REPUBLICANS, AND EVEN SOME DEMOCRATS, believed that Harding might well have been the most presidential-looking man ever to inhabit the White House. He was also one of the most likable—short on ego, long on cheerfulness, a friend of those on both sides of the aisle as a member of the United States Senate, in which he served but a single undistinguished term before becoming the nation’s chief executive. Gray-haired, stern-visaged, clear-eyed, stiff-chinned, ruggedly constructed, almost always attired in a three-piece suit of modest hue and equally modest tie, Harding was the first American head of state for the media age, in which, of course, he played a starring role. As has often been said, he was the chief executive from central casting. It was not meant as a compliment.
The problem was that his reality did not match his appearance. “In the end,” writes biographer Robert K. Murray, “it was the quality of Harding’s mind, as much as any personal habits or character traits, which limited his effectiveness as president. … Actually, Harding had a good mind but he simply made little use of it.”
He certainly gave it the day off when he wrote his Inaugural Address. One of the least memorable ever recited, it began with an attempt at eloquence that left careful listeners shaking their heads.
“When one surveys the world around him after a great storm, noting the marks of destruction and yet rejoicing in the ruggedness of the things which withstood it, if he is an American he breathes the clarified atmosphere with a strange mingling of regret and new hope. … In the beginning the Old World scoffed at our experiment; today our foundations of political and social belief stand unshaken, a precious inheritance to ourselves, an inspiring example of freedom and civilization to all mankind. Let us express renewed and strengthened devotion, in grateful reverence for the immortal beginning, and utter our confidence in the supreme fulfillment.”
One thing was certain, though, Harding told his fellow Americans: there would be no more incidents like the Wall Street explosion of September 16. Or, if there were, the culprits, the Reds or anarchists, would have been caught and sentenced by this time, with no mercy shown.
The applause, like the speech itself, was tepid.
Among the journalists listening to the new chief executive was the most uniquely readable of his breed that our country has ever produced. “He writes the worst English I have ever encountered,” said Henry Louis Mencken, of Harding. “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges. … It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps in.”
According to a poll of scholars conducted by Harvard College in 1948, Harding was the worst president the United States had ever had up to that point, twenty-ninth in a field of twenty-nine. By 2010, in a survey from New York’s Siena College Research Institute, Harding’s reputation had shot up to forty-first out of forty-three chief executives, with James Buchanan, America’s only bachelor president, and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and the first president to be impeached, having fallen behind him. According to scholars Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, Harding
did not provide moral leadership; he did not have much understanding of forces at work in the United States after the World War; he was not willing to use the federal government to ease adjustment after the war. … He sought to avoid controversy, even if it meant avoiding real problems. … [He] was an ineffective leader, who suffered both personal and political scandal. It is not surprising that historians rate Harding a poor president.
Perhaps, influenced by the right cabinet members and other advisers, Harding would have performed more admirably, exercised his mind more often. Instead, he surrounded himself with a horde of hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, poker-playing, perpetually scheming banditos known as the Ohio Gang. They were certainly not the first presidential associates to combine personal and political misbehavior, but they were without question the first to combine them to such extremes. The political misdeeds were mainly the doing of Harding’s pals from back home, who reacted to the election returns like kids who found that the door to the candy store had been left unlocked and the cop on the beat was home sick tonight. They smoked, they drank, they chewed tobacco, and at least twice a week they played poker, with Florence Harding, the unattractive, barely sociable, and normally straitlaced wife of the president often sitting in herself. Poker, she admitted reluctantly, was her weakness.
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was dubious of the Ohio Gang before they even had time to break their first law, and the more he saw of them, as Harding filled important government posts with one after another late in 1920, the more apprehensive he became. Hoover liked Harding, respected him for a variety of reasons. But, he believed, the president
had another side which was not good. His political associates had been men of the type of Albert B. Fall, whom he appointed Secretary of the Interior; [Harry M.] Daugherty, whom he appointed Attorney General; [Charles] Forbes, whom he appointed head of the Veteran’s Bureau; Thomas W. Miller, whom he appointed Alien Property Custodian, and Jesse Smith, who had office room in the Department of Justice.
[Harding] enjoyed the company of these men and his old Ohio associates in and out of the government. Weekly White House poker games were his greatest relaxation. The stakes were not large, but the play lasted most of the night. … I had lived too long on the frontiers of the world to have strong emotions against people playing poker for money if they liked it, but it irked me to see it in the White House.
