Florence Harding

...People said Florence was `quite a woman,'" recalled a friend from her Ohio days, "but never 'I just love Florence.'" For her part, The Duchess abided her husband's chronic satyriasis and set her sights on doing her best with the hand God (and her beloved zodiac) had dealt her...

...G iven the ribald White House headlines of recent times, Anthony's detailed coverage of this century's first tabloid president is somehow reassuring...

...As the President's Naval physician Joel Boone observed: The American Spectator • November 1998 79 She had no hesitancy in expressing her mind with vehemence...

...But," Nan later wrote, "he was mistaken...

...That to Carrie Phillips, Florence Harding's closest friend, and wife of Jim Phillips, one of Warren Harding's closest friends...

...It was an interest piqued, no doubt, by his 1977 interview of Alice Roosevelt Long-worth, the Matt Drudge of Washington's rumor mill in the Roaring Twenties...

...The Duchess had poured her resources into more than just the living, breathing Warren," writes Anthony...

...Shrewd investment, but high risk...

...Nan grew concerned that they lacked any of the 'usual paraphernalia which we always took to hotels...

...After Harding won his party's presidential nomination in 1920, it would cost the Republican National Committee a down payment of $25,000 and laundered stipends of $2,000 a month to keep Carrie Phillips and her cuckold husband quiet about their friend Warren's lascivious nature and atrocious poetry...

...Mere sex between consenting adults...

...Partner, colleague, and in some eyes the power behind Warren Harding's throne...

...Nan's "sweetie," given his talent for outreach, would have made a marvelous First Gent...

...appalling, yes, that the Oval Office should be so misused...

...Florence had her ideas," another friend observed, "and she went for it...

...but good to know that we have suffered a lecher in the White House before and survived...

...So too with American presidents in search of greatness: Knowing when to die is half the battle...

...So what if he fathered an illegitimate daughter with his wife's next-door neighbor...

...A former o speechwriter for \ Nancy Reagan, Anthony, a painstaking 78 November /998 • The American Spectator researcher, previously published a two-volume work on American First Ladies, as well as an oral history of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...

...If only First Ladies could be judged separate from the men they married," writes Carl Anthony, "Florence Harding would rank as one of the greatest achievers among them...

...Too bad for him, but even more so for a widow who deserved better...

...two chorus girls procured by his friend Ned McLean, publisher of the Washington Post...

...So what if he had a quote-unquote inappropriate relationship with young Nan Britton in a closet just off the Oval Office...

...A startled maid immediately began pulling the curtains, but [Mrs...

...S]he had what one would call a "man's mind...

...Warren Harding," wrote the Washington correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin, "leaned on 'the Duchess' as no President ever has depended on his wife...

...one Augusta Cole, whose pregnancy by Harding was aborted...

...All this, however, is mere subtext to Anthony's central story, that of the dominant, driving woman who, in the author's view, was a First Lady ahead of her time...

...In years to come Eleanor Roosevelt would be [the First Lady] held high as the ideal modern woman," he writes, "but it was Florence Harding who had first...expressed herself as a feminist, arguing for the political, social, and economic equality of women in emphatic letters published in national newspapers...

...I love the way you stir desire...

...They disrobed and stayed in the office quite late, longer Warren said, 'than was wise,' but he wanted to watch her there, so he couldtt Had she poisoned Harding, a jury might well have deemed it justifiable homicide...

...Not that there hadn't been ample warning that Warren Harding was no poster boy for Middle American morality...

...Odds are, in fact, that there would have been no Harding presidency but for the ironwilled woman Warren Harding called "The Duchess...

...Love your beauty to thus adore...

...Who can doubt, given the roaring economy and flapper morality of the mid-Twenties, that Harding alive would have been overwhelmingly re-elected in 1924...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW The First Lady of a Tramp Florence Harding: The First Lady, The Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President Carl SferrazzaAnthony William Morrow /645 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold T iming, as the French cynic said, is everything...

...A third-rate land-grab...

...Nor was Florence's unconventional approach to the role of First Lady limited to matters of White House protocol...

...rence Harding very much cared about her husband's compulsive philandering, though not in the way aggrieved wives usually care about the extramarital capers of their faithless husbands...

...S] he had invested everything she had into the very idea of 'Harding' as her career...

...In any event, or revised history thereof, Warren Harding died on August 2, 1923 —a popular president whose reputation and place in history would sink like a stone in the years that followed...

...Inevitably Florence made enemies, notably the unscrupulous Gaston B. Means, a Justice Department gumshoe who, after the President's death from heart failure, charged the First Lady with having conspired to poison her husband...

...visualize' her during the day while he worked...

...That none of this fits the Victorian stereotype of Warren Harding's First Lady is what sets Carl Anthony's latest book apart from other histories of the Harding years...

...Late one evening at the end of January, 1919," writes Anthony, "Harding had Nan come to his Senate office...

...Indeed she would...

