The Book of Bastards (15 page)

Warren G. Harding was far and away the least competent chief executive this country had during the twentieth century (Dubya doesn't count. He belongs to the twenty-first century). In fact Harding was even worse than any of the mediocrities who camped out at the White House during most of the nineteenth century. He was the ultimate product of corrupt machine politics: Harding was handsome, outgoing, and not too bright. He was a back-room glad-hander and dealmaker who got his start by marrying the daughter of the richest man in his small Ohio hometown. And while he wasn't much of a “policy guy,” Harding was definitely good at
being
a U.S. Senator. At the time he just needed to be himself!

When Harding's machine got him elected first as a U.S. Senator and then as president, he didn't arrive at the White House friendless. He took with him such thieving members of the “Ohio Gang” as his poker buddies Harry M. Daugherty and Albert Fall. He also brought his penchant for card playing, cigar smoking, and skirt chasing. Harding's wife — a formidable woman whom he nicknamed “The Duchess” — always suspected her husband of fooling around behind her back and used to stalk through the halls of the Executive Mansion looking for him.

In order to dodge her, Harding used to meet his “secretary” — a buxom, curvy blonde named Nan Britton — in the cloakroom that President Theodore Roosevelt had converted into the first phone booth in the White House. Apparently it was the only place in the entire mansion where the Duchess didn't think to look for Ol' Warren.

Then the inevitable happened: Harding sired a child in the room. (Britton wrote about it several years after his death, in a book titled
The President's Daughter
.) Harding's handlers gave Britton $100,000 in hush money and sent her on a cruise around the world.

Shortly before his death, Harding began to get wind of all of the grafting taking place. The potential for scandal began to worry him. While traveling west on a summer tour in 1923, Harding asked his secretary of commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover for his two cents: “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?”

Hoover, a very honest fellow, responded that in such a case he would expose the scandal. Harding never made up his mind what to do about it. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco later that same summer.

Everyone knows the term “fall guy.” He's the person who will take the blame and consequences of someone else's criminal act, even if it's murder. This poor soul may not even know the criminal; he may simply be getting “framed” and is otherwise blameless. But where did the term originate? Meet the original “fall guy”: former Senator and Interior Secretary Albert Fall of New Mexico. He was a far-from-blameless man involved up to his eyebrows in one of the greatest bilking schemes of the twentieth century: the Teapot Dome scandal.

Fall settled in New Mexico while it was still a territory, began to practice law there, and jumped feet first into local politics. Fall was a fixer, a guy who got deals done. He also represented and got off several notorious gunmen accused of murder, including one for the death of Fall's longtime political rival. Fall became a senator when New Mexico became a state in 1912. During his nine years in the Senate, Fall allied himself with Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding and his followers.

Elected president in 1920, Harding appointed Fall secretary of the interior. Fall then persuaded Navy Secretary Edwin Denby that the Interior Department should manage the Navy's huge oil reserves inside the United States like Buena Vista, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Fall immediately leased these deposits for a ridiculously low price to two old friends from his early days in New Mexico: Henry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny. He didn't bother allowing for bids on the oil leases (a violation of federal law). In return Fall received a $100,000 cash “loan” (worth over $1 million today) from Doheny's son. Doheny immediately became the wealthiest man in the country.

Too much money and too many people were involved in the swindle for it to remain a secret, and
The Wall Street Journal
broke the story about the “loans” to Fall on April 14, 1922. Sloppy before this story broke, Fall managed to cover his tracks afterward. By the time the Senate named a subcommittee to investigate, Fall had made everything look perfectly legal.

When Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh uncovered the “loan” Doheny's son had hand-delivered, Fall and Denby were quickly forced out of office. In 1927 the Supreme Court invalidated the original leases; by this time, however, millions of barrels of oil had been pumped out of these lands at an immense profit for Sullivan and Doheny. In 1929 Fall was convicted on bribery charges and spent a year in jail; he was the first cabinet-level government official in American history to do so. He died broke in El Paso, Texas, in 1944.

Huey Long's picture ought to be next to the word “demagogue” in the dictionary. The irony is that Long didn't start out that way. He started out as just one more little guy trying to help other little guys.

A middle child in a large Louisiana family, Long's elder siblings were able to go to college; by the time young Huey was of age to consider an higher education, however, the cost of college had skyrocketed. The luxury was well beyond his middleclass, farm-owning family's means, even though he'd won a scholarship that would have taken care of his tuition. Instead Long went to work as a traveling salesman, peddling everything from medicine to canned goods to books.