THE OHIO GANG’S FIRST CRIMINAL deed was to be expected. It was the almost mandatory act of violating the Eighteenth Amendment. It didn’t have to. It could have set an example of compliance to the law, or at least could have non-complied behind closed doors. Instead, the White House made no secret of its malfeasance, the edifice being stocked with more liquor than a city block of high-toned speakeasies, with shipments arriving in unmarked trucks under cover of darkness almost every night of the week. The Ohio Gang bought, or was given by shady friends who would later have favors to ask, only the best of alcoholic beverages.
Other than that, the first of the administration’s scandals was the only one not involving a member of the Ohio Gang. But as a close friend of the president, Charles Forbes might well have been an honorary member. He knew well the members of the gang; he was also a close friend of the first lady, with whom he may have been the only male in Washington to grit his teeth and flirt at the same time. His reward for this proximity, and feigned affection, was being appointed head of the Veterans’ Bureau.
He was a strange choice. As Murray writes, although he won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Great War, “Forbes nonetheless had earlier once deserted the army and been arrested although never brought to trial. … Forbes’s personal reputation among Republicans was unsavory. Neither [Republican National Committee Chairman Will] Hays nor Daugherty, the two men most responsible for party patronage, endorsed Forbes’s appointment to the Veterans’ Bureau. Daugherty told the president at the time that it was a mistake.” The attorney general would later turn out to be a mistake himself. As for Harding, he refused to be dissuaded, and eventually Forbes assumed his new duties.
Because of the Great War, veterans’ hospitals were facing severe shortages of supplies, more than they had at any time since the Civil War. It was up to Forbes to refill the warehouses. It was, in fact, the first set of duties he faced upon taking office. Instead, he did just the opposite, not restocking the storage areas but temporarily emptying them. Declaring as “worthless” all manner of items that were actually invaluable to the care of his patients, Forbes sold them to accomplices at bargain-basement rates. Then he bought them back from dummy corporations for much more than they were worth, with Forbes and his allies pocketing the difference. As Harding biographer John Dean writes, “Forbes was indeed selling surplus supplies (sheets, towels, soap, gauze, winter pajamas, and the like), and at absurdly low prices, to private contractors in private deals.” Other goods that went straight from Veterans’ Bureau storage to the black market were drugs, moleskin, medicinal liquor, “and even hardware and some trucks.”
In addition, Forbes and his most trusted companion in wrongdoing, the Bureau’s chief counsel Charles F. Cramer, knowing that more hospitals were going to be built to house the afflicted, purchased the land for them at grossly inflated prices. Two examples will suffice: The Veterans’ Bureau paid $90,000 for a site worth $35,000, and $105,000 for a site worth a mere $19,000. Once again, a large portion of the overpayment went into the private caches of Forbes, Cramer, and the other crooks in charge of health care for veterans, so much so that critics charged there was not enough money left over for the state-of-the-art medical treatment that had been planned. And, in fact, there wasn’t.
It has been estimated that the Veterans’ Bureau lost at least $200 million because of Forbes’s chicanery, a total made all the more appalling when one considers that it was amassed by adding to the pain of men who were already suffering the wounds of the world’s most technologically excruciating war. The normally functioning human conscience reels at such heartlessness.
It did not take long for the Justice Department to learn of Forbes’s activities and begin an investigation. Nor did the investigation itself take long. When Attorney General Daugherty reached the point at which he was certain of the truth, he told Harding what was happening and provided documents backing up his charges. The president summoned the Veterans’ Bureau chief immediately. It took a lot to arouse Harding’s ire. This was a lot. Daugherty resisted the impulse to tell the Chief Executive “I told you so.”
But Forbes was ready for the confrontation. Perhaps believing that his relationship with the Hardings would protect him from outsiders, he decided to be casual instead of contrite. Instead of admitting his transgressions, he claimed that the materials being sold truly were worthless, and that the cost of storing them was more than half a million dollars a year. The government, Forbes insisted, could simply not afford to spend that much money for that inconsequential a reason.
Harding did not believe him, looking at him with disappointment more than disgust. He had been prepared with too much paperwork by Daugherty, paperwork that seemed at first glance to be irrefutable proof, but later seemed too hastily gathered and thoughtlessly organized. Still, the president’s friend was a crook, a thief, the openness with which he committed his crimes an insult that Harding could not help but take personally. That was on the one hand.
