I, Warren, do solemnly swear…

On Aug. 2, 1923 in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, Florence Harding was reading aloud a pro-Harding puff piece in the Saturday Evening Post: “A Calm Review of a Calm Man.” Warren said “That’s good. Go on. Read some more.” Those were the President’s last words.

Warren Harding makes just about everyone’s list of presidential stinkers. That’s unfair. His administration had well more than its share of scandals, but Harding had nothing to do with them and they had no lasting negative impact on the country. Unfortunately, they were made juicier news by an escape from the country and two suicides. No one, including his successor Calvin Coolidge, put in a good word for him. Two subsequent sex scandals forty years apart cemented Warren’s reputation as a perv and a cad, neither of which bears any relevance to his performance in office. The poor guy just can’t climb out of the cellar.

Harding desegregated public buildings in Washington, D.C. after world-saver Woodrow Wilson had segregated them. He was the first president to denounce segregation and he did it in front of an audience of 30,000 in Birmingham, Alabama. Though the U.S. had eschewed the League of Nations, Harding steered it onto the World Court. The Washington Conference on Naval Disarmament produced the first arms control treaty in history. While Wilson was content to let socialist Eugene Debs rot in prison for sedition (aka disagreeing with Woodrow Wilson) Harding not only pardoned him but expedited the paperwork so Debs would be home for Christmas.

Let’s not forget that the country was having fun. Wages were up. Unemployment was low. Prohibition was on the books but flappers drank and did the Charleston anyway. Baseball had Babe Ruth, boxing had Jack Dempsey and actress Clara Bow and author Elinor Glynn convinced folks that sex was good clean dirty fun. The twenties roared.

Harding did admittedly make three serious bummer appointments. Charles Forbes, a pol from Washington state who ran the Veterans Bureau and stole big bucks in the form of kickbacks on surplus medicines and hospital construction contracts. Harding also appointed his campaign manager Harry Daugherty as Attorney General. Daugherty was indicted twice, but never convicted. His Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was a widely respected Senator whose appointment was confirmed by a near-unanimous vote. Fall arranged sweetheart oil leases in exchange for huge bribes he initially declined. Sinclair Oil kept raising the ante until Fall finally cracked. Fall, Daugherty and Forbes all swore that Harding knew nothing. In fact, Forbes claimed Harding grabbed him by the collar and called him a “double-crossing bastard.”

Had Harding not died, he likely would have cruised to re-election and the stain of the scandals, collectively known as Teapot Dome, would have abated. Times were good. Harding was enormously popular. And the Democratic party, an uneasy alliance between southern segregationists and northern city bosses, was torn apart by the issue of the reemerged Ku Klux Klan.

Another thing would have happened if Harding had lived to the same age as his father. He would have continued paying child support to his mistress Nan Britton, the mother of his illegitimate daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth was conceived on a couch in Harding’s senate office and though he never saw her, he made liberal support payments – including some that were delivered by Secret Service agents while he was president. When the Harding estate rebuffed Nan’s claim, she wrote a tell-all book, “The President’s Daughter,” that sold 90,000 copies. It was obvious from Nan’s detailed descriptions of her White House trysts that she had been a guest in the Oval Office, as well as its adjacent hideaway.

In 1968, just when the “new morality” and the old immorality might spur historians to give Warren a forgiving second look, Charles Russell published “The Shadow of Blooming Grove.” Russell had unearthed a trove of love letters from Harding to Carrie Phillips, his neighbor’s wife and a close friend of Florence. The affair lasted for many years, even as the two couples traveled together. Warren’s prose won him no medals: “I love thee garbed, but naked more.” He loved not wisely but too well.

More than any other president, Warren Harding honored his oath of office. The Constitution was rotting away in a file at the State Department. Harding ordered that it be covered by a protective glass case and put on public display. He did more than any other president to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”