10 Facts About U.S. Presidents Who Partied Their Faces Off

Editor’s Note: Our buddy Brian Brian Abrams, editor-in-chief of the fantastic pop culture site Death and Taxes, wrote a book about United States Presidents who knew how to bro-down in the Oval Office and have a good time. Like, everyone knows about Slick Willie and the blue dress BJ, but did you know that Andrew Johnson took three shots of whiskey before swearing in? Bro as fuck. It’s called Party Like a President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery, and Mischief From the Oval Office and every Bro should pick it up on Amazon or wherever the hell books are sold these days. 

In the meantime, Brian offered to write a fun piece here on BroBible about Presidents who partied their faces off. Follow his drunk ass on Twitter, buy his book, and read it below. 

1. John Adams downed a tankard of hard cider every morning with breakfast. This was something he learned at age 15 while attending Harvard and trying to choke down the school-provided meals. “I shall never forget,” Adams wrote, “how refreshing and salubrious we found it, hard as it often was.”

2. Martin Van Buren might have been the bastard child of Aaron Burr — who may or may not have porked his mother, who served beers at the family tavern in upstate New York. This is probably a bunch of horseshit, but they do share the same receding hairline and Van Buren noted in his memoirs how Burr paid “much attention” to him when he ran around the tavern in his formative years.

3. Franklin Pierce was called “the hero of many a well-fought bottle” during the Election of 1852, but this nickname did not come from his constituents. Rather, it was drummed up by the political opposition, who apparently considered this a bad thing?

4. On the day of his vice presidential inauguration — one month before Abraham Lincoln was shot and he would become the 17th president — Andrew Johnson took three shots of whiskey before his swearing-in. His entire speech was slurred all to hell.

5. When Bill Clinton inserted a cigar into Monica Lewinsky’s vagina, according to the White House intern’s authorized biography, that’s when “she realized she had fallen in love.”

6. When Dolley Madison threw her Wednesday night salons at the White House, everyone stared at her ample curves. Seriously, her breasts were well-documented. One socialite wrote that the first lady had “the most beautiful … neck and bosom … I ever saw.”

7. The sexploits of John F. Kennedy would require an entirely separate list from this one. “I can’t get to sleep unless I’ve had a lay,” he once admitted to a United States ambassador (!).

8. In 1979 Honolulu, Barack Obama used to drive up Mount Tantalus with high school buds and take chest-bursting rips of “choom” inside a Volkswagen bus. Blue Öyster Cult, Aerosmith, and Stevie Wonder were in 8-track rotation.

9. Lyndon B. Johnson was never afraid to swing his dong around. One colleague recalled the Texas-born legislator in the House Office Building bathroom (this was when LBJ was paying his dues as either a state representative or a senator), where he was holding his penis, nicknamed “Jumbo,” and was “shaking it, as if he was showing off” and asking whoever was in the room, “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?”

10. On February 28, 1844, John Tyler was emptying a few bottles of champagne in a private cabin on the USS Princeton when he was supposed to be on deck with hundreds of spectators, who were awaiting the ceremonious first cannon fire of the ship’s new weapons. Good life choice on Tyler’s part: The cannon ended up malfunctioning and had imploded, sending searing hot pieces of metal into the crowd. Six people were killed.