On the other was the fact that for many years the man had been a friend of the Hardings, had gone out of his way to do favors for them, had offered gifts, hospitality and more—and Harding simply did not have the heart to fire him. His weaknesses toward those close to him, already legendary and soon to be put to further, even more egregious trials, interceded on Forbes’s behalf. Instead of firing his Veterans’ Bureau head, Harding simply ordered him to stop his illegal practices immediately. Forbes agreed in writing that, thenceforth, he would put no more surplus government goods on the market. The meeting ended with accord, but one of which the president was dubious.
As he should have been. Forbes wasted no time in returning to work—i.e., continuing to peddle government property and stash away the gains. Harding, however, not trusting him, had assigned government agents to monitor Veterans’ Bureau activities, and Forbes was ordered to pay a return visit to the president’s office, where he foolishly tried to bend the truth again. This time, Harding would have none of it. This time, the friendship didn’t matter. According to one witness, Harding grabbed Forbes by the shoulders and shook him while shouting in his face, “You yellow rat! You double-crossing bastard.”
Harding told Forbes to submit his letter of resignation immediately. Forbes agreed. Sort of. He gave Harding his usually worthless word that he would give up his position, but begged to be permitted to flee to Europe first. He would write the letter from across the Atlantic. It would be his first action once safely abroad; he swore it.
On the surface, it sounded preposterous, chutzpah without so much as a shred of justification behind it. But the more Harding thought about it, the more he liked the idea. The effects of the scandal would be muted if Forbes were out of the country when the story broke, and since he would be unavailable to reporters, his criminal activities would drop from the front pages much more quickly than they would if he were nearby and available to the press. The president would seem, as was true, the victim of a duplicitous colleague rather than a miscreant himself. That he had waited too long to fire that colleague might not even be known. Harding told Forbes to get out of his sight and start packing. And not to forget his stationery.
To the surprise of many, Forbes’s word was good on this occasion, and the White House received the letter of resignation within a month. The scandal was big news for a few days, but, as expected, Harding had been portrayed sympathetically, the victim of a trusted appointee who had turned on him once placed in a position of trust. When the press got tired of the story, as it did more quickly than it should have, the unconscionable behavior of Charles Forbes and company disappeared from public view, never to be seen in print again.
Nonetheless, it seemed to some in the Fourth Estate and many in Congress that the president had acted irresponsibly by not insisting that Forbes be brought back to the United States to face prosecution. “Years later,” however, “historian Robert H. Ferrell confirmed, with regard to the criminal activities at the Veterans’ Bureau, that Harding acted quite appropriately and that those who criticized Harding for letting Forbes slip off to Europe to resign ignored the fact that Harding did not have any evidence of Forbes’s criminal activity, only his insubordination. Ferrell also notes that Harding immediately appointed a new director for the Veterans’ Bureau, who quickly cleaned up the mess Forbes had made and proved an able administrator.”
But Ferrell was writing about the immediate aftermath of the crime, defending Harding’s original impulses. Eventually, Daugherty and the Justice Department were able to dig up even more proof of their charges against Forbes, this time presenting it more professionally, as a result of which his guilt was established beyond doubt—and it went far beyond just insubordination. Forbes was extradited from his overseas redoubt and tried in an American courtroom. The verdict was a fine of $10,000 and two years in a federal prison. Given the outrageousness of what he had done, and given what the victims of his chicanery had been through for their country, the punishment was not nearly severe enough for the crime. No one, however, seemed to complain, although from the vantage point of the present it is impossible to understand why. Certainly these days the punishment would have more closely suited the misdeeds.
About two weeks after the Senate began a hearing on the matter, Charles Cramer became the first of two suicides resulting from the Harding scandals. Cramer knew that, with Forbes being disposed of, he would be the next Veterans’ Bureau figure called to the stand, and knew just as well he could not bear to be humiliated in a forum so public. Instead, he opted for holding a .45 pistol to the side of his head and, standing in front of a bathroom mirror, squeezing the trigger. The scene was too grisly for even the most tasteless of tabloids to publish. Cramer was removed from his house on a stretcher, covered by as many sheets as emergency workers carried. Even so, patches of blood seeped through and were visible to the onlookers who had formed a path from the front door of his house to the back door of the ambulance.
