Wilbur Mills scandal
Wilbur Daigh Mills (May 24, 1909 – May 2, 1992) was an American Democratic politician who represented Arkansas's 2nd congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1939 until his retirement in 1977. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974, he was often called "the most powerful man in Washington".
Born in Kensett, Arkansas, Mills pursued a legal career and helped run his father's bank after graduating from Harvard Law School. He served as the county judge of White County, Arkansas, then won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1938. As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mills played a large role in establishing Medicare. He also helped pass the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which created the alternative minimum tax.
Mills ran for president in 1972, championing an automatic cost of living adjustment to Social Security, but he performed poorly in the Democratic primaries. After two public incidents with a stripper named Fanne Foxe, he declined to seek re-election in 1976. After leaving office, he returned to the practice of law and helped establish a center for the treatment of alcoholism.
Sex scandal, alcoholism, and retirement
Mills was involved in a traffic incident in Washington, D.C. at 2 a.m. on October 9, 1974. U.S. Park Police stopped his car late at night because he had not activated the vehicle's headlights. Mills was intoxicated, and his face was injured following a scuffle with Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanne Foxe, a stripper from Argentina. When police approached the car, Foxe leapt from the vehicle and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin in an attempt to escape. She was taken to St. Elizabeths Mental Hospital for treatment.
Despite the scandal, Mills was re-elected in November 1974 in a heavily Democratic year with nearly 60% of the vote, defeating Republican Judy Petty. On November 30, 1974, Mills, seemingly drunk, was accompanied by Fanne Foxe's husband onstage at The Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house where Foxe was performing. He held a press conference from Foxe's dressing room. Soon after this second public incident, Mills stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged his alcoholism, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and checked himself in to the Palm Beach Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida.
According to the British Journal on Alcohol and Alcoholism Mills acknowledged that his alcoholism had grown so advanced that he could remember practically none of 1974, including meetings he had with President Nixon.
Mills did not run for re-election in 1976 and was succeeded by Democrat Jim Guy Tucker. Thereafter, Mills practiced law at the prestigious Shea and Gould Law Firm of New York's Washington Office, until he retired in 1991 and moved back to Arkansas to work on the establishment of the Wilbur D. Mills Treatment Center for Alcoholism, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' Wilbur D. Mills Endowed Chairs on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, and the Masonic Grand Lodge's fundraising campaign.
Mills died in Searcy, Arkansas in 1992. He is interred at Kensett Cemetery in Kensett, Arkansas.
In 1993, sociologist E.D. Nelson grouped Mills's escapade with Foxe together with Gennifer Flowers's accusations of an affair with Bill Clinton and the Profumo affair in the United Kingdom in terms of its "dramatization of evil".
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Wilbur_Mills_scandal ]
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