...There were precedents for how a First Lady should conduct herself, but from the day she entered the White House and shocked her staff by opening the gates to the public, Florence let it be known that she would "do things differently": As the public clustered on the North Portico, watching guests come and go, some pressed their noses to the window, looking in...

...She was versed in politics and she could express herself clearly and with a definite opinion....The President shared things political with Mrs...

...With a brilliant sense of public relations, she had reopened the gates of the 'people's house' for use as a public park, given tours of the rooms herself, encouraged groups to meet with her, and cultivated the national press....All of this apart from her central role as the President's partner and colleague to Cabinet members...

...to the extent, one concludes on reading this engrossing biography, that if America was destined for a Harding presidency, fate picked the wrong spouse...

...A few years later Nan and her sweetie, still careless of consequences, would do a repeat performance in the Oval Office, a Secret Service lookout on the alert for any sign of a prowling Duchess...

...I love you garb'd, but naked MORE...

...Nor did the threat of blackmail end there...

...As for those carping critics with their mean-spirited questions about Harding's private life—in a phrase: So what...

...His name was Warren Gamaliel Harding, and the moment she laid eyes on him, according to legend, Florence Kling saw her (and his) future...

...Imagine Lincoln grappling with the Reconstructionist Congress, FDR trying to defend Yalta while running for a fifth term...

...Neither her relationship with DeWolfe nor motherhood suited Amos Kling's rebellious daughter, but it was enough for young Flossie that the episode infuriated Amos...

...It was a term not so much of endearment as respect, for Florence Harding, with her ramrod posture and gelid gaze, was a formidable presence...

...And if his wife didn't care, why should outsiders...

...Teapot Dome...

...In addition to Carrie Phillips, Warren Harding over the years entertained—sometimes in New York hotels, other times in his Senate or White House office—one Rose Hoyle, who bore him an illegitimate son...

...In time the author gained access not only to Florence Harding's private diaries but to a cache of saccharic billets-doux written by her errant husband to his various paramours, e.g.: I love your mouth, I love your fire...

...On the other hand, there are those presidents whose premature deaths turn out to be poor career moves...

...But for a woman wielding such power in early twentieth century politics, there would be a price to pay...

...It was a charge easily debunked, though had it been true ashrewd lawyer like Clarence Darrow, given access to Secret Service testimony, might well have convinced a jury it was a case of justifiable homicide...

...as did her later marriage to a handsome, albeit debt-encumbered, newspaper publisher reputed to have black ancestry...

...His interest in Harding's Duchess began some twenty years ago, when he was a college freshman doing a paper on the wives of past presidents...

...Harding and I felt quite certain that she had no hesitancy in giving him advice...

...Ah, but was he, as generations ofAmericans have been taught to believe, our worst president...

...Take Warren Harding: popular president, rotten timing...

...Harding's tragedy, writes Carl Anthony, rose out of misplaced trust in venal friends whose "dirty deals" would block out the memory of "his sponsoring America's first international disarmament conference, his progressive views on racial equity and fighting for religious tolerance, his support of government programs for better women's health, his promotion of new American technology and his successful demand that industry institute a fair eight-hour workday...

...and most memorably, the Lolita-ish Nan Britton, who not only bore the 29th president an illegitimate daughter but later wrote a book about her long-running affair with the elder she variously called "sweetie, dearie, sweetheart, or Mr...

...Mistakes were made, but when did the American people ever cashier a Peaceand-Prosperity president for the sins of his cronies...

...The problem with that particular so-what, Carl Anthony tells us, was that FloVICTOR GOLD is The American Spectator's national correspondent...

...he unwanted daughter of the richest merchant in Marion, Ohio he had ordered a male heir—Florence Kling Harding grew up to ride horses like a tomboy and go to war with her autocratic father before she celebrated her twentieth birthday...

...Surrounded by con men and hustlers from his days as a state senator in Columbus, Ohio, Harding was a political disaster waiting to happen, a president as careless of consequences in his public life as in his private...

...No, Warren Harding's First Lady cared in the way any political handler frets about the reckless conduct of a self-indulgent candidate: She was afraid her Warren's flagrant womanizing, if news of it ever got out, would devour his (and her) political future...

...Harding] saw this and yelled out, "Let 'em look in if they want...

...It's their White House...

...No matter...

...One day's traitor is the next day's patriot...

...At 80 November 1998 • The American Spectator...

...It was Harding's own father who first expressed misgivings about his son's character by saying that if Warren had been born a girl he would have been eternally pregnant: the man simply couldn't say "no...

...The author here joins Robert H. Ferrell and other revisionist historians who argue that Harding's reputation has been ravaged by scandal-mongers and otherpress critics of the period, not the least of whom was the patron spirit of this magazine, the bilious Henry L. Mencken...

...I love your size and daintiness, Love every thread in which you dress...

...Warren, however, was "more or less careless of consequences," and told her that he was sterile from childhood mumps...

...Her opening salvo was a dilly: She got pregnant by, then eloped with, one Henry DeWolfe, an alcoholic ne'er-do-well whose family her father despised...