At that precise moment, the newly-anointed candidate is wandering into the Blackstone Hotel, drawn by a curious sight: a half-dozen late-night patrons sit at the lobby bar, enjoying a nightcap or sipping cups of coffee — but all wearing headphones. At either end of the room, signs tout “The wonders of wire less. Hear the news of the day the day of the news.”
Harding takes a stool. The bartender approaches. “What’ll it be, sir?”
“Bourbon, pal. Straight up.”
The bartender shakes his head. “’Fraid we’re out of bourbon — between the politicians and the press. Got a little gin.”
“Sure, that’ll do,” says Harding, amiably. He picks up a spare headset. “This radio thing is somethin’. What’s everyone listening to?”
“They’re broadcasting from right down the street,” replies the bartender. “Coliseum. The Republican fellas? Seems they finally got together. Picked their man. Sure took ‘em long enough.”
“Yeah,” chuckles Harding. “I heard. Lowden.”
“Nope, wasn’t him.”
Surprised, Harding looks at him. “Wood?”
The bartender shakes his head. “This guy I never heard of. They spend four whole days huffing and puffing, then choose some nobody.” He leaves Harding his gin.
Harding’s going to need it. He puts on the headphones.
17.
The convention floor continues its clamor for a man no one knows. Or seems able to locate. Nan, long a student of Harding’s habits, edges past the Ohio delegation in time to see Daugherty lift Charlie Forbes off the ground by the lapels. Jess Smith observes Charlie’s plight with some satisfaction.
“A walk?” shouts Daugherty. “Probably the next frigging President of the United States — you let him go out for a walk? In Chicago?”
He drops Charlie and turns on Jess. “Call the goddamn room again.”
“Just did, chief. No answer.”
Daugherty shakes his head. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. All right. Grab Burns, anyone else you need, start with the bars, then the bordellos. No — not you, Charlie. I want you to . . .”
Nan slips away.
Minutes later she scurries down the hall of Harding’s hotel, reaches Harding’s door and knocks softly. No answer. She knocks harder. The door cracks open. Cautiously, she pushes in.
Harding sits on the edge of the bed, alone in semi-darkness. She goes to him.
“They’ve given you the nomination, Mr. Harding.” Harding doesn’t respond. “I guess you heard,” Nan continues.
Still no response.
She kneels down and takes his hand. “Perhaps you ought to go to them now. Say a few words.” She pauses. “May I be the first to offer my congratulations.”
Finally Harding speaks. “I’m going to do my best. I’ll try not to let them down.” He’s still a little drunk.
“You’ve never let anybody down. Not in your entire life.”
“I’m an ordinary man, dearie. Just an ordinary man. But how can I say no?”
“Of course,” replies Nan, gently. “You can’t.” She caresses the top of his hand.
“I let them put my name in,” says Harding. Now I’ve got to see it through.”
“I know.”
“Good God, Nan. What if I win? I could, you know. It’s possible.”
She reaches out, strokes his cheek. “You’ll be the best President the country’s ever known . . .”
“This Democrat Cox — plenty bright, but tied to Wilson. The People — they’ve had enough of Wilson. Christ — they just might vote for me.”
“They will. Oh, I know they will. And come to love you. As I do.”
Harding turns to her. He can barely discern her silhouette in the darkness, but at that moment remembers her face as the loveliest he has ever known. “You really do, don’t you. You really do. Lord knows why.” He kisses her once, gently.
“I always trust my heart,” explains Nan. “That’s why.”
She kisses him back. He responds, then pulls away.
“Nan, I have to tell you . . .”
“Perhaps you could tell me later,” she says, again moving toward him.
“In the Senate there’s ninety-six of us. Nan, there’s only one President. All eyes will be on him. And anyone close to him.” He sighs. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“No, never, ever —”
Another kiss.
“I think,” says Harding softly, “that you might be the only person in my entire life who’s never asked something of me. No, you never have, have you. Not a gosh darn thing.”
“You give me everything. Just by . . . being here. With me.”
