Famous historical figures are no exception. Like ordinary people, they have both positive qualities and negative ones. And they also come with oddities, about which people find out much later. Often when that person is no longer with us. Taking this opportunity, we decided to tell you about ten American leaders who surprised people with their quirks.

John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States (1825-1829)

The so-called White House, designed by Irish immigrant architect James Hoban, has served as the residence of American presidents for more than two hundred years. Not far from one of the most famous places in the world, the Potomac River flows.

There are many ways to deal with stress, from the simplest, to the most complex. U.S. President Adams, apparently constantly stressed before the workday, found the easiest way for himself. Every morning, he bathed naked in the Potomac.

The White House staff has repeatedly caught their boss engaged in such unusual activities. And one inquisitive journalist had the nerve to find out about the president's swims and hide his clothes while he was in the water.

She wouldn't let Adams get dressed until he answered all her questions. That's how she interviewed him while he stood in the water shivering. Nothing is known about the consequences, both for the president himself and the reporter.

Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States (1829-1837)

Many people love birds. True, to love them and keep them in a cage at the same time is a slog of affection.

Parrots and canaries are especially popular. Both can imitate human speech. American President Andrew Jackson also had a favorite parrot called Poll.

Poll himself and told the public that the owner taught his pet to swear obscene words. This happened at Andrew Jackson's funeral.

God only knows what got into his arse. The people present at the funeral heard him use such a profane language that one does not always hear in port pubs.

The cage with the parrot was taken away. The eyewitnesses wondered for some time whether the president had purposefully taught the parrot such words or whether it had absorbed them when the master of the cabinet was swearing his last words when discussing this or that issue with his subordinates.

Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States (1889-1893)

Russian Empress Catherine the Great was the first to volunteer to inoculate against smallpox when it was reported to her that her subjects were afraid to be inoculated.

 American President Harrison, on the other hand, unwittingly wanted to drag his nation back to a bygone era of paraffin and gas lanterns. The fact is that he had a panic fear of electricity.

When he and his wife moved into the White House in 1889, it used gas lanterns for lighting. A year later, progress came in the form of electric lighting.

Up until the end of his presidential term, Harrison and his wife never touched a light switch. They honestly believed that electric current could kill them. The man who was the first to record his voice on a phonograph, by the way, was not up to the challenge of the newfangled technology.

Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1913-1921)

When women were given all rights equal to men in an undemocratic country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the American president of the country, the light of democracy, hated women.

Wilson said in public that they belonged in the kitchen and the nursery. And he tried to ignore women who tried to get involved in politics.

He was also known for his racist tendencies. When he moved into the White House, the first thing he did was to fire all black people, despite the fact that many of them had worked there almost all their lives.

Warren Garding, 29th President of the United States (1921-1923).

If his colleague Adams let off steam by bathing naked in the river, but Garding did not bother.

The 29th President of the United States relieved stress with huge binges. He didn't drink alone. He called to Washington his friends from Ohio, where he was from, and they spent days on end drinking in his office and playing poker.

Garding's gambler wasn't much of a gambler, though. He once managed to lose a china set from the White House.

 Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States (1923-1929).

This character was obsessed with alternative medicine. He read somewhere or someone told him that putting Vaseline on his head was very good for his health.

Coolidge followed this ritual every day. When he woke up, he would smear a thick layer of Vaseline on his head in bed. It took the whole jar, and jars were bigger than they are today.

Whether Coolidge was born that way, or whether the Vaseline had that effect on him, but the trouble was that the president was taciturn. Eyewitnesses say that sometimes you wouldn't hear a word from him during the day. A nod meant ‘yes’, and if he said ‘no’, he would simply remain silent.

Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States (1953-1961)

The man who played one of the key roles in World War II also had his own ‘cockroaches in his head’.

Harry Truman, who was president before Eisenhower, was very fond of squirrels. He would go out on the White House lawn every morning and feed these cute animals.

Eisenhower, on the other hand, loved to play golf. In order not to waste time travelling back and forth, he ordered a golf course to be built on the same lawn where his predecessor fed the squirrels.

When the president played golf, the squirrels would periodically run out onto the course. Either to get a nut he had stashed away or to beg Uncle Joe for more nuts. Eisenhower was very annoyed and finally ordered to remove all the squirrels outside the White House.

How they were removed is not known. Only after that did the general acquire a reputation of the worst enemy of nature.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States (1961-1963).

Famous for his endless trips to the left. There were baboon presidents before him, but this one outdid them all. He slept with a lot of people. Film stars, secretaries, White House staffers.

Kennedy can rightly be called the Casanova of the White House. He did not try to hide his adventures, defiantly saying that his love for women inspired him to feats of state.

His beautiful wife Jacqueline, of course, was aware of his affairs. But she tried not to take the litter out of the family and kept an aristocratic silence. Only occasionally, at some party, having met another of her husband's passions, she gave her a caustic characterization.

Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States (1977-1981).

Carter, a Democrat, had a beef with unidentified flying objects (UFOs). He claimed to have personally seen an unidentified object. ‘It was something terrible,’ the president often said, rolling his eyes.

Carter's rise to power led him to push through Congress a costly programme of UFO research. He considered aliens to be the most serious danger to the United States. At the end of his presidential term, many considered the 39th president of America a real paranoid. As we say: ‘The man's cuckoo has gone.

Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States (1981-1989).

The former actor and his wife Nancy were obsessed with horoscopes. Even before they moved into the White House.

Before he was elected president of America, Reagan was governor of California. When he took office, he would check his oath of office with the stars.

For his entire presidential term, two of them, Reagan never took a step without his personal horoscope, which was prepared for him by astrologers hired for this purpose. Nancy recalled that he dreaded every meeting with a statesman if the time was unfavorable according to the horoscope.

It is said that his horoscope even told him the day when an attempt was made on his life.