“In an ironic twist,” John Dean points out, “Cramer had purchased the Harding home on Wyoming Avenue.”
JESSE W. “JESS” SMITH WAS the informal head of the Ohio Gang. It was through his connections that the White House was able to ignore the Eighteenth Amendment and keep its officials lubricated. Smith procured the finest distilled beverages available north of the Canadian border, had them shipped across the Detroit River from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, then transported by rail to Washington, D.C.
It was as the members of the Gang sipped, swigged, and dealt out the cards that they began to turn their attention to more overtly illegal deeds. Soon they were buying votes, selling votes, forging presidential approvals, granting other unscrupulous favors, making financial demands of those who sought the favors, and in other more subtle ways enriching their bank accounts at the expense of the American people. They were careful about it. Individually, none of their crimes approached the scale of Forbes’s. But they made up for the lack of quality with what amounted to a surfeit of quantity. Charles Ponzi was in jail by this time, and surely never knew what was happening at the White House, but how he would have admired the Ohio Gang, how he would have pleaded for membership!
Smith, for example, unofficially the top aide to Attorney General Harry Daugherty, who had taken over for A. Mitchell Palmer after the election, managed to pocket $200,000 out of $441,000 that had been a bribe in the first place, disguised as a settlement for wrongdoing in a stock transaction during the war.
Smith’s primary contribution to the Harding administration’s historical rating, however, was his liquor purchases—not the liquor he bought for his mates and himself to drink at the poker table, but the liquor he purchased as a middleman and then sold to others; Smith was reputed to be a principal supplier of bonded liquor to Washington-area bootleggers. As such, of course, he was an important figure in the District of Columbia’s world of organized crime, and his ties to the White House made him feel impervious to either discovery or punishment. They also made the White House into a depot for illegal activity.
Smith and Daugherty were from the same small town in Ohio, Washington Court House; and despite Daugherty’s being eleven years older, the two had been friends since Smith’s early years, when Daugherty acted as a kind of big brother to the younger, less-civilized lad. Daugherty had helped Smith get started in the department store business in Washington Court House, and during the 1920 presidential campaign, in which Daugherty served as Harding’s campaign manager, Smith repaid the favor by working without pay as his assistant. “Given the fact that Daugherty’s wife was ill and forced to remain in Columbus [Ohio],” writes John Dean, “Jesse Smith set up house for Daugherty in Washington and made himself so valuable to the new Attorney General that Daugherty gave him an office near his on the sixth floor of the Department of Justice, although Smith was never on the government payroll.”
It was rumored, in fact, that Smith went further than just making Daugherty comfy in his new home, that his divorce from a beautiful redhead was due, at least in part, to his lack of suitable performances with her between the sheets, that he was much better when partnered with a member of his own sex—say, his roommate in Washington. No evidence supports the rumor, but Washington, D.C., then as now, was a city of whispers as well as bombast, and once Daugherty and Smith moved in together late in 1920, their relationship inspired all manner of whispers.
More to the point, the two men were close enough to make it a reasonable assumption that the nation’s top law enforcer knew his friend was acting illegally by flouting the Eighteenth Amendment and dealing with bootleggers. No less reasonable an assumption is it that Daugherty was raking in his own share of the transactions, just as he raked in a healthy percentage of what Smith referred to as a $200,000 “fine.” After Daugherty, he was “without doubt the most controversial appointment made by Harding,” says Robert K. Murray, and later revelations that Smith was the prince of Capitol Hill bootleggers did nothing to dispel the charge. Murray is wrong in referring to Smith as an “appointment,” however, as he held no position to which he could have been appointed; he was simply the unofficial aide-de-camp, or tagalong, to the attorney general.
As for Harding, it was reported that he “definitely knew about some of Jesse Smith’s actions and attempted to scare him away from Washington in order to forestall his arrest and imprisonment. [No one] will ever know how many specific details Harding uncovered about the house on K Street [where Daugherty and Smith lived], but it was enough to make him realize Smith’s culpability.”
Nonetheless, Smith managed to hang on to his position at the Justice Department—whatever it was—until 1923, when Harding was planning a trip to Alaska from which he would never return. Daugherty prepared a list of people who would accompany the president on the journey, and Harding read it over in the attorney general’s presence. He noticed that Smith’s name was on it. Harding ordered it struck off, and furthermore, having heard enough gossip about Smith in the past few years, most recently that he was running around Washington with “a gay crowd,” told Daugherty he wanted him out of the nation’s capital as soon as possible. (The word “gay” did not then have its present connotation.)