Back on the convention floor the delegates, punchy with fatigue, continue their rhythmic chant in a single voice:
“Harding . . . ! Harding . . . !”
Burns wearily returns to Daugherty. “I’ve got half of Chicago’s finest out searching for him. Don’t know what else to do.”
Daugherty points to the exit. “You’re a detective, aren’t you? Get the hell out there and do some detecting!”
Burns need only to have looked in Nan’s arms.
Harding kisses her ears, her neck. “I don’t want to lose you. Nan. I don’t want to ever have to give you up.” Another kiss. “Not for the White House, not for any . . .”
“You’ll always have me, Warren.” Open-mouthed, she kisses him on the lips. “You’re all that matters to me. You.”
They’re into each other deeply now, hands searching hungrily, clothes pulling off.
Harding buries his face in her breasts. “Don’t want to lose you . . .”
While in the convention hall, the delegates chant:
“Harding! Harding!”
Harding and Nan envelop each other on the carpeted hotel room floor. He enters her.
“Never give you up, Nan.”
“You have me. For ever and ever. Oh lord in heaven, you have me . . .”
18.
And so, for one magical, brief fragment of a single night, Mr. Harding had been mine, entirely mine. Yet even at that exalted moment, I knew that I would have to quickly step back into the shadows again and let him go, that all too soon I would be sharing him with the entire country.
An apricot dawn is breaking over the coliseum as Harding and Nan hurry to the entrance of the convention hall. She shows the security guard her pass. He waves them through.
The floor is thinning out as the exhausted delegates, resigned to Harding’s inexplicable reluctance to show himself, torpidly pack it in. Harding, still utterly unrecognized, stands with Nan at the rear of the hall. He gives her hand a loving squeeze. They look at each other. Then, as if in a dream, he slowly begins the long walk alone toward the podium.
Gradual awareness, beginning with those nearest Harding, spreads across the hall in an expanding wave. Delegates stare and point. Several reach out to shake his hand, others pat him on the shoulder. Those further away clamber up on chairs and tables to glimpse a man few outside Washington or Marion have ever seen. Albert Fall catches his eye and gives him the high sign. And then the chant of Harding! Harding! starts to boil up again as the delegates crowd around the anonymous man in whom they have placed their faith, hoist him on their shoulders, and bear him toward the podium.
Nan, all but invisible at the pageant’s periphery, watches her lover’s triumph with a beatific smile as tears roll down her cheeks.
Part Three
19.
I saw my darling just once more back in Washington — an idyllic afternoon we spent together in my little apartment — before he was totally enveloped by the folds of his campaign. As you may imagine, he was greatly concerned about the enormity of what he had taken on. Nevertheless, he said that if it was truly Warren Harding that they wanted, he would just have to try and somehow do the job. But had h
e anything to offer, he asked himself repeatedly. Which of his ideas, if any, were worthy of an entire nation?
Then, after weeks of worry, it came to him — that America was “merely Marion, Ohio, writ large,” he said. That wherever in the country they might live, people were just people, sharing common hopes and dreams. That he would simply be talking to folks every bit like himself. And I must tell you, from then on, his speeches became a symphony.
Decked in red, white and blue bunting, the plush Baltimore & Ohio pullman that conveys presidential candidate Harding back to Marion to open his campaign is a quantum leap from the drab day coach in which Senator Harding had quietly left Washington for the Chicago convention just a week earlier. Daugherty has planned the prodigal son’s return with the same attention to detail he’d employed to manipulate his nomination, today marshaling hundreds of enthusiasts, some shipped in from as far away as Cleveland, to receive the candidate at Marion’s train depot. To follow is a “pre-victory parade” to the Harding home on Oak Street, the route fortified with a massing of Harding placards, banners, and cheering supporters that would rival any Potemkin village.
