1920 (34 page)

In fact, the entire episode, and indeed all the preceding criminal activities of the Harding administration, were treated by the courts as much less important matters than they really were, the fines and jail terms for those involved amounting to little more than scoldings, their knuckles being rapped by a wooden ruler. Thus, although it never seems to be viewed this
way in any study I have read, the scandals of the Ohio gang and cohorts were scandals for the judicial system as well, which minimized the punishments it handed down almost to a point of being ludicrous—perhaps because the criminals had previously held such high positions of trust, perhaps for more devious reasons that can only be guessed at. It is far too late at this point to discover the truth behind Teapot Dome, but there is more to it than meets the history books, this offense not just against an individual or a federal bureau but against an entire nation.

IRONICALLY, ON THE DAY THAT
Fall went to prison, Doheny secured the mortgage on Fall's ranch for $168,250. Several years later, when Fall was out of prison and living there, back in the home he had come to love so much—Doheny foreclosed him. Fall had to give up the ill-gotten residence bestowed upon him by Teapot Dome. He pleaded with the court that had granted the foreclosure to reconsider its verdict. It would not. This time, having spent a great deal of money in the interim, most of it on legal fees, Fall could not raise nearly enough to pay off his mortgage and keep his residence. He raged at his former friend, cursed him, threatened him. Doheny was unmoved. If Fall didn't have the money, he was evicted; it was as simple, and ruthless, as that. Business, just business. There was no honor, apparently, among disgraced Cabinet members and their companions in crime.

ONCE AGAIN, IT IS BELIEVED
that the affable but dense Harding, even more inept at choosing colleagues than he was at governing, knew little of the illegal activities swirling around him in the three and a half years of his administration. Or knew of them in general terms but was not aware of their extent. Or suspected them but believed that his old friends, some of whom had been with him since childhood, were simply not capable of turning into criminals when he turned into the president.

Finally, though, there came a time when Harding could no longer remain ignorant of the Ohio Gang's actions; and when it did, this man, fundamentally decent in a number of ways, was hurt more than angered. “My god, this is a hell of a job!” he said to the Kansas newspaper editor and author William Allen White. “I have no trouble with my enemies;
I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends keep me walking the floor nights!”

Perhaps. But Harding's performance as a practitioner of marital infidelity was worth some dusk-to-dawn pacing too. After the election of 1920, he said good-bye to a lengthy dalliance with Carrie Phillips, “the most beautiful woman in Marion [Ohio],” and moved on to other affairs in the nation's capital, where the selection of beauties was much greater. According to an article in the
Washington Post
, Harding had extramarital sex with at least four women once he took up residence in the White House. Two of them were friends of Mrs. Harding. The third was Harding's aide in the Senate. The fourth, Nan Britton, claimed that the president was the father of her daughter. Harding neither affirmed nor denied any of the charges.

Although Britton later wrote
The President's Daughter
, which is considered the first “kiss-and-tell” book of American politics, a lot more than kissing made its way onto the pages.

The latter part of February, 1919, I knew for a certainty that I was to become the mother of Warren Harding's child. I remember one morning in the subway train I felt so queer and faint that I was obliged to ask someone for a seat. Too, I had faint spells from nausea.

When Britton sent a letter to Harding to tell him the news, “he wrote to tell me that this trouble was not so very serious and could be handled.” Which Harding did, it is believed, by regularly sending checks to his mistress for the child's care. It was a long time before Florence Harding was able to engage in small talk at the poker table again.

BY THE START OF THE
fourth year of his presidency, not only was Harding's administration showing signs of strain, but so was Harding. Most Americans seemed not to notice, seemed to think of him as the same hearty fellow who had won the first election ever broadcast on radio. But most Americans were in no position to see the man closely.

Larger than average to begin with, Harding had gained weight, up to 240 pounds, and lost the healthy glow to his skin, which had been replaced
with a pallor that his friends had never seen before. “The flu attack which felled Harding in mid-January 1923 unquestionably was the triggering factor in the subsequent rapid deterioration in his health,” according to some opinions. Then again: “One medical expert later claimed that the flu attack was actually accompanied by an undiagnosed coronary thrombosis followed by myocardial infarction.” But according to yet another supposedly informed opinion, Harding was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage. There were also reports that attributed the president's lack of vigor to congestive heart failure. Whatever the cause, a few days before he died, Harding collapsed and had to be lifted into bed by several aides. Although no one knew it at the time, in 1920 one terminally president was followed into office by another who would be terminally ill long before his time.

Afraid that journalists would find out about Harding's collapse and make too much of it, the White House issued a press release announcing that the president had simply been the victim of food poisoning and the culprit was a tainted crab. It was an interesting story, but a little too imaginative. According to several reports, Harding had not eaten any kind of seafood, much less shellfish, in recent days.

