Presidents Day
Naked Presidents? We don't have vintage photos of nude U.S. Presidents, but we do have other representations, and several Presidents were actually unashamed males. Read on.
George Washington. The statue above was made by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. It was a nude "study" for a larger clothed sculpture commissioned by Thomas Jefferson in 1812. This was after Washington's death, so he didn't pose for the sculpture, and it doesn't look anything like Gilbert Stuart's portraits of him, but according to Canova, this is George Washington naked.
John Adams. We have no naked stories about John Adams, the second President, but his son Charles, as a student at Harvard, was caught running naked across Harvard Yard with some friends in 1788, the first known college streaking incident in America.
John Quincy Adams, brother of streaker Charles Adams, became the 6th President. As President, Adams used to rise early every day and, if the weather was warm enough, he would walk from the White House to nearby Tiber Creek, a large stream that ran into the Potomac, where he would take off his clothes and bathe naked. This sounds risqué to us, but it was normal in those days (1825-1829) for men to swim in the buff if there were no women around. Washington D.C. was not a big city then, and the space between the White House and the creek was lawn and open fields. The creek was later covered and now runs beneath Constitution Avenue.
There is a story that a female reporter, Anne Royall, sat on the President's clothes and refused to give them back to him until he granted her an interview, as seen in the cartoon above. Though amusing, the story is apocryphal.
Andrew Jackson was also known to swim in the buff as a means of taking his daily bath.
Ulysses S. Grant was the opposite of an unashamed male: he never let anyone see him naked. On the battlefield, soldiers bathed by stripping in the open and having their comrades pour water over them. Not Grant. He bathed in a sealed tent so no one could see him. So this naked G.I. Joe action figure of Ulysses S. Grant is a bit ironic.
Theodore Roosevelt. By contrast, this naked G.I. Joe action figure of Teddy Roosevelt is right in his element. As President, Roosevelt regularly skinny-dipped in the Potomac.
In 1903, President Roosevelt and the first head of the U.S Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, took the French Ambassador for a walk in the nearby woods. When they got to the Potomac, Pinchot and the President took off their clothes and dove in. The more demure ambassador eventually joined them, but kept his kidskin gloves on as a precaution. “We might meet ladies,” he explained.
William Howard Taft is mainly remembered today as the fattest President, weighing 340 pounds. The rumor that he got stuck in a bathtub is apocryphal, but it makes a good story. The illustration above is from the children's book President Taft is Stuck in the Bath.
Warren G. Harding nicknamed his penis "Jerry," a detail revealed in love letters to his mistress that became public in 2014.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was crippled by polio and loved to swim as a way to exercise. He had an indoor pool built in the West Wing of the White House in which he skinny-dipped. He threw "stag parties" with fellow politicians where the activities included fishing, shooting clay pigeons, and skinny-dipping.
After Pearl Harbor in 1941, Winston Churchill came to spend Christmas at the White House to cement the Anglo-American alliance. One day, Roosevelt entered Churchill's bedroom to find Churchill naked after taking a bath. Supposedly Churchill said, "The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States."
John F. Kennedy loved to skinny-dip in the White House pool with political buddies and with female friends, including Marilyn Monroe on one occasion.
Lyndon Johnson also loved to skinny-dip in the White House pool. That's him at right in the pool with two aides. Are they naked? Well, Johnson insisted that fellow swimmers take off their trunks. Among the White House visitors who skinny-dipped with LBJ was the Reverend Billy Graham.
Johnson was proud of his penis, which he nicknamed "Jumbo." Once, when a group of reporters asked him off the record why the U.S was in Vietnam, Johnson pulled out his penis and said "This is why." A revealing answer in more than one way.
Richard Nixon, not a swimmer, had the pool covered over. The room became the White House press briefing room. The empty pool is still there under the floor.
This fake picture of Nixon, called Leader of Men 37, is a self-portrait of artist Luke Butler to which he added Nixon's face.
Gerald Ford, an avid swimmer, had an outdoor pool built next to the West Wing. Because it's more public, Ford (above) and subsequent Presidents have not used it for skinny-dipping.
Bill Clinton left cum stains on Monica Lewinsky's dress, but he was never photographed doing it. Instead, we have this painting published in the Aug. 2006 issue of MAD Magazine as a "Bill Clinton rejected portrait" by MAD artist Richard Williams,
George W. Bush apparently took up painting after leaving the Presidency. Someone hacked into an email that he sent his sister with photos of two works in progress. One of them was this self-portrait in the shower. It may be amateurish, but it's an authentic painting of a naked President.
Donald Trump. What about those ubiquitous naked statues of Donald Trump? Unlike the G.I. Joe figures, this one is anatomically correct. It has a micro-penis and no balls.
Joe Biden might be an unashamed male. According to an unfavorable biography published in 2014 while Biden was Vice President, Biden liked to skinny-dip in the pool both at the Vice President's residence in Washington DC and at his home in Delaware. The Photoshopped image is from the New York Daily News.
