First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  You could argue that Florence’s first mistake was marrying Warren Harding. But that would be a bit unfair. When Florence Kling met the affable Ohioan, she was a desperate woman with a failed marriage. Her first spouse had been a playboy who abandoned her and her infant son. She was determined, if she married again, to choose a man she could keep in line.

  Warren may have struck her as a bit vacuous, but that was a minor problem. Her quarry (she pursued him relentlessly) was unquestionably handsome, and he had high if vague ambitions. Florence was almost thirty-one and Warren was twenty-five, no doubt another reason why she thought he would be easy to control. She should have listened more closely to Warren’s mother, who told her if she wanted a happy marriage, she should keep the icebox full and both eyes on Warren.

  Harding was the owner and publisher of the Marion, Ohio, Star, a newspaper that was barely breathing. Florence appointed herself circulation manager and head bookkeeper and in eighteen years of hard work built the Star into a profitable small-town paper. As one of the neighbors observed, Florence “runs her house; runs the paper… runs Warren, runs everything but the car.”

  Meanwhile Warren wrote editorials full of platitudes about God and country and home and mother and recited them in speeches up and down Ohio. Pretty soon the local Republicans decided his eloquence and his matinee idol profile made him a likely candidate for the state senate. There he met a political operator named Harry Daugherty, who said to himself: “That man looks like a president.”

  Florence had mixed feelings about Daugherty. Perhaps she sensed, from the start, that “Wurr’n,” as she called him, was not qualified for high office. Maybe she feared that politics would make it harder for her to keep her eyes on him. Both fears turned out to be well grounded, although Warren did not need politics as an excuse to stray. For over two decades he conducted a passionate affair with Carrie Phillips, the wife of one of their best friends in Marion. Many people who knew about it did not blame Warren too much. Florence never stopped nagging him about money and other matters, and from all accounts her nasal, peremptory voice would have driven even a devoted husband out of earshot. Warren’s attitude is probably summed up in the nickname he pinned on her: “The Duchess.”

  In spite of her misgivings, Florence allowed Daugherty, a less than successful lawyer, to become Warren’s alter ego and perennial promoter. Thanks to this eager beaver, Harding was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1914.

  Florence liked being a senator’s wife. She enjoyed the capital’s social scene and was thrilled when the millionaire hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean befriended her. Florence’s fears about her husband’s incompetence proved groundless. There were many senators as dumb as Warren, without his personal charm or gift for platitudes.

  Harry Daugherty was still lurking in the wings of Senator Harding’s career, and as the Wilson administration collapsed into illness and political disarray, it became more and more apparent that the Republicans were going to win in 1920. Moreover, the nomination was wide open because Theodore Roosevelt, the most likely candidate, had died in 1919. At first Florence reacted coolly to the idea of Warren becoming President. This time maybe she was sure he was not up to the job. In any case, she told Daugherty she preferred to remain a senator’s wife.

  There were other more serious reasons for saying no. Warren had high blood pressure, a heart condition, and a long record of “breakdowns” which required him to retreat to a sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, to recuperate. Florence had lost a kidney in 1905 and was frequently forced to retreat to her bed with attacks of nephritis. Neither was in any condition to handle the stresses of the White House.

  Harding himself was less than enthusiastic about running for President. He had no great opinion of his talents; in fact, he was a modest man, aware of his limitations. He was also lazy. He spent a lot more time on his extramarital affairs than he devoted to politics. He was now conducting two of them, one with his long-running flame, Carrie Phillips, the other with Nan Britton, a curvaceous twenty-something blonde who bore him an illegitimate child in 1919. No wonder Warren missed two-thirds of the votes in his five years in the Senate.

  Florence’s doubts about a presidential race were deepened by a visit to Madame Marcia, one of Washington, D.C.’s more popular astrologers. Florence told Marcia only the time and date of Warren’s birth and asked for a reading on his destiny. Marcia declared the man was a “great statesman” and was destined to become President. But he would die in office. She also said his life was full of clandestine love affairs and he was subject to melancholia.