But first, about a mile out of town, the train slips off to a siding to collect Florence. From there it slowly backs the remaining distance to the station so that the initial glimpse Marion has of its now most celebrated citizen is that of him and his adoring wife, arm in arm, waving at them from the platform of the caboose. The sea of people milling about the station platform parts as it might for Moses, as the Hardings descend from the train and make their way through their well-wishers to an open Packard phaeton, where Daugherty and Jess Smith wait, chauffeur Bobby Burns behind the wheel. Minutes later. Burns shifts up through the gears and wrestles the ponderous motorcar around a corner and on to Oak.
Harding stands up in back and tips his hat right and left to rooters lining the road. He is surprised and flattered to find each and every fence, tree, and building in either direction bristling with flags and plastered with life-sized posters of his own face — save for Carrie Phillips’ house — shuttered and conspicuously unadorned.
This one short drive from the train station proves to be the extent of Harding’s travels for the duration of the campaign. Daugherty has decided to keep the candidate close to home, cheered by the warm and familiar, and shielded from overly close press scrutiny. Let Harding’s Democratic opponents, James Cox and his young, energetic running mate, Franklin Roosevelt, exhaust themselves tearing about the country. For Harding the country could come to Marion.
And come it does. Over the next month Harding will stand on his front porch facing groups of some several hundred, a remarkably large number of them dewey-eyed women, all crammed onto the small lawn listening attentively as the candidate disgorges an oration he will repeat with few changes from that very spot, day after day.
By week’s end, he no longer needs notes as his rich baritone rings out over the assembly. “You and I, we all want the same things for the country, don’t we?” asks Harding, rhetorically.
“Yes, sir,” and “We sure do,” come the replies.
“We all want to see Washington return to normalcy — it is not heroism that this great land now needs right now, but healing. Not new foreign adventures but a return to uniquely American virtues, to an old-fashioned patriotism, to the cherished values of the small town — my small town, your small town, our parents’ small town. A return to an uncorrupted rural America, with its purity of spirit. That spirit, my friends, is America’s very soul.” A great ovation adds to Harding’s growing confidence.
Daugherty and Jess Smith have been standing to the side, gauging audience response. Jess turns quizzically to Daugherty. “’America’s very soul?’ The hell’s he talking about. Harry?”
Daugherty shrugs. “Just listen to how it sounds. I’d sure wanna vote for him.” He points a finger at the enraptured crowd. “And so, dear Jess, do each and every one of them, God bless ‘em.”
One week before the election, in the early hours of the morning of November 2nd, Bobby Burns turns his supercharged, sunrise-yellow Stutz roadster off Cleveland’s Fourteenth Street and into an alley behind a decrepit two-story wooden building in a run-down section of the city’s oldest industrial district. Daugherty had several times expressed his “concerns” about a certain publisher of “scurrilous tracts” whose presses were located there. That was enough for Burns. He didn’t need it in writing.
Burns drops the Stutz into neutral, kills the engine and waits several minutes, occasionally glancing up and down the narrow passageway. Satisfied that he’s alone, he slides a can of kerosene and a paper bag stuffed with oily rags off the seat next to him and brings them along as he steps down from the car and approaches the rear of the building. The sky is moonless, the nearest visible electric light blocks away.
He rattles the back door. Locked. He pulls a rag at random from his collection, wraps it around his fist and punches out a small window pane, reaches inside, unfastens the catch on the sash, and slides the window up. He drops his incendiaries, then himself, inside.
Flipping on a flashlight, Burns finds himself surrounded by printing presses and book-binding equipment. Moving to the room adjacent, he quickly comes upon the object of his visit — stacks of books and political monographs — The Coming Aryan Revolution, Racial Pollution In America, and most particularly, Warren Harding, The Negro Candidate. Burns chuckles at the last title as he unscrews the cap of the fuel can and sloshes kerosene about, taking care to saturate the Harding tract, scatters his rags into the puddles of kerosene, strikes a match and sets them ablaze. He watches for a moment as small fires become bigger ones, then reach out to one another to form a solid wall of flame.
As Burns turns away from his handiwork, a light comes on in the makeshift bedroom above, where Professor Esterbrook Chancellor, Ph.D. in anthropology, implacable white supremacist, and publisher of Purity Press, is awakened by the smell of smoke. Clad in shorts and socks, he bounds down the stairs and bursts into the press room just as Burns is about to climb back out the window.
