Flashback, June 1920: Harding, Calling for ‘Normalcy,’ Nominated by GOP for Presidency

On the 10th ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, with front-runners having pummeled each other silly and unbearable heat bearing down on the delegates, lovable lightweight Warren G. Harding emerged as the nominee 100 years ago this week. 

The victory climaxed a careful multi-month campaign that had achieved greater momentum four weeks earlier, when the U.S. Senator from Ohio called for a return to “normalcy” that would end progressive legislation domestically and intervention abroad.

For years, that reversion from government activism, along with a scandal-plagued administration, led largely liberal historians to place Harding among the lowest rung of Presidents. 

In the last two decades, vigorously contrarian (and often conservative) scholars, tapping papers long (and wrongly) believed destroyed by the President's widow, challenged that assessment. That may have raised Harding’s standing somewhat, but he is still unlikely to rank among good or even fair Presidents.

But Harding’s quest for the nomination is one area where the revisionists offer a more nuanced approach to our understanding of the forces that propelled him to the Presidency. In particular, a 2004 biography by John Dean of Watergate fame persuasively argued that, rather than being simply a favorite-son or dark-horse candidate who caught lightning in a bottle, Harding had shrewdly positioned himself as an acceptable second or third alternative to better-known candidates who could not secure the nomination.

For at least the last four decades, national conventions have been scripted down to the minute. It was a far cry from what held sway through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. (In 1924, the Democrats went to 103 ballots before staggering out of New York with a compromise candidate, John W. Davis--who still lost that fall overwhelmingly.)

In 1920, bitter internecine warfare engulfed the three GOP front-runners: Gen. Leonard Wood, Gov. Frank Lowden and Sen. Hiram Johnson. On the eve of the convention, a campaign finance scandal damaged Wood and Lowden. However, Johnson was unable to pick up their delegates, as he was blamed for pushing the Senate probe about his two opponents. 

That paved the way for the success of the strategy created by Harding’s campaign manager and friend, Harry Daugherty—i.e., secure commitments from delegates in the rival camps to back Harding if their own candidate couldn’t break a convention deadlock. 

Harding enjoyed several other advantages when he came to Chicago with his family, including a moderately conservative record that appealed to important businessmen who backed the party; an amiable personality that seldom if ever alienated anyone; a wife who played an unprecedented role behind the scenes and before the media; a wide-open field following the death of Theodore Roosevelt a year and a half before; and a handsome appearance that led more than one of his supporters to think that he “looked like a President.”

Daugherty secured the nomination for his Ohio buddy following sleepless, frantic deliberations the night before in a 13^th-floor suite of the Blackstone Hotel—giving rise to the term “smoke-filled room” to suggest party bosses secretly selecting nominees without taking into account the wishes of primary voters. 

Dean disputes the efficacy of that meeting, noting that nothing had been decided in these freewheeling discussions that night and that the real coup was pulled off the next morning on the convention floor by Daugherty’s forces. But clearly, some crucial minds were changed by what went on in that suite.

The second person to whom Harding owed his victory was his wife, Florence Kling Harding, who had been instrumental in his success as a newspaper editor and politician. 

In the lead-up to the convention, the formidable “Duchess” had convinced her husband to stay the course after he had suffered two disastrous primary defeats. At the convention itself, as detailed by biographer Carl S. Anthony, she “openly engaged the male political reporters covering the deadlocked convention with remarks that, for all intents and purposes, served as the blueprint for candidates’ spouse convention speeches many generations in the future.”

But, as the ultimate prize appeared within her husband’s grasp, Mrs. Harding was not as happy as might be expected. “I can see but one word written over the head of my husband, if he is elected, and that word is ‘tragedy,’” she told reporters. 

What caused her concern? She was certainly familiar with her husband’s limited intelligence and his vulnerability to charlatans who took advantage of his too-trusting nature (both of which paved the way for the Teapot Dome scandal that undermined his reputation after his death). 

But some of the unease stemmed from her conversation with a Washington fortune-teller who predicted that her husband would make it to the Oval Office—then die there by “sudden, violent, peculiar death by poison”—which, in one sense, did happen three years later, when one of Warren’s doctors accidentally hastened his death by prescribing purgatives that aggravated his cardiac condition.

But that remained far in the distance in the fall of 1920, when Harding benefited from an electorate exhausted from World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s battle with the GOP-controlled Senate over the League of Nations, as well as a recession that began under the Democrat. 

Still, a major obstacle loomed. In order to clear the path to Harding’s victory in November, the Republican National Committee paid his longtime mistress, Carrie Phillips, to go on a long trip to Asia so she would be unavailable to reporters who might discover her relationship with the nominee, as well as her oft-voiced sympathy for Germany during the war. She continued to be paid a yearly stipend by the GOP to assure her silence until her death in 1960. 

(Due to litigation by Phillips' daughter and two of Harding's nephews, the President's erotic, pseudo-poetic correspondence with his paramour was not released by the Library of Congress until 2014.)

GOP leaders were unaware of yet another of Harding’s dangerous liaisons, this time with Nan Britton, two decades younger than Phillips and three decades younger than the nominee. By the time of the convention, she was eight months pregnant with his child—and, unlike Phillips, would continue her relationship with Harding when he reached the White House.  Her revelation of their relationship in a 1931 tell-all--long denied by Harding loyalists--was finally confirmed by DNA testing in 2015.

Dean, Amity Schlaes and Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh have argued in recent years that Harding is underrated as a President, pointing to moderate views on race and his successfully attempt to revive the economy. 