  Harry Daugherty pooh-poohed Madame Marcia and overcame Florence’s doubts by convincing her that the presidency was no more trouble than a Senate seat. He dangled the First Lady’s social power before the Duchess’s susceptible eyes. During her Washington years, Florence had begun keeping a list of people who had snubbed her. The chance to even scores with these adversaries swept her away. Need I say this is not a very good reason to persuade an ailing husband to run for President?

  Nevertheless, Florence and Harry Daugherty soon had “Wurr’n” in the race. At first, he was a horse so dark he was all but invisible. There were several leading Republican contenders, but none had enough votes to win the nomination. The canny Daugherty said he did not expect Warren Harding to win on the first ballot or the second or the third. He was going to be a compromise candidate when the deadlocked convention had nowhere else to go.

  Harding’s lack of enthusiasm for the run made him a less than energetic candidate. When he faltered at rounding up delegates in Ohio and Indiana, he decided to withdraw. Florence arrived just as he was placing the call and snatched the telephone out of his hand. “Wurr’n Harding, what are your doing? Give up? Not until the convention is over,” she cried.

  The Republican Convention played out exactly as Daugherty had predicted. The leading contenders deadlocked, and Daugherty and his Ohio cohorts pushed Harding until the bleary-eyed party leaders finally accepted him at 2:00 A.M. in a room full of cigar smoke at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. The bosses asked Warren if he had any skeletons in his closet. He thought it over for ten minutes and said “No.” He had concealed his love life as senator. Why not as President?

  As the final ballot neared, Daugherty joined Florence Harding in a box in the balcony. She had taken off her hat and was clutching two enormous hatpins in her right hand. “Warren will be nominated on the next ballot,” Daugherty said.

  Florence whirled, a maniacal light in her eyes, and drove the hatpins deep into Daugherty’s side. The mastermind of Harding’s presidency staggered away, wondering if he were mortally wounded, while the roll call of the states put his man over the top. What inspired this extraordinary act of violence? We will never know, but I tend to suspect that Florence Harding sensed in her deepest self that making “Wurr’n” President was the worst mistake of both their lives. She yielded to an unconquerable urge to wreak harm on the man who had set the fatal machinery in motion.

  Harding won the election by an astonishing seven million votes, and the Republicans did almost as well in the House and Senate. It was not an endorsement of Harding, of course; it was a repudiation of Woodrow and Edith Wilson. But no one stopped to think about that. Harding instantly became a “popular” President. He gave the disillusioned American people what they wanted in the White House at that moment: a nice man with a big smile and no ideas whatsoever. He or one of his speechwriters chose a word to sum it up: normalcy.

  Florence soared on Warren’s bubble. She saw herself as the queen of Washington and with Evalyn Walsh McLean’s help planned the most expensive inauguration gala the country had ever seen. The Republican National Committee, true to the party’s tightfisted tradition, refused to foot the bill. So Mrs. McLean and her husband paid for the bash out of their own pockets and held it at their estate, Friendship, outside Washington. Needless to say, the guest list was studded with millionaires. It was a harbinger of things to come.

  Sixty and in poor he
alth, Florence tried to conceal her haggard appearance with layers of powder and rouge. Edith Wilson gave her a brief White House tour and invited her to tea. She was so appalled by her successor’s déclassé style, whining voice, and overbearing manner, she rang for housekeeper Elizabeth Jaffray and left without saying good-bye. Florence, knowing a snub when she saw one, retaliated by firing Jaffray. A week later, when she realized the complications of running the Executive Mansion, she rehired Jaffray and let her handle that side of the White House with scarcely a word of comment. Florence had little interest in housekeeping.

  By this time she also had little interest in Warren. During the campaign she had found out about his long-running romance with her friend Carrie Phillips. The Republican National Committee gave Carrie and her husband twenty thousand dollars to leave the country and stay away for the next four years. That left the Harding partnership very close to a marriage of convenience.