The attorney general had no choice other than to agree but was frightened of the possible consequences. And not just to himself. Smith had been depressed after an operation on his appendix failed to heal as well as expected, and was further upset because the diabetes with which he had been plagued for several years was worsening. His exclusion from the Alaska trip would be yet another blow, proof that he was suddenly an outsider in a town where respects were paid only to insiders. His removal from the White House altogether, which Daugherty decided he would not tell Smith about until later, would be less a dismissal than an exile. Nonetheless, Daugherty assured Harding that he would deal with Smith as the president desired, but he did so with trepidation.
In fact, it might have been the most difficult thing ever asked of him. Both Daugherty and Smith’s ex-wife were afraid that Smith might harm himself if left alone, might perhaps even follow Charles Cramer in taking his own life. So, after finally breaking the news to Smith that he was no longer on the Alaska list, that it wasn’t so bad, that he could tend to other “business” more freely with the president and his retinue having departed, Daugherty asked his special assistant, Warren F. Martin, to start spending his nights with Smith. Pay close attention to him, his actions, and his mood, Daugherty cautioned.
Martin agreed. The attention he paid, however, was not close enough. At nine o’clock on the first night of his assignment, which was the day Smith learned he wasn’t going to Alaska, Martin said goodnight to his temporary roommate, who claimed he was tired despite the early hour. Martin said Smith did not seem distracted, did not seem depressed, only tired. He went to his room, closed the door, and Martin stood against it listening for several minutes. He heard only the sounds he expected to hear: a man undressing, a bed being unmade, teeth being brushed, a desk light being turned out. For the first time that day, Martin relaxed. He went to an adjoining room where he would spend the night. It passed without incident.
The next morning, May 30, Martin was awakened suddenly by a sharp, familiar noise. He was foggy and initially could not place it; then, in an instant, he did. He had heard similar bangs all too many times before. He told police that he dashed through the doorway into Smith’s room and found the body. Still in his pajamas, Smith had fallen with his head in a wastebasket, a revolver in his hand, a bullet hole in his head.
“Mystery had surrounded Smith’s death,” says Dean, “because there was no autopsy, and he had burned all of his personal papers just before his death.” And, of course, mystery meant even more whispers in Washington, a roar of them. Had he really killed himself? To those who knew of Smith’s fading status in the Harding administration, his health problems, and the crimes he had committed, crimes that might be revealed at any moment, the answer was a resounding yes.
By committing suicide, however, he had created repercussions at the highest levels of government, making his superiors fear that their own crimes might soon be revealed. The cover story, quickly decided upon, is reviewed by Robert K. Murray: “Although Jess Smith’s suicide was more eloquent than words in indicating the creeping malaise affecting the administration, both Harding and Daugherty pretended that nothing serious was wrong. They turned aside queries about the rumors of corruption by claiming that Smith’s death was due to a mentally unbalanced condition brought on by diabetes, and nothing more.”
It seemed to play. The papers went along with it and the populace thought it was a shame that Smith had been afflicted with a disease so terrible that he could no longer live with its torments.
THE LAST TWO MAJOR FELONIES during Harding’s administration were not discovered until after he had passed away. Both were examples not only of scandalous activity but, given the person involved in one, and the audacity on display in the other, which could easily have compromised national security, they were the most surprising of all the criminal acts in which the federal government engaged early in the twentieth century.
After weeks of speculation that most Washingtonians found hard to believe, despite the eagerness with which they repeated it, Attorney General Harry Daugherty was indicted on charges of fraud. Listed on the indictment with him was Colonel Thomas W. Miller, a former war hero and former congressman. The two men were accused of having been “illegally transferring a German-owned American subsidiary of American Metal Company to a syndicate that paid [Miller] $50,000 and Jesse Smith $224,000, of which $50,000 ended up in a joint account belonging to both Smith and Daugherty. When government investigators tried to get the records for the account, Daugherty saw to it that they couldn’t.”
