First Ladies (34 page)

Florence soared on Warren’s bubble. She saw herself as the queen of Washington and with Evalyn Walsh McLean’s help planned the most expensive inauguration gala the country had ever seen. The Republican National Committee, true to the party’s tightfisted tradition, refused to foot the bill. So Mrs. McLean and her husband paid for the bash out of their own pockets and held it at their estate, Friendship, outside Washington. Needless to say, the guest list was studded with millionaires. It was a harbinger of things to come.

Sixty and in poor health, Florence tried to conceal her haggard appearance with layers of powder and rouge. Edith Wilson gave her a brief White House tour and invited her to tea. She was so appalled by her successor’s déclassé style, whining voice, and overbearing manner, she rang for housekeeper Elizabeth Jaffray and left without saying good-bye. Florence, knowing a snub when she saw one, retaliated by firing Jaffray. A week later, when she realized the complications of running the Executive Mansion, she rehired Jaffray and let her handle that side of the White House with scarcely a word of comment. Florence had little interest in housekeeping.

By this time she also had little interest in Warren. During the campaign she had found out about his long-running romance with her friend Carrie Phillips. The Republican National Committee gave Carrie and her husband twenty thousand dollars to leave the country and stay away for the next four years. That left the Harding partnership very close to a marriage of convenience.

Warren sat in the Oval Office, scared half out of his wits, wondering what to do next. He confessed to an amazing number of reporters that he did not think he was up to the job. He told one, Bruce Bliven of
The New Republic
, that he wanted Congress to pass a bill that would make the U.S. tariff wall high enough to help Europe’s industries recover from the war—demonstrating he had one of the big issues of the era exactly backward. When another newsman returned from a trip across the war-ravaged continent and offered to tell the President what he had seen and heard, Warren said he had no interest in that “Europe stuff” and referred him to his secretary and chief speech-writer.

Needless to say, Florence was not equipped to fill this vacuum in the oval office. She had no political ideas either, beyond a mindless hostility to Democrats. One of her few interventions concerned a speech Warren planned to give in which he semiendorsed Wilson’s League of Nations. Florence made him remove the kind words. She could still run “Wurr’n,” but she did not have a clue about where they should go.

The only political program that occurred to either of them was a spurious populism. At a White House reception shortly after Evalyn Walsh McLean’s million-dollar inauguration party, Florence noticed the servants were lowering the window shades to prevent the public from goggling at the guests. “Let ’em look in if they want to!” she cried. “It’s their White House.”

Tourists traipsing through the public rooms were sometimes startled to find the First Lady in their midst, shaking hands and acting as an impromptu guide. Warren too was eager to shake hands by the hour. This touch of democracy, after the austere Wilson White House, with its barred gates and unused state rooms during the war and the eighteen months of the President’s illness, struck many people as charming. For a while Warren and Florence enjoyed a honeymoon with the people and the press.

Behind the scenes, Florence remained mean-spirited, evening scores with the snubbers on her list by excluding them from the White House and exalting her favorites. She was also ferociously hostile
to anyone she perceived as a potential competitor for Warren’s share of the political limelight. When the widow of Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri tried to donate her handsome house on Sixteenth Street as a vice presidential residence, good-natured Warren had no objection to asking Congress to appropriate a few hundred thousand dollars to maintain the place for Calvin Coolidge and his pleasant wife, Grace. The Duchess exploded when she heard about it and ordered “Wurr’n” to kill the bill. “Do you think I am going to have those Coolidges living in a house like that?” Florence shouted. “A hotel apartment is plenty good for them!”

It would take another forty-some years and the generosity of Nelson Rockefeller for the vice president to get a decent house. When Dad became vice president in 1945, we stayed in the same two-bedroom apartment we had lived in while he was a senator. Although Dad was only vice president for three months, it would have been nice to get some training in a sort of minor-league White House before being thrust into the real thing.