  Warren sat in the Oval Office, scared half out of his wits, wondering what to do next. He confessed to an amazing number of reporters that he did not think he was up to the job. He told one, Bruce Bliven of The New Republic, that he wanted Congress to pass a bill that would make the U.S. tariff wall high enough to help Europe’s industries recover from the war—demonstrating he had one of the big issues of the era exactly backward. When another newsman returned from a trip across the war-ravaged continent and offered to tell the President what he had seen and heard, Warren said he had no interest in that “Europe stuff” and referred him to his secretary and chief speech-writer.

  Needless to say, Florence was not equipped to fill this vacuum in the oval office. She had no political ideas either, beyond a mindless hostility to Democrats. One of her few interventions concerned a speech Warren planned to give in which he semiendorsed Wilson’s League of Nations. Florence made him remove the kind words. She could still run “Wurr’n,” but she did not have a clue about where they should go.

  The only political program that occurred to either of them was a spurious populism. At a White House reception shortly after Evalyn Walsh McLean’s million-dollar inauguration party, Florence noticed the servants were lowering the window shades to prevent the public from goggling at the guests. “Let ’em look in if they want to!” she cried. “It’s their White House.”

  Tourists traipsing through the public rooms were sometimes startled to find the First Lady in their midst, shaking hands and acting as an impromptu guide. Warren too was eager to shake hands by the hour. This touch of democracy, after the austere Wilson White House, with its barred gates and unused state rooms during the war and the eighteen months of the President’s illness, struck many people as charming. For a while Warren and Florence enjoyed a honeymoon with the people and the press.

  Behind the scenes, Florence remained mean-spirited, evening scores with the snubbers on her list by excluding them from the White House and exalting her favorites. She was also ferociously hostile to anyone she perceived as a potential competitor for Warren’s share of the political limelight. When the widow of Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri tried to donate her handsome house on Sixteenth Street as a vice presidential residence, good-natured Warren had no objection to asking Congress to appropriate a few hundred thousand dollars to maintain the place for Calvin Coolidge and his pleasant wife, Grace. The Duchess exploded when she heard about it and ordered “Wurr’n” to kill the bill. “Do you think I am going to have those Coolidges living in a house like that?” Florence shouted. “A hotel apartment is plenty good for them!”

  It would take another forty-some years and the generosity of Nelson Rockefeller for the vice president to get a decent house. When Dad became vice president in 1945, we stayed in the same two-bedroom apartment we had lived in while he was a senator. Although Dad was only vice president for three months, it would have been nice to get some training in a sort of minor-league White House before being thrust into the real thing.

  All sorts of machinations were taking place behind the scenes in the Harding White House, none of them very nice. Warren had made Harry Daugherty his attorney general, and this dime-store Machiavelli started collecting on his long years of toil to make Harding President. One of his first moves was to get a presidential order giving him control of the corporations confiscated from German owners under the Alien Property Act during World War I. He and his pals began selling off these assets at bargain rates and pocketing bonuses paid under the table. Another crony skimmed millions from the Veterans’ Bureau, selling alcohol and drugs needed for soldiers still recuperating from their World War I wounds to bootleggers and narcotics dealers. The secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, an old Harding Senate pal, allowed oil companies to tap into the Teapot Dome oil reserve and other government-owned fields for a half million dollars in “loans” which Fall never bothered to repay

  The only political plum Florence demanded was the appointment of Dr. Charles Sawyer as surgeon general. She credited this quack, who believed in “nature food” as a sovereign remedy, with keeping her alive and hoped he could continue to work his miracles on her and Warren in the White House.

  Having nothing else to do, Warren spent incredible numbers of hours answering the mail. He composed personal replies to innumerable appeals for help and warnings of imminent national disaster, the two chief reasons people write to the White House. One night the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, visited Harding in his office and found the President groaning over a huge pile of letters on his desk. Butler glanced at them; their triviality boggled his mind. He urged Warren to put a clerk in charge of this mundane chore.

