A Secret Life

Lachman (executive producer, Inside Edition; The Last Lincolns: The Rise and Fall of a Great American Family) uses a sordid incident in Grover Cleveland's life to show that scandals in politics are not new. He focuses on Maria Halpin, a widowed store clerk who, with her young son, moved to Buffalo and became involved with Cleveland, giving birth to a son in 1874. Lachman tells the story from Halpin's point of view, as she accuses Cleveland of rape, abandonment, child abduction, and trying to institutionalize her. Although Halpin ultimately dropped her claims, George H. Ball, a local Buffalo minister, tried to bring Cleveland down with a newspaper campaign about the affair but only managed to put his own motivations under scrutiny. Lachman portrays Cleveland as a heartless womanizer who used his connections to bury the scandal. Inflated in this sensationalist book, the story does have a fascinating cast of characters, and Lachman traces the life of Cleveland's son.