All sorts of machinations were taking place behind the scenes in the Harding White House, none of them very nice. Warren had made Harry Daugherty his attorney general, and this dime-store Machiavelli started collecting on his long years of toil to make Harding President. One of his first moves was to get a presidential order giving him control of the corporations confiscated from German owners under the Alien Property Act during World War I. He and his pals began selling off these assets at bargain rates and pocketing bonuses paid under the table. Another crony skimmed millions from the Veterans’ Bureau, selling alcohol and drugs needed for soldiers still recuperating from their World War I wounds to bootleggers and narcotics dealers. The secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, an old Harding Senate pal, allowed oil companies to tap into the Teapot Dome oil reserve and other government-owned fields for a half million dollars in “loans” which Fall never bothered to repay

The only political plum Florence demanded was the appointment of Dr. Charles Sawyer as surgeon general. She credited this quack, who believed in “nature food” as a sovereign remedy, with keeping
her alive and hoped he could continue to work his miracles on her and Warren in the White House.

Having nothing else to do, Warren spent incredible numbers of hours answering the mail. He composed personal replies to innumerable appeals for help and warnings of imminent national disaster, the two chief reasons people write to the White House. One night the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, visited Harding in his office and found the President groaning over a huge pile of letters on his desk. Butler glanced at them; their triviality boggled his mind. He urged Warren
to
put a clerk in charge of this mundane chore.

Butler did not realize that Warren had to fill his time somehow. He never read a book. He had no interest in art or the theater, except for the Gayety Burlesque, which he visited regularly to watch the bumps and grinds in a special box that concealed him from the public. During the day he played a lot of golf, and the nights when he was not at the Gayety he tried to fill with poker and booze. While the rest of the country wrestled with the idiocy of Prohibition, for which Warren’s party was chiefly responsible, he and Florence were serving hard stuff on the second floor of the White House to his poker-playing buddies.

Florence tolerated—she even encouraged—Warren’s poker playing and golf. But there was one recreation that she would not condone. That was why she became the first President’s wife to demand her own Secret Service agent—launching the unhappy tradition of imprisoning the First Lady as well as the President in their eternal vigilance. Florence’s Secret Service man was acquired not to protect her but to keep Warren’s remaining inamorata, Nan Britton, out of the White House.

The agent did not do a very good job. According to the bestseller Nan wrote a few years later, she swiftly established communication with Warren via the mails, and soon he was sneaking her into the Oval Office, where they enjoyed themselves in a five-foot-square clothes closet. Once the First Lady almost caught them. Tipped off by her Secret Service man, she rushed downstairs and demanded access to Warren’s sanctum. The Secret Service agent who had escorted Nan
from Union Station was guarding the inside door, which he refused to open “by order of the President.”

An infuriated Florence raced around and invaded the office of George Christian, one of the President’s secretaries, adjoining the Oval Office. Sensing what was up, Christian stalled her with double-talk about his boss being busy, while the Secret Service man guarding the other door extracted Nan from the closet and hustled her out a side exit. When Florence finally charged into the Oval Office, “Wurr’n” was at his desk, reading a letter. That did not save him from a ferocious tongue-lashing. “She makes life hell for me!” he told Nan later.

Other Presidents have been unfaithful to their wives. But none has perpetrated the kind of French farce the Hardings performed in the White House. Beyond the gates another drama was beginning to unfold that would transform the farce into tragedy. Honest men started telling the President what Daugherty, Fall, and others were doing to his administration. The appalled Harding did not know what to do or say. He spent his nights staring into the darkness and his days in a sleep-starved fog. Whenever possible he consoled himself with Nan, who listened tearfully to his troubles after another rendezvous in the closet.

