New book shows none of our presidents were perfect — even George Washington

An elective trivia round

Chicago. No more toddlin’. Now coddlin’. Comes now Bill O’Reilly’s 19th best seller “Confronting the Presidents.” Pub date Sept. 10. St. Martin’s Press. It’s delicious BS from G. Washington’s wooden teeth to whatever’s left of anything Joe Biden once had.

Were they all great men? Please. Nice George Washington “was mad at his mother.”

1797. Alexander Hamilton about then-President John Adams: “A mere old woman and unfit for a president.”

All atwitter

Early 1800s. Thomas Jefferson’s: “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. Brethren, we are all Republicans.” Then let his pet mockingbird fly around the office as he conducted business.

Van Buren. Nicknamed “Sly Fox.” It quotes Davy Crockett: “Martin Van Ruin. Laced up in corsets like a woman, he struts and swaggers like a crow in the gutter. Tighter than the rest. He a man or a woman?”

1820. James Monroe. Re-election campaign. Runs unopposed. Last time ever happens in US history.

James Madison’s wife Dolley served ice cream for dessert. Flavor? Oyster. Also asparagus, Parmesan and chestnut. Losing his hat “and fearful to be seen without it” President Madison “hides inside two days until a new hat is brought.”

1825, John Quincy Adams, president of the United States, stripped down at the riverbank “and stood nude in full view of strangers.” That’s on page 48. Also kept a live alligator in an East Room bathroom.

1845, age 78, Andrew Jackson’s funeral. Poll, his African gray parrot who attended, began swearing during the liturgy and had to be removed. A forerunner of Nancy Pelosi?

The more modern times? April 1945. FDR passes on. Wife Eleanor is “devastated to learn her own daughter secretly arranged love liaisons between Franklin and his secretary Lucy, mails his unfinished portrait to Lucy.” Who knows why she didn’t know, I don’t know. Everybody knew. My grandma, who cleaned stoops for a living, she knew.

Harry Truman’s victory. Wartime. White House was falling down. Floors wobbled. Rat infestation. Wood supports disintegrating. Meanwhile, Truman and Churchill are playing poker.

And 2005? George W. Bush’s wife Laura says: “We read in bed. The president almost always turns his light off first. Come 9 o’clock, Mr. Excitement is sound asleep and I’m watching ‘Desperate Housewives.’ I am a desperate housewife.”

Patriotic read

The terrific book, which you cannot put down, is 304 pages. It includes Clinton, Donald, plus Obama who rises at 4:30 a.m., does treadmill and weight-lifting in the gym, then breakfasts on eggs, potato, wheat toast and prefers green tea to coffee.

O’Reilly, broadcaster 50 years, two Emmys. Not only politics, it’s what they ate, drank, how they lived, loved, laughed and cuddled. Plus each participant’s double bed shift. Jackie, Lady Bird, Pat Nixon, Mamie Eisenhower “slept in Abraham Lincoln’s actual bedroom. The spouses had separate quarters.”

Exception? Melania “occupied a two-room suite on the third floor while [Trump] remained in the Presidential Suite one story below.”

God bless America.