“What the devil . . . ?” Chancellor sputters, and impulsively charges at Burns. Unperturbed, Burns holds his ground as if waiting for a softball pitch, then slams his flashlight hard against his oncoming attacker’s head and clubs him to the floor. Nonchalantly, he returns to the window and scrambles out.
By the time Burns tools his roadster out of the alley back onto Fourteenth Street, Dr. Chancellor and his publishing enterprise are engulfed by fire.
20.
As we all know, 1920 was a watershed year: Prohibition became law and ladies got the vote. Perhaps we were no longer allowed to drink, but women could at last pick whomever they most wanted in Washington to look after their interests. For us, the choice was very nearly unanimous. And so it was that handsome Warren G. Harding, the love of my life, became the twenty-ninth President of the United States. The women of America had been able to discern what I had known since childhood — that a great, kindly, humble man walked amongst us. For me, that was intoxicant enough.
On inauguration day, Harding and the outgoing President, a gaunt, mortified Woodrow Wilson, ride side by side toward the Capitol Building in the open, presidential Pierce-Arrow. Wilson, his hair snow-white, his left side palsied, looks twice Harding’s age, though at sixty-two he is in fact just seven years his senior. His silk top hat is as threadbare as he. Harding wears his, sparkling new, at a rakish angle.
Wilson, the most literate man since Jefferson and the most eloquent since Lincoln to sit in the White House, is today as much ravaged by profound disenchantment with the electorate — and a bitter disdain for the President-Elect — as by his recent stroke. Harding does his best with Wilson’s arctic silence, turning to his stricken companion with the warmest of smiles.
“Florence was most appreciative of Mrs. Wilson’s finding the time to show her through the White House.”
Wilson remains
silent.
“Sure need lots of help to keep that place going.”
Nothing from Wilson.
“Back in Marion, Florence always insisted on doing everything herself.”
Wilson nods. Encouraged, Harding tries once more. “Boy, some motorcar, these new Pierce-Arrows. Hard to tell this buggy’s moving, the ride’s so smooth . . .”
Wilson finally speaks. “Purely an illusion, Mr. Harding. Be assured: the road ahead is one of potholes, ditches and rocks.”
Harding contemplates that for a moment. “Well whatever the hazards, I plan to follow your example, Mr. President — always to do what’s right for the country.”
“As should be obvious from my example, sir,” replies Wilson icily, “doing what’s right for the country is a prescription for humiliation.”
They arrive at the foot of the Capitol steps. From the Pierce-Arrow they appear endless and perilously steep. A Secret Service man opens a rear door. Wilson looks up at the formidable staircase with apprehension — grasps his cane with a tremulous hand and struggles to lift himself out.
Harding is alarmed. “Mr. President, would you mind if we, er, continued on to the back entrance? Only a handful of steps there — a far easier climb for us both. I have a mighty strenuous day ahead of me.”
Wilson is much relieved — and touched by Harding’s tact. He speaks to the chauffeur. “Starling, Mr. Harding’s suggestion is most sensible. Please take us to the rear.” He nods at the Secret Service, the door closes and the two Presidents continue on. For the first time, Wilson looks directly at Harding. “Most gracious of you, sir. The Senate’s thrown me down once. I wouldn’t care to fall a second time.” There are tears in the proud man’s eyes.
Minutes later, at the top of the Capitol steps, Harding, with Florence incandescent by his side, is sworn in by a rotund William Howard Taft, now Chief Justice. Familiar faces are amongst those privileged to be within shouting distance of the new President — Dr. Sawyer; Senators Lodge, Webb, Guthrie, Paxton and Blair; and the gang of four. Harry Daugherty, Jess Smith, Al Fall, and Charlie Forbes, already instinctively drawing together. This last quartet of men, surrounded and tantalized their entire lives by the limitless wealth and unbridled power of others, themselves now face a future of infinite opportunity.
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