Meanwhile, Florence collapsed with a near fatal attack of nephritis that left her bedridden for months. Recovered, she hobbled around on swollen ankles, looking more and more like a walking corpse. Both the First Lady and the President were desperately in need of someone to protect them from each other—and the huge uproar that was gathering around them. Harding finally found the nerve to ask one of Daugherty’s top aides, Jess Smith, to resign. He was the alien properties operation’s bagman, and all sorts of witnesses were ready to testify that they had deluged him with bribes. Smith went home to Ohio and blew out his brains. The crook who had been looting the Veterans’ Bureau soon imitated his example.

Like other Presidents before and since, Harding finally decided the best answer to the mounting scandal was a campaign-style trip across the country to let the people see their President was undaunted by
the nasty things the newspapers were printing about him. If patriotism is, as they say, the last refuge of scoundrels, populism is unquestionably the final refuge of tottering Presidents. The roar of the crowd will, they hope, wash them clean.

Harding’s Voyage of Understanding, as he called it, whistle-stopped across the country with Florence and Surgeon General Sawyer at his side. It never seemed to occur to them that they were exhausting a man with high blood pressure, a weak heart, and acute insomnia. The President hurled his platitudes at the voters at literally dozens of stops from Washington, D.C., to Alaska, where he was welcomed with acclaim by the natives because he was the first Chief Executive to acknowledge their existence by visiting the place.

En route to Alaska aboard a U.S. Army transport, Harding received a coded message from Washington with more bad news about the deepening scandals he had left behind him. For several hours the President looked dazed; he muttered incoherently about false friends. A few days later, when the ship collided with one of her escorting destroyers in a heavy fog, Harding was heard to say: “I hope the boat sinks.”

In Seattle, on his way back from Alaska, Harding tried to give a speech, but he faltered in the middle of it, turned green, began slurring his words, and called Alaska “Nebraska.” Another speech later that day finished him. In a state of collapse, he was rushed aboard a train, complaining of severe stomach cramps and indigestion. He was almost certainly having a heart attack, but Surgeon General Sawyer diagnosed the President’s condition as food poisoning. In San Francisco he was hurried from the train to the Palace Hotel with a fever of 102 and a racing pulse.

Two days later he seemed to rally and even began making plans for a fishing trip to Catalina Island. On the evening of August 2, Florence sat by his bed, reading him an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
which praised him extravagantly. Warren liked what he was hearing. “That’s good. Go on, read some more,” he said.

Those were his last words. His head fell back on the pillow. Florence thought he was asleep and tiptoed out of the room. A few minutes
later, a nurse came in and saw that Warren Harding was dead. At first the nation was plunged into mourning, but grief rapidly turned to indignation as Daugherty, Fall, and other crooks went on trial for their various malfeasances and people began to realize Warren Harding had been a hollow President.

The woman who put him in the White House mourned him with words that can be read several ways. The night before the funeral, Florence went into the East Room, where Harding lay in state, and said: “No one can hurt you now, Warren.” She may have been bearing witness to the treachery of his friends. She may also have been confessing that she had been one of the hurters. Evalyn Walsh McLean, who was present, said she sounded more like a mother talking to a lost son than a wife saying farewell to her husband.

Florence’s final scene as First Lady was not pretty. Although it was August at its most beastly in Washington, D.C. (and air conditioning had yet to be invented), she ordered a fire built in the fireplace of the President’s second-floor study and spent the next five days going through Warren’s papers, burning potentially incriminating evidence. The President’s horrified secretary George Christian managed to hide some papers in the basement pantry. Otherwise our knowledge of the Harding administration would be close to zero.

Suddenly, Florence could not bear another minute in the White House. She packed the remaining papers in boxes and trucked them out to the McLeans’ estate, where she spent several more days burning evidence on the lawn. All in all, it was a performance more suitable for the bereaved mistress of a South American dictator than the widow of the President of the United States.

Sixteen months later Florence Kling Harding was dead of nephritis, and the sorry story of the First Lady with no judgment and the President with no brains came to an end—except in the courts, where various members of the Harding administration continued struggling to evade the punishment they so richly deserved.