When he died, on August 2, 1923, doctors listed the cause of death as apoplexy, and so it has been proclaimed for posterity on his death certificate. There is no particular reason to believe it; then again, there is no particular reason not to. So vigorous in appearance when he first took office, he had lost his hardiness quickly and in a number of ways, so many that the real cause of death, which was perhaps a combination of maladies, will never be known.

From Plymouth Notch, Vermont, “Silent Cal” Coolidge, probably the least verbose man ever to occupy the White House, sped to Washington to be sworn in to his new duties. Before he left, he spoke his first words upon learning of Harding's death. As if sending a telegram and paying by the word, he was typically terse.

I believe I can swing it.

Later, though, in a eulogy broadcast on radio, the first such sorrowful event on the nation's airwaves, Coolidge was more expansive.

Some will say that such a sweet and gentle nature could only have found its setting and its opportunity for service in a strange and peculiar time. Yet he came to the world's stage in an hour when it seemed set for other characters. The captains and the kings, the armies and the navies, the men who would have war, and the men who would not have peace, had long dominated the scene. Where among them could place [be] made, could place be found, for this kindly, gentle, gracious soul?

It seemed that the longer Coolidge spoke, the less sense he made. His brevity, all of a sudden, began to seem his most effective method of communication.

POOR WARREN HARDING COULD NOT
even die without scandal, or at least intimations of it. One of them was that the various differences in opinion about what had actually ended the president's life were part of a conspiracy to keep the real reason a secret. For what purpose, though, no one could say. Nor could any of the conspirators declare what that real reason was, or who was behind it, or what was to be gained by the president's death. In fact, there wasn't even anyone who could say who the conspirators actually
were
.

Another rumor had it that, because he knew his health was failing and was certain that more scandals were about to attach themselves to his administration, Harding had committed suicide, like Cramer and Smith. But his 1924 campaign for the White House was already under way, and Harding had taken an active role in the planning, one of several reasons that his having taken his own life seems unlikely.

In a related vein, there was the rumor that hundreds of thousands of Americans read or heard about. A book called
The Strange Death of President Harding
was written by an equally strange fellow named Gaston B. Means, a part-time gangster, part-time FBI operative. In jail on publication day, serving time for perjury, Means strongly hinted that Harding's wife killed him because of Nan Britton's forthcoming revelations of his extramarital scandals. It was not anger; it was benevolence: Means believed Florence Harding wanted to spare her husband the ignominy of the charges she knew were on the way.

And then there was the tale that seemed most to intrigue the public, that Mrs. Harding, who was not a popular figure with the Washington press, had in fact murdered her husband, poisoned him—anger this time,
not
benevolence. The First Lady did not want to save Harding from shame, but to punish him for his serial affairs. The fact that she refused to allow an autopsy was one source for this suspicion. Another was that she had gathered and burned all of the former president's papers in a White House fireplace. The new First Couple, the Coolidges, stood by watching the flames, the three of them united in their approval.

But Mrs. Harding wasn't done with her little book of matches. When she returned to Marion, she ordered that her husband's personal papers meet the same fate as his presidential papers. Those documents that, for some reason, escaped a fiery end are stored at the Harding Memorial Association in Marion—but for what reason one can only guess. Mrs. Harding insisted that the public have no access to the papers. The public didn't, still doesn't, and, according to Mrs. Harding's instructions, never will. That being the case, why not ignite those artifacts as well?

When asked about all the fires she had been setting lately, the former first lady struggled with a reply. Finally, she said she had destroyed her husband's documents to preserve his legacy, which, of course, suggests that what had since been consigned to ashes revealed nefarious behavior of one sort or another, even more than exists on the historical record. This might not have been what Mrs. Harding meant by her comment; but, unfortunately, she died the year after her husband without explaining further—and no one else ever can.

It was certainly not what she had expected on November 2, 1920, when her husband, having won the presidency of the United States, was the most admired man in the country, and she was no less admired as the woman at his side. Nor was it what the men of America had expected on that day in 1920 when they were joined in the voting booth for the first time by women. Neither sex, it seemed, cast a very wise vote. The White House was a blackened institution for the next three and a half years.

A
MONTH AFTER THE ELECTION OF
1920, Christmas decorations began to appear in homes and on the streets of business districts. Santa was scheduled to make appearances in a number of civic venues; manger scenes had been erected in front of churches without controversy. Jingling bells could sometimes be heard from a distance. Bundled up against the weather with heavy coats, scarves, and mittens, mothers and fathers took it all in, holding children's hands, the children changing their minds about their favorite toys with each store they passed.

But the holiday was the furthest thing from the minds of the federal investigators and members of their staffs who were looking into the explosion that had killed more than forty people and injured more than 140 others in front of the Morgan Bank more than three months before. They had made no progress. The tips they received had all been dead ends. Barring something miraculous, it seemed certain that all of their stockings would be filled with coal this year.