I
have always been fascinated with Warren Harding. As I type an autographed letter and picture
are looking down on me. “The Shadow of
Blooming Grove” by Francis Russell was one of the first presidential
biographies I collected and is one of 300 I own. I have updated it from the Book of the Month
Club edition and even a different copy published in England. We also visited his home in Marion, Ohio,
visited Teapot Dome in Wyoming and picked up an oily rock from there. I also
like the fact the Franklin D. Roosevelt ran on the opposing ticket as the Vice
Presidential candidate for James Cox in 1920.
Harding
is well known for his extramarital affairs.
Internet research shows that allegedly, for 15 years Harding saw Carrie
Phillips, wife of Harding’s friend James Phillips. After he won the Republican
presidential nomination, the Republican National Committee attempted to silence
Phillips with an all-expense paid trip to Japan, a $20,000 payment as well as a
promise of future monthly stipends. But is the story of Nan Britton which
captures the imagination. I have her book called the President’s Daughter. My mother told me when she was a child (she was
born in 1919) the book was considered a very racy book. Britton was recently depicted on the HBO
series, Boardwalk Empire. She was a
teenager in Ohio she developed a crush on Harding. In 1919, the year before Harding’s
run for President, Britton gave birth to a baby girl. She said it was Harding’s.
With the help of secret service agents, Nan sneaked
into the White House, and she and the President would walk down a hidden
hallway, which Nan called it “our secret passage”—connecting the oval office
and a coat closet. Inside the 5-by-5-foot closet, they would make love.
In 1923, with scandals breaking out all around him, the
President fled Washington for a tour of the west and Alaska. On the return trip
he became ill, and on august 2, he died in his San Francisco hotel room. He was
58.
The cause of death was reported as a stroke, but Harding
had suffered food poisoning earlier in the trip. Later an agent for the Bureau
of Investigation published a report claiming that Florence had poisoned the President.
But no one could ever prove it. Mrs. Harding had refused to have an autopsy
done on her husband. Was this her way of divorcing him?
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