But their reassessment, while an important correction to the record, only carries so much weight, as Harding's racial views were squarely in mainstream Republican thought at the time and never really challenged his base; important sections of the economy—notably, agriculture—did not benefit from the boom of the Twenties; and the President remained, intellectually, a featherweight.

Moreover, for all his work in journalism, Harding continually offered up some of the most gaseous political rhetoric ever produced in the White House. With memorable invective, newspaper columnist and editor H.L. Mencken summed up Harding’s style as "Gamalielese" (a play on the President's middle name):

“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

This Day in Presidential History (Dean, Nixon and Watergate)

March 21, 1973—Watergate began to unravel, eventually bringing down a Chief Executive just re-elected in a landslide, when President Richard Nixon ignored counsel John Dean’s warning that the mushrooming scandal was “a cancer on the Presidency.”

Perhaps more than any other event in modern history, Watergate contributed all kinds of phrases to the American political lexicon: “at this point in time,” “inoperative,” “modified limited hangout,” “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind,” “the Big Enchilada,” “expletive deleted),” and “stonewall it” (the phrase that finally led to a mass affirmative vote on the House Judiciary Committee in favor of Nixon’s impeachment, thus forcing his resignation). But Dean’s phrase stands out for being the most descriptive and the most prescient.

For two hours on this morning, the President met with Dean and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on the coverup arising from the break-in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. Within the past week, Newsweek had run a cover story, "Nixon's Palace Guard," on the growing evidence of ties between top aides and the seven Watergate defendants.

Now, Dean spelled out as much as he knew: that deputy campaign director Jeb Stuart Magruder knew much about the bugging; that White House special counsel Charles Colson might also have been involved; that campaign fundraiser Herbert Kalmbach had provided funds for the defendants’ attorneys; and—the topper—that E. Howard Hunt was blackmailing them for $122,000 more or he’d reveal all he’d done for the campaign and administration, including a break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

The amount of attention throughout this day on Watergate signaled the President’s increasingly preoccupation with the scandal. He and his staff finally understood the legal and political gravity of the situation. “We now have a different problem than we did during the election,” wrote Haldeman in his notes on the day (later printed in The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House). “We’ve got to figure all the problems and possibilities.”

Despite an adversarial relationship with the press from early in his Presidency—really, perhaps, going back to the beginnings of his career—Nixon had been able to stage-manage events largely as he wished, mostly due to Americans’ traditional trust in their Presidents.

From this day onward, however, control of events increasingly slipped out of his grasp. Like the metaphorical medical condition that Dean predicted, the bad days started to outnumber the good ones.

Nixon’s command of the political terrain was not only undermined by his “silent majority’s” recognition that he had committed what journalist Theodore H. White called a Breach of Faith, but also by the resignation a month later of Haldeman, a former advertising executive who had helped resurrect his boss from the political dead by remolding his public image for the 1968 campaign.

In elementary school I seized each day’s paper to see what Nixon’s gang was up to. High on my hate list was Haldeman, who, with his humorless mien, drill-sergeant crewcut, and absolute command of the President’s schedule, became known among the press and Washington inner circles as “Nixon’s S.O.B.” and “The Iron Chancellor.”

Today I’m inclined to feel more compassion for this aide who received as much abuse from Nixon as he inflicted on others. It could not have been easy to work for a self-centered, obsessive political junkie who, after more than a decade of close interaction, did not know the number of children in Haldeman’s family.

It was even harder to try to guess which of his boss’ statements was a momentary irrational thought and which an unbending order. Retired New York Times columnist William Safire revealed that, in Nixon’s first year in office, a bad landing on Air Force One prompted a singular tirade by his former boss: "That's it! No more landing at airports!" Haldeman listened, nodded, then paid the order no further mind.

Two days after the meeting among Dean, Haldeman and Nixon, Judge John Sirica read in open court a letter from Watergate defendant James McCord, disclosing political pressure from on high to plead guilty and hinting at the involvement of others not identified during the trial. The revelation was the first of a daily round that eventually led to convictions for 25 Watergate figures, as well as the first resignation (and later pardon) of an American President.

After all this time, it’s amazing to think not only that some doubted this paranoid micromanager could have instigated the cover-up, but also that they also discounted the possibility that he ordered the original break-in, too.

More and more actors over the years have played either Nixon or a thinly fictionalized version of him, including Peter Riegert, Jason Robards Jr., Frank Langella, and Anthony Hopkins. But for my money, the best was Dan Hedaya, complete with jowls, hunched-over frame, and hooded scowl, in the 1999 film Dick (whose charm only begins with that short but extremely appropriate title). It lays out the real story of how Watergate came to be revealed.

It’s a tale involving two giggly teenage ditzes, Betsy and Arlene (played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, respectively), who on a tour of the White House, recognize G. Gordon Liddy as the weirdo they saw skulking around the Watergate Hotel, where Arlene resides.

“Tricky Dick” attempts to gain their silence by hiring them as “official White House dog watchers” (for the obstreperous Checkers) and, later, the more official-sounding "Presidential youth advisors,” but they outsmart and outlast the presiding political genius of their day. Along the way, you’ll learn all sorts of secrets never divulged on those Watergate tapes (e.g., the girls set off a “Hello, Dolly” sing-along at a summit by accidentally distributing marijuana-laced brownies to the principal adult participants).

When you’ve finished watching this unbelievably realistic film, remember who first told you (or reminded you) about it….