Miller was fined $5,000, meaning, one supposes, that he came out $45,000 ahead, and sentenced to a year and a half in jail, meaning that he came out eighteen months behind. About Daugherty, the jury could not make up its mind, in large part because of the blustering sanctimoniousness of his denials and the eminence of his office. In addition, his claim that he could not take the stand because he was protecting the memory of the late President Harding was a master stroke of public relations—if not of logic—making him seem, at least to some, more honorable than evasive. Through his attorney, he “maintained that he had been unaware of Smith’s activities until shortly before the suicide and that the ‘Reds’ were after him.” Another good idea; when in doubt, blame the Bolshies. It was as effective a defense in the twenties as it was during the heyday of the Cold War.
Only access to Daugherty’s bank records could prove or disprove the charges against him, but the attorney general claimed that to grant access would be a breach of privacy. He was standing on principle, he claimed, not hiding his guilt. Initially, the court ruled in his favor.
But the prosecutors refused to give up. They finally convinced the judge that, given the crucial role Daugherty played in the American criminal justice system, the records should be made available to them. If they were, prosecutors declared, the case against Daugherty would be proven, one way or another, beyond doubt; the American people, they concluded, had a right to know whether a serious breach of faith had been committed by the nation’s foremost guardian of the law.
Finally the judge agreed. But it didn’t matter. The records, it turned out, were missing. No one could offer an explanation, certainly not Daugherty, not even anyone at the bank—but they had vanished. Without them, the prosecution’s case crumbled. Charges against the attorney general were dropped; but that he was responsible for the absent records few people doubted, and his reputation, as a consequence, plummeted.
He remained Harding’s friend, though, perhaps his best friend among members of the Ohio Gang. He stayed on as head of the Justice Department whose standards he had been mocking since his first day in office.
He did not, however, go gentle into the controversy that engulfed him. His response to those suspicious of his actions was a combination of vitriol and arrogance. For the rest of his life, whenever he was asked about the charges against him and the conveniently missing bank records, he put the glibness of public relations behind him. “If anybody does not like my position,” he wrote to a friend, recapitulating his attitude toward one and all, “you can tell them to go to hell.”
EVEN STUDENTS WHO HAVE SAT through the kind of high-school history classes so tedious that they end up making it impossible for a historian to find a place on the best-seller lists have heard of Teapot Dome. But for most of them, the knowledge doesn’t go much further than the name. Some people know that whatever it was happened during the Harding administration. Fewer know it had something to do with oil, specifically the illegal sale of leases. And fewer still know the cabinet officer who made it all happen. Still, the odd phrase “Teapot Dome” has a resonance to it that transcends the absence of meaning, the ignorance of details. For what many people do know is that the words refer to what a majority would consider the second most outrageous scandal in the history of American politics.
Three oil reserves in the western United States had been set aside for future use by the military, especially the Navy. Two of them were in California, at Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and the third lay under a rock formation in Salt Creek, Wyoming, shaped somewhat like a teapot resting atop a dome—in this case, a dome covering a huge underground pool of oil, its quantity virtually unmeasurable. With the shadow of the Great War still draped over the nation, the reserves were considered vital to the country’s defense, indispensable in the event of future hostilities. They were certainly not to be treated with the same cavalier disrespect as supplies in a Veterans’ Bureau storehouse.
But one more member of the Ohio Gang had a different idea, finding in the oil an opportunity for self-enrichment that was simply too good to overlook. Albert B. Fall, another good friend of President Harding who, as a United States Senator from New Mexico, was a well-known critic of the previous petticoat government, “was regarded as above suspicion by friend and foe alike. The only opposition to him,” according to Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, “came from those who opposed his conservation views, not his morals. A few rabid conservationists, such as Gifford Pinchot, maintained a drumfire of criticism against the Fall appointment, but they were not a large enough group to matter. From everybody else’s point of view, the appointment was perfectly logical.”
The appointment was for Fall to be secretary of the interior, and the nomination passed both houses of Congress easily. After which, one of Fall’s first acts was to arrange to have two of the three oil reserves transferred to his department from the Department of the Navy. The move should have seemed a suspicious one; instead it seemed a change of heart. It appeared as if Fall wanted to atone for past environmental indifferences by deciding to protect the oil reserves now, keep an eye on them himself. It was the perfect con, yet another of the many that stained this period in American history.