  Butler did not realize that Warren had to fill his time somehow. He never read a book. He had no interest in art or the theater, except for the Gayety Burlesque, which he visited regularly to watch the bumps and grinds in a special box that concealed him from the public. During the day he played a lot of golf, and the nights when he was not at the Gayety he tried to fill with poker and booze. While the rest of the country wrestled with the idiocy of Prohibition, for which Warren’s party was chiefly responsible, he and Florence were serving hard stuff on the second floor of the White House to his poker-playing buddies.

  Florence tolerated—she even encouraged—Warren’s poker playing and golf. But there was one recreation that she would not condone. That was why she became the first President’s wife to demand her own Secret Service agent—launching the unhappy tradition of imprisoning the First Lady as well as the President in their eternal vigilance. Florence’s Secret Service man was acquired not to protect her but to keep Warren’s remaining inamorata, Nan Britton, out of the White House.

  The agent did not do a very good job. According to the bestseller Nan wrote a few years later, she swiftly established communication with Warren via the mails, and soon he was sneaking her into the Oval Office, where they enjoyed themselves in a five-foot-square clothes closet. Once the First Lady almost caught them. Tipped off by her Secret Service man, she rushed downstairs and demanded access to Warren’s sanctum. The Secret Service agent who had escorted Nan from Union Station was guarding the inside door, which he refused to open “by order of the President.”

  An infuriated Florence raced around and invaded the office of George Christian, one of the President’s secretaries, adjoining the Oval Office. Sensing what was up, Christian stalled her with double-talk about his boss being busy, while the Secret Service man guarding the other door extracted Nan from the closet and hustled her out a side exit. When Florence finally charged into the Oval Office, “Wurr’n” was at his desk, reading a letter. That did not save him from a ferocious tongue-lashing. “She makes life hell for me!” he told Nan later.

  Other Presidents have been unfaithful to their wives. But none has perpetrated the kind of French farce the Hardings performed in the White House. Beyond the gates another drama was beginning to unfold that would transform the farce into tragedy. Honest men started telling the President what Daugherty, Fall, and others were doing to his adm
inistration. The appalled Harding did not know what to do or say. He spent his nights staring into the darkness and his days in a sleep-starved fog. Whenever possible he consoled himself with Nan, who listened tearfully to his troubles after another rendezvous in the closet.

  Meanwhile, Florence collapsed with a near fatal attack of nephritis that left her bedridden for months. Recovered, she hobbled around on swollen ankles, looking more and more like a walking corpse. Both the First Lady and the President were desperately in need of someone to protect them from each other—and the huge uproar that was gathering around them. Harding finally found the nerve to ask one of Daugherty’s top aides, Jess Smith, to resign. He was the alien properties operation’s bagman, and all sorts of witnesses were ready to testify that they had deluged him with bribes. Smith went home to Ohio and blew out his brains. The crook who had been looting the Veterans’ Bureau soon imitated his example.

  Like other Presidents before and since, Harding finally decided the best answer to the mounting scandal was a campaign-style trip across the country to let the people see their President was undaunted by the nasty things the newspapers were printing about him. If patriotism is, as they say, the last refuge of scoundrels, populism is unquestionably the final refuge of tottering Presidents. The roar of the crowd will, they hope, wash them clean.

  Harding’s Voyage of Understanding, as he called it, whistle-stopped across the country with Florence and Surgeon General Sawyer at his side. It never seemed to occur to them that they were exhausting a man with high blood pressure, a weak heart, and acute insomnia. The President hurled his platitudes at the voters at literally dozens of stops from Washington, D.C., to Alaska, where he was welcomed with acclaim by the natives because he was the first Chief Executive to acknowledge their existence by visiting the place.

  En route to Alaska aboard a U.S. Army transport, Harding received a coded message from Washington with more bad news about the deepening scandals he had left behind him. For several hours the President looked dazed; he muttered incoherently about false friends. A few days later, when the ship collided with one of her escorting destroyers in a heavy fog, Harding was heard to say: “I hope the boat sinks.”