2. George H. W. Bush’s Affair With Jennifer Fitzgerald
George Herbert Walker Bush was nowhere near JFK’s or LBJ’s levels of reckless womanizing. However, he had a few discrete relationships. His wife Barbara tolerated that, mainly 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. For example, he kept an Italian mistress in an NYC apartment in the 1960s. However, that discretion went out the window when Bush met Jennifer Fitzgerald, a 42 year old pretty blond divorcee.
Fitzgerald 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“.