevating her younger son to political prominence and then, after he died in an accident, doing the same with her older son. Ultimately, this favoritism made her cabinet a laughingstock.

More concerning is how she dealt with the many problems she faced while in office: by using brute force. Finally, in 1975, when she was in danger of being overthrown due to protests against her tactics and after being found guilty of election fraud, she called a national emergency. She used almost dictatorial power to censor the press, arrest protestors, and force the sterilization of men and women. She delayed the election that could throw her out, while at the same time forcing local elections so her political enemies could be replaced with allies. She even changed the Constitution in an attempt to retroactively make her election fraud legal. In 1994, journalist and author Arun Shourie told the Los Angeles Times, "Her legacy is a sort of continuous ruin; she did more than anyone else to destroy institutions in India."

Dennis Hastert still holds the Republican record for longest-tenured speaker of the House in U.S. history. For eight years, he was just two heartbeats away from the presidency. While there were some scandals during his tenure — including the revelation that he had known Rep. Mark Foley was sexually harassing male pages and had not done anything about it — Hastert only retired in 2007 because his party lost the majority. He became a lobbyist, and his career seemed pretty well set by Washington standards.

Then, in 2014, the FBI noticed Hastert was covering up some huge cash withdrawals and pointed out to him that this was illegal. But that was nothing compared to why he was taking out the money in the first place: Hastert had been paying millions in hush money to a man whom he had sexually abused decades before. Nor was he the only victim. Hastert would eventually be accused of abusing at least five boys as young as 14 when he was their high school wrestling coach in the 1960s and '70s.

No charges could be filed for these crimes because of the statute of limitations. However, Hastert was charged with the related financial crimes and sentenced to 15 months in prison. He also admitted to what he'd done at his sentencing. According to The New York Times, the judge stated, "Some actions can obliterate a lifetime of good works. Nothing is more stunning than having 'serial child molester' and 'speaker of the House' in the same sentence."

Paul Powell might not be a household name, but at one point, he was one of the most important men in Illinois. Powell (pictured center with John F. Kennedy) served in the state legislature starting in 1934, eventually becoming speaker of the house. In 1964, he was elected secretary of state. When he died in 1970, tributes poured in. The state's lieutenant governor said, "Powell has been in the forefront of nearly every battle that has brought help to the helpless and given hope to the young and old" (via the Chicago Tribune). Former president Harry Truman was an honorary pallbearer at Powell's funeral.

Then they found the shoebox stuffed with money, along with other boxes filled with cash — all totaling $750,000. Another $50,000 was discovered in Powell's office. Since he had the salary of a public servant for decades, it wasn't clear where the cash came from. The answer turned out to be simple: Powell had been using his position to skim money for years, in many creative ways. Other times, it was pretty much outright bribery. "He would go to any function anywhere, and people would just give money to him. Here's $100. His secretary would talk about going through his jacket at the end of the day and just pulling cash out of the pockets," John Rendleman III (the son of the man who found the shoeboxes) told the Associated Press.

Even in a state known for corruption, Powell is an extreme example. His crimes were so bad, they led to major campaign finance and lobbying reforms.

Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru for the entirety of the 1990s. His election was a complete shock, considering that not even two months before, he was polling at barely 1%. But that overnight success was not fleeting. For almost all of the '90s, Fujimori was hugely popular, even as he broke campaign promises, and life for Peruvians didn't actually get much better. 

After two years of dealing with the normal difficulties of politics, Fujimori decided it would be easier if he were a dictator, so he called a national emergency. He then made sure his loyalists won elections and even redrafted the country's constitution. He had hundreds of thousands of mostly Indigenous Peruvian women forcibly sterilized. Then there were the death squads: Fujimori was behind massacres, torture, and kidnappings. His wife even denounced him, accused him of abuse, and divorced him in the middle of his presidency.

Eventually, his corruption and cruelty did bring Fujimori down, and he fled Peru in 2000. He was returned in 2007 to stand trial for abuse of power; later he was charged with human rights violations and received a 25-year sentence. However, his hold over a large chunk of the Peruvian people was still evident. Fujimori's daughter has come very close to winning the presidency herself a few times, some of his former administration officials are still in government, and the political party he started holds many seats in the country's parliament. When Fujimori was controversially released from prison early in 2023, many took to the streets to celebrate.