One Summer: America, 1927

carried him back to Washington. The New York Times called it ‘the most remarkable demonstration in American history of affection, respect, and reverence’. In fact, at the time of his death President Harding was on the brink of being exposed as a scoundrel and a fool.
    Three years earlier hardly anyone outside Congress had even heard of him. He was simply the junior senator from Ohio. By background and temperament he was a small-town newspaper proprietor, and that was about as far as his talents should have carried him. His nomination for president was one of the great astonishments of the age. It came about only because delegates to the 1920 Republican Party convention in Chicago grew hopelesslydeadlocked over a slate of poor candidates and, after four days of indecision in the midst of a merciless heatwave, settled on the worst one on offer. Harding’s only obvious qualification for higher office was his handsome bearing. ‘He looked,’ one contemporary observed, ‘like a President ought to look.’ In nearly every other respect – intelligence, character, enterprise – he fell considerably short of mediocre. His crassness in private could be startling. The New York Times reporter Richards Vidmer confided to a friend that he once saw Harding rise from his chair in the middle of a conversation and casually urinate into a White House fireplace. For his running mate, the party selected a person nearly as obscure and even more unpromising (though at least rather more refined): Calvin Coolidge.
    Harding’s administration was the most breezily slack in modern times. Although he made a few irreproachable appointments – Herbert Hoover at Commerce, Henry C. Wallace at Agriculture, Charles Evans Hughes at the State Department – for many posts he selected people he simply liked without considering whether they were qualified or not. His choice for head of the Federal Reserve Board was Daniel R. Crissinger, a friend and neighbour from Marion, Ohio, whose previous highest professional achievement was to be a director of the Marion Steam Shovel Company. For chief military adviser, Harding chose Ora Baldinger, who had formerly been the family newsboy. Harding gave his sister a senior position in the US Public Health Service and made her husband superintendent of federal prisons; previously the couple had been Seventh Day Adventist missionaries in Burma.
    The most extraordinary appointee of all was Charles Forbes, whom Harding had befriended on a trip to Hawaii and about whom he knew almost nothing. Appointed to the role of head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Forbes managed in two years to lose, steal or misappropriate $200 million. Other Harding appointees wrought similar financial havoc at the Justice, Interior and Naval departments and at a department left over from the First World War called the Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The interior secretary,Albert Fall, corruptly sold oil leases to two slick (as it were) oil men in return for $400,000 in ‘loans’. One of the leases was at a place near Casper, Wyoming, formally called US Naval Oil Reserve Number Three but popularly known as Teapot Dome, and that became the name of the scandal. The total cost to the country of all the various acts of incompetence and malfeasance in the Harding administration has been put at $2 billion – a sum that goes some way beyond stupendous, particularly bearing in mind that Harding’s presidency lasted just twenty-nine months.
    Harding’s death was so well timed, in terms of escaping scandals, that it was widely rumoured that his wife had poisoned him for the sake of his reputation. Her behaviour following his death was certainly curious: she immediately began destroying all his papers and wouldn’t allow a death mask to be made. In addition, she stoutly refused to give permission for an autopsy, which is why the cause of his death has always been uncertain. All that can be said is that the president had been unwell ever since arriving in California from Alaska, where he had been on vacation. He seemed, however, to be rallying when at 7.35 p.m. on 2 August 1923, while in conversation with his wife in their room in the Palace Hotel, he shuddered and stopped talking. A moment later he was dead.
     
    On the night he became president, Calvin Coolidge was at his boyhood home in Vermont visiting his father. It was after midnight in the east, and he and his wife were fast asleep when news of Harding’s passing was brought to