But it gets worse. As it turned out, it was not the Department of the Interior that would oversee the reserves—for after they were under Fall’s jurisdiction, he promptly sold their leases to private investors, an act of criminal irresponsibility under any circumstances, but all the more egregious because the leases were sold without being put up for public bid. Of course, had Fall announced that he was opening the bidding, he would have been admitting that he was up to no good. Even Harding would have had to step in and tell him he couldn’t do something like that. For this reason, the bidding was so private that there was really no bidding at all. The cards had been cut the moment Fall acquired the leases.
Buena Vista, the smallest of the three reserves, remained under control of the Navy. The Elk Hills lease went to a longtime friend of Fall named Edward Doheny, a respected and experienced figure in his field, the president of the Pan American Petroleum & Transport Company. Teapot Dome went to another well-qualified executive, the president of Sinclair Consolidated Oil, Harry F. Sinclair.
Both Doheny and Sinclair had dealt with drainage problems in the past, and both had the know-how and equipment to do so in the future. It was for this reason, Fall claimed, that he wanted oilmen, not government or military officials, to oversee the reserves, to make sure the oil would not seep beyond the bounds of public ownership and onto private property, where it would not only be wasted, but, if it did damage to the water supply on an adjoining ranch, might subject the government to legal action. Doheny and Sinclair would not let that happen, Fall confidently announced as he granted the leases. The oil was safe. From everything but greed.
Some accepted Fall’s explanation at face value. Others, however, saw the risk immediately. The oil, United States Navy oil, was henceforth no longer under the Navy’s control, but rather was the property of private, profit-making enterprises. Conservationists were enraged and insisted on hearings before the transfer could be finalized. Reluctantly, the Senate agreed. “When the hearings commenced,” John Dean reveals, “there was so little interest that [Thomas J.] Walsh [chairman of the hearings] initially had trouble mustering a quorum of his committee.”
That was soon to change. Walsh proved a relentless interrogator, especially when it was finally Fall’s turn to testify, and before long the outlines of Teapot Dome, not as a rock formation but as a scam of greater than Ponzian proportions, began to emerge.
The interior secretary, Americans were about to learn, was still not a friend of the environment. Neither, unfortunately, was he an honest man. Unlike the case with Daugherty, Fall’s bank records were readily available, and they showed that a man who had just suffered through “a decade of financial difficulties,” and whose annual salary as a cabinet member was $12,000, suddenly had a net worth of almost $125,000. It seems that the arrangements he had made with Doheny and Sinclair had less to do with oil drainage than they did with personal gain. And not just for Fall. In addition to stipulating that his two friends do all they could to prevent the oil from oozing beyond its boundaries, Fall allowed them to drill for profit, to keep for themselves vast amounts of black gold and then selling it to consumers through their companies on the open market. Doheny and Sinclair had kicked back more than $100,000 for the favor—and much more money might await Fall if the profits were greater than expected.
The arrangement was breathtaking in its contempt for the public good, not only because it would have allowed Doheny and Sinclair to keep most of the money they made from drilling into the oil reserves, which could easily have been tens of millions of dollars, but because sufficient amounts of oil might no longer be there when the Navy, or other government agencies, needed it for military purposes. Who knew when that might happen? Who knew what kind of catastrophe might have resulted with depleted energy supplies? Up to this time, no other American scandal, with the behavior of Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr excepted, had involved the sale of national security.
To be fair, if almost irrelevant, the deals did include a few crumbs for the government. Sinclair’s lease, which was to last for a minimum of twenty years, required that he pay a sixteen-percent royalty into federal coffers on all oil drilled at Teapot Dome. As for Doheny, he too had to compensate the government for his lease, by building a pipeline, a refinery, and oil storage tanks in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor. It should not be necessary to point out that the amount of money the oilmen were supposed to spend was considerably less than what they stood to earn once they started selling the underground bounty that used to belong to Uncle Sam.
It did not take long for the real motives of Fall’s transactions to become public, and when he was convicted for issuing the drilling permits, he became the first Cabinet officer in American history to suffer the indignities of arrest and imprisonment. He served nine months of a paltry one-year sentence but, although fined $100,000, never paid the money, claiming he did not have that much. In other words, he kept the entire bribe from Sinclair and Doheny. As for those two, for some reason neither of them even stood trial for their offense. Nor was a fine levied on them. The prime beneficiaries of Teapot Dome, they were, and it was as if they had had nothing to do with the subterranean dealings.
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.