George H.W. Bush Kept a Long-Term Mistress For Decades
George Herbert Walker Bush (1924 – ) served as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, before succeeding him in the Oval Office, serving a single term as America’s 41st president. Before that, his public service life included stints as a Congressman, an ambassador, and as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Throughout his public career, few knew that Bush, whose campaign platform included a family values plank, and who had been endorsed by The Moral Majority, had kept mistresses.
Unlike some other presidents on this list, Bush was never a compulsive womanizer – certainly nowhere close to the indiscriminate skirt-chasing levels of a JFK or LBJ. Instead, Bush maintained a few discrete relationships, which his wife Barbara tolerated because he was the soul of discretion, never humiliated her, and usually carried on his affairs out of town so as not to jeopardize his marriage. But he did carry on affairs – and they tended to be long-term ones. An example would be one he carried out with an Italian woman, whom he kept in a New York City apartment in the 1960s.
However, the keeping mistresses far away routine changed when he came across Jennifer Fitzgerald, a 42-year-old short and pretty blond divorcee. She worked as a personal assistant to one of Gerald Ford’s aides, and Bush was smitten when he met her. In 1974, Bush was appointed ambassador to China, and he arranged to have Fitzgerald join him there as his secretary.
Bush told friends that he chose Fitzgerald to act as a buffer between him and Henry Kissinger’s State Department, but few bought it. As one embassy staffer put it: “I don’t know what skills she brought to the job. She certainly couldn’t type“. Fitzgerald arrived in Beijing on December 5th, 1974, and the following day, Bush took her for a 12-day “diplomatic conference” in Hawaii.
Unlike his previous affairs, which Barbara Bush had turned a blind eye to, the situation with Fitzgerald was way more than a dalliance. As described by a close family friend: “It wasn’t just another woman. It was a woman who came to exert enormous influence over George for many, many years. … She became, in essence, his other wife … his office wife“. Barbara ended up burning her love letters with Bush, which she had treasured since World War II and went into a severe depression.
Bush did not stay in Beijing for long, and the following year, President Ford asked him to become his CIA Director. Bush accepted, but only on the condition that he be allowed to bring Fitzgerald with him to the CIA as his confidential assistant. A memo in Ford’s Presidential Library, dated November 23rd, 1975, states: “Please advise me as soon as you have completed office space arrangements for George Bush and Miss Fitzgerald“.
Bush traveled around the world as head of the CIA, and took Fitzgerald with him, while Barbara Bush spiraled into a deep depression that brought her to the brink of suicide on multiple occasions. The affair continued, even as Bush indulged in other dalliances, such as an intense but brief affair with a young photographer during the 1980 presidential campaign.
When the Reagan-Bush ticket won in 1980, Fitzgerald was brought along as a member of the vice-presidential staff. Tongues wagged, but Bush was deaf to them, and he kept his mistress by his side during his 8 years as vice president. When he ran for president in 1988, Bush appointed Fitzgerald as his liaison to Congress, and upon winning the election, he made her his chief of protocol. The affair finally ended after The New York Post exposed it during Bush’s failed 1992 reelection campaign.