(Kevin Kan | Contributing Illustrator)

What’s more fun than a Political Party? A political party. Despite their attempts to appear to voters as bastions of civility and decorum, American presidents have been known to “rally.” Here are a few stories of them at their most devious, in roughly chronological order.

Not just a populist, but quite pop-ular at the time too, Andrew Jackson held several open-invite parties at the White House, the most famous of which was during his very own Welcome Week. After his inauguration, Jackson, on horseback, led a group of hundreds of supporters to the White House, where he proceeded to throw a rager for the ages. So raucous, in fact, he had to escape through a window to get away from the throngs of people attempting to meet him. 

At Jackson’s very last open-invite party there was an air of…cheese. For two entire years, Jackson displayed a 1,400-pound block of cheddar cheese gifted to him by rural New York farmers. According to the White House Historical Society, in 1837, Jackson allowed Washington, D.C. residents to come to the White House and take a hunk of cheese home. 

The events of Jackson’s last party prompted President Barack Obama, from 2014 to 2016, to host “Big Block of Cheese Day,” where he would answer questions online directly from common people — a fromage to Jackson’s populism.

On the very opposite end of the partying spectrum, President Calvin Coolidge was much happier being a popular loner. Once, according to Politico, “Silent Cal” was told by a woman sitting next to him at a dinner that she could get him to say more than three words to her. In response, he told her succinctly: “You lose.”

Coolidge was a far cry from the man who brought him to the White House in the first place (as Vice President): Warren G. Harding. Despite voting for Prohibition as a Senator, Harding kept the White House bar stocked with drinks and regularly brought whiskey to golf courses. Harding also held poker nights twice a week in a smoky and booze-filled White House. One legend says that he actually gambled away the White House china!

Perhaps the least surprising of our partying Presidents was John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, most infamously, was said to have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Amidst partying with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, Kennedy is also alleged to have had many other mistresses. One pair of mistresses were given the nicknames Fiddle and Faddle by Secret Service Agents.

According to “Party like a President,” a book on presidential debauchery by Brian Abrams, Kennedy would often meet Fiddle and Faddle — then interns at the White House — in the White House pool and skinny-dip with them. Other allegations include using poppers with the two! Kennedy would do all of this while his wife, Jacqueline, was out of the house.

The book also claims that JFK once smoked three joints with a mistress, but rejected a fourth. His reasoning? “What if the Russians did something now?” Typical high paranoia.

Another predictably party-hard president is Bill Clinton. Even though it was his administration that passed the 1994 Crime Bill — widely known to have ramped up the War on Drugs — Clinton experimented with marijuana when studying in England. His own issues with infidelity do not need much elaboration, either. 

The road to the presidency for one of our more recent partiers, Barack Obama, was bumpy, to say the least. Obama wrote in his memoir that he indulged in “reefer” and, don’t gasp, cocaine, while in high school. In college, though, a classmate said that “he was not even close to being a party animal.”