Following a swing through the Western states and a
detour through the Alaska territory, President Warren G. Harding died in a San Francisco hotel after several days
of sudden, perplexing physical deterioration—just as he became aware of
multiple scandals affecting his administration and, ultimately, his standing in
history.
Three decades before Judith Miller and Jayson
Blair’s work called into question The New
York Times’ reputation for accuracy, a caption in its Sunday magazine made
me think heresy about the Newspaper of Record. Harding, the caption mistakenly stated, had
been assassinated on August 2, 1923.
Maddeningly enough, however, the
circumstances involving the President’s death were confusing and murky enough
that some suspect foul play to this day, eyeing particularly the role played by
First Lady Florence Harding.
In this scenario, Harding’s imperious “Duchess”
becomes a kind of Roaring Twenties counterpart of Mellie Grant, the President’s
vengeful wife on Scandal, and Beth
MacMann, the heroine (if “heroine” is the proper word for a woman accused of offing
her cheating hubby with Paul Revere’s spittoon in the White House) of Christopher Buckley’s
insanely funny No Way to Treat a First
Lady.
Florence dispensed with an autopsy and a
then-commonly-used death mask for her husband, then had many of his papers
destroyed—actions that only fed the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.
(Equally
remarkable was the speed with which this was done—within an hour of his death, Harding
was “embalmed, rouged, powdered, dressed, and in his casket,” according to Russell Aiuto's "Strange Life and Death of President Harding." “By morning, he was on a train, headed back to Washington, D.C.”)
The
President’s weakness for other women, according to this theory, fed the
Duchess’ desire to take revenge on her husband.
Others, somewhat less sensationally minded, point to an
emotional rather than physical poison acting on the President. In this version
of events, Harding, buffeted by (take your pick) a young mistress clamoring for
him to divorce his wife, persistent racist claims that he had African-American
blood, and worries that some close aides were mired in corruption, had grown so
despondent that he literally worried himself to death.
To be sure, the Hardings had any number of secrets:
Florence had eloped at age 19 to a drinker she soon divorced, and Warren had at
least one affair, with a friend from Marion, Ohio, who was paid by the
Republican National Committee to take a trip abroad so she could be
conveniently out of the way during the 1920 Presidential race. (I discussed
Harding’s nomination that year in what became known as the “smoke-filled room”
in a prior post.)
But when it came to secrets, Harding was no match
for a later President who bedded more women than he could count (including an intern); medical ailments
so severe and multitudinous that he required injections by a shadowy physician
nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood” to cope; a father whose days as a bootlegger furnished
him with underworld connections; and a secret intelligence operation aimed at
overthrowing a recently installed Cuban caudillo.
It’s hard to believe now, when he is perennially
ranked at or near the bottom of Presidents by historians, that, in an age before
television, when radio was still in its infancy, the mourning for Harding was
every bit as intense as that of this other President who died in his third year
in office, John F. Kennedy. (Approximately nine million Americans lined up to
view the funeral trip back to Ohìo.)
Yet Kennedy’s reputation has survived much
more intact than Harding’s—this despite the fact, for instance, that it was the
activist liberal President, not the laissez-faire conservative one, who laid
the groundwork for American involvement in a divisive, ruinous foreign war.
There are a number of reasons why that has occurred,
including that Harding called for a “return to normalcy” while Kennedy urged
service to the nation and others. But key among them is the place of the
President’s widow in the time surrounding his death.
Jacqueline Kennedy carried herself with a stoic
dignity that won universal applause after her husband’s assassination.
She was largely silent and aloof in the 30 years after Dallas, and the one
interview she did give—with journalist Theodore H. White, when she spoke of her
husband’s love for Camelot—played an
indelible part in the creation of his legend.
Secret Service aides had enough
respect for her that they would not speak to Dark Side of Camelot author Seymour Hersh about her husband's many assignations until after her
death.
Harding did not enjoy that posthumous shield, as his
wife—more sickly in life than himself—died within a year of him. That opened
the floodgates to all kinds of accounts, many untrue, by men who knew they
could speak without fear of contradiction.
Prominent among them: the roguish Gaston B. Means, a man described by his publisher as an “ex-Department of Justice
investigator.” Means’ book The Strange
Death of Warren Harding, is the source of the rumor that Florence poisoned
her husband.
Even though Means’ account was so shot full of inaccuracies and
even downright lies that it was denounced by his own co-author, it had already
done its damage in the form of a preposterous conspiracy theory.
Yet in other ways, it was Florence, who had made
possible so much of Warren’s success, as both newspaper editor and politician, who
inadvertently helped undermine his enormous popularity with the public.
When he learned the full dimensions of the scandals
threatening to break over his administration (primarily in the form of the “Teapot Dome” scandal involving Interior Secretary Albert Fall and Navy Secretary Edwin
Denby), Harding cried out, "I can handle my enemies, but God protect me
from my friends!” He might just as well have said, “God protect me from
Florence’s friends.”
Florence had insisted on one friend, Charles Forbes,
to be appointed to head the newly created Veterans Bureau. He betrayed the
couple’s—and the nation’s—trust through massive kickbacks and corruption at the
bureau.
The second friend of Florence’s was Dr. Charles Sawyer, personal physician to the President. He had endeared himself to the
first lady by advising her she did not need surgery for what seemed like a
life-threatening kidney ailment, at a time when other prominent physicians were
urging surgery. When she recovered, she ascribed to him almost the same level
of medical wisdom that Czarina Alexandra of Russia regarded the mad monk
Rasputin.
The Hardings adored this little, somewhat pompous man, but much of
the White House staff were cool toward him.
Dr. Sawyer was a homeopath, which meant he did not
possess the requisite expertise when the President, even before his fatal trip
west, began to develop what sounds like serious heart trouble.
Carl Anthony, a
prominent historian of First Ladies in general and Florence in particular,
believes that Harding’s so-called “mysterious death” is not so mysterious at
all—it was the result of misdiagnosis, mistreatment (including the use of purgatives) and medical neglect.
Furthermore, Florence enlisted Harding’s private
secretary, George Christian, in attempt to destroy her husband’s papers, in a
misguided attempt to sanitize his memory. (She was not the last First
Lady to do so. Some years later, Harry Truman found his wife burning his
letters. “Think of history,” he protested. “I am!” she answered.)
What she did
not realize, however, was that Christian only sent her a few cartons. He kept
more than 100 cubic feet of records in the White House basement. Many
commentators and even historians wrote under the belief that they need not
consult any primary documents from his administration because none existed.
It
was only in the 1960s that the Harding Memorial Association began to relinquish
its tight grip on this material, which then ended up in the hands of the Ohio
Historical Society. It has taken historians (including, interestingly enough, John Dean of Watergate fame) all this time, after consulting these records, to construct a more nuanced view of this heavily maligned President.
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