During this time he discovered that he had the common touch. A born politician, Long had a way of ingratiating himself with people almost immediately.

In the interim he attended college here and there, and after just one year at Tulane Law School he convinced the local bar association to allow him to take the bar exam. He passed it, and was admitted to the Louisiana Bar in 1915. He immediately went into private practice, mostly working for poor clients suing large companies.

By 1922 Long had been elected chairman of Louisiana's Public Service Commission; representing that entity he sued Cumberland Telephone & Telegraph for price gouging. He won, and forced a settlement that called for CT&T to reimburse over 80,000 of its ratepayers a total of nearly $440,000. This made him quite popular with the poor and middle class, and Long ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1924.

He ran again in 1928 with the campaign slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” As part of his program, Long promised voters services many of them had never envisioned before, including paved roads to replace the dirt ones that turned into red clay muck during the Gulf Coast's rainy season. This time he won.

Long immediately set about redistributing Louisiana's wealth mostly at the expense of its oil companies. He taxed the big corporations at ever-higher rates and cut the taxes of what he called “the rest of us.” All the while he increased services for the poor, including supplying free textbooks to schoolchildren and state-sponsored night adult literacy courses. This cemented Long's power-base with lower and lower– middle class voters.

And the people loved him as much as his growing list of enemies among the rich and intellectuals loathed him. But at some point for Long it became about power, and not about the people he served.

After two years as governor, Long ran for the U.S. Senate in 1930 without resigning his seat. He won, and was sworn in to the Senate in 1931, still without resigning his seat. Long held two posts for over a year: he was both the governor of Louisiana and the state's U.S. Senator. Not since John Marshall had served as both U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice had anyone done that.

Long emerged as a critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt, announcing as early as 1934 that he intended to make a primary challenge of FDR in the 1936 election. He never got the chance. A doctor whom Long had smeared by claiming he had “coffee blood” (a euphemism for being mixed-race) shot Long dead in the Louisiana State Court House on September 8, 1935.

The world knows President “Give 'Em Hell” Harry Truman for his blunt speech, forthright manner, and historic endeavors. He used an atomic bomb to end World War II, faced down the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War, integrated the U.S. Armed Services, and won reelection in the most stunning upset in American political history.

He was also a machine politician connected throughout his career to one of the most corrupt “kingmakers” in American history.

Truman had been a failure as a farmer and as a haberdasher. He seemed the most unlikely of political hacks, but he needed help to get into the game. So Truman called on Kansas City political machine boss Tom Pendergast. He backed Truman's run for the comparable position to a county commissioner's seat in eastern Missouri. Pendergast exerted his powerful influence on Truman's career for the next two decades, and helped the young man rise through the ranks. Though he rejected Truman's desire to run for Congress or the governorship at first, Pendergast got him elected as a U.S. Senator from Missouri in 1934. Truman won by a large margin, but had trouble getting meetings with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who airily dismissed the Missourian as “the Senator from Pendergast.”

In spite of his reputation as a machine politician, Truman carefully built up his reputation for honesty. He let Pendergast choose the people Truman would appoint and support in government jobs (this was known as Truman's “patronage”), but made it clear that Pendergast never influenced his congressional votes. Keeping it that way wasn't easy. Political machines would sink hooks into politicians who could serve their interests. The poor chump would arrive at a hotel room for a “meeting” and find young women waiting for him. Whether or not any hanky-panky went on, if the sucker got caught, then the machine had leverage against him.

Truman never forgot this. He was a devoted family man and was never linked to any of the “other women” stories that so often crop up in the closets of prominent politicians. Late in life, Truman was asked how he was able to avoid even the hint of bad behavior in an age where politicians kept mistresses the way modern campaign managers keep opinion polls; Truman was as forthcoming as ever. The key, he said, was never to allow himself to be caught dead in a room alone with a woman not related to him. Not only would he walk out of a room in which a woman was alone, he made a point of getting up and walking out of
any
room into which a single woman was sent — even if he was to be there with other men. And it worked.

Pendergast helped fix one too many elections, and in 1939 the newly elected Missouri governor (who owed his new office to Pendergast) threw the boss under the bus. Pendergast went to jail and his political machine was broken. Pendergast was finished as a machine politician, and he lived out the rest of his life in a quiet Kansas City suburb. Truman, so careful to keep clean and clear of the fray, was never even questioned about his relationship with Pendergast.