A president in their pocket

How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country

By Laton McCartney

Random House. 368 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Leonard Boasberg

The Harding administration was elected in 1920 with what Warren Gamaliel Harding, an obscure senator from Ohio, called a "return to normalcy." As the Republican Party saw it, normalcy meant turning over the public lands to be exploited by private enterprise, Big Oil in particular.

Harding was a "dark horse" for the presidential nomination. But the "Oil King of Oklahoma," Jake Hamon, shopping for a president, decided that this undistinguished senator was his man, with the understanding that Hamon would become secretary of the interior. In that position, he would try to wrest control over the naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills and Buena Vista, Calif., from the secretary of the Navy. The Taft and Wilson administrations had set aside the reserves to provide the Navy with oil in case of war or national emergency.

Hamon and the enormously wealthy oil moguls Harry Sinclair, Edward Doheny, and Robert W. Stewart saw visions of billions of dollars in today's money if they could get their hands on the drilling rights.

Hamon strewed money around the Chicago GOP convention, buying delegates and influence. Collaborating with Harding's campaign manager and political brain, the crafty Ohio fixer Harry Micajah Daugherty, Hamon bought the nomination for Harding, according to McCartney.

Alas, Hamon never took office. His mistress shot him. She took umbrage when he told her he was dumping her - after 10 years of living together - and returning to his wife. Harding's wife, "the Duchess," had insisted that she would not allow the man to bring his 27-year-old floozy to Washington as part of her husband's administration.

Harding's managers ran the "front-porch campaign" from his home in Marion, Ohio. "Keep Warren at home," Pennsylvania's Republican boss Boise Penrose warned. "Don't let him make any speeches. If he goes out on tour, somebody's sure to ask him questions, and Warren's just the sort of damned fool who will try to answer."

They also had to keep him out of trouble: Harding was a serial philanderer whose current mistress, a young woman named Nan Britton, had a child by him. (Harding managed to meet her for love-making during the convention and later sneaked her into the White House).

The Republican ticket of Harding and Calvin Coolidge carried 37 of the 48 states over Democratic nominees James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, 16 million popular votes to a little over 9 million.

The Harding administration would become the most corrupt administration in American history up to that time. Appointed attorney general by Harding, Daugherty would be the ringleader of what became known as the "Ohio Gang."

"Once Harding assumed office," McCartney writes, "this collection of swindlers, sharpies, con men, and extortionists descended on Washington like a pestilence, securing about every job in the new administration that provided an opportunity for corruption."

McCartney recounts a compelling story with a familiar ring: The influence of oil, financial chicanery, greed, cover-ups, stonewalling, forgetful witnesses, national security invoked as pretext for secrecy, destroyed records, a Republican National Committee attack machine, corrupt judges, a corrupt attorney general forced to resign, ransacked senators' offices, a lapdog press, and an indifferent public (until the scandal reached mammoth proportions). Not to mention murders, suicides, blackmail, bribery, shakedowns, strong-arm stuff, jury tampering, and a woman named Roxy.

Harding named his former Senate colleague Albert B. Fall of New Mexico to take over the Department of the Interior. Fall easily persuaded a complaisant Navy secretary to turn over control of the reserves to Interior. When questions were raised about the transaction, Harding brushed them off, saying that "if Albert Fall isn't an honest man, I'm not fit to be president of the United States."

Right.

Once he got the reserves, Fall awarded the Teapot Dome leases to Sinclair and the California oil fields to Doheny. In return, he received from each payments in the six figures, variously disguised.

The hero of the story is Thomas Walsh, senior Democratic senator from Wyoming. At first reluctant to take over the Senate investigation of the scandal, Walsh proceeded courageously and relentlessly with a probe that lasted a period of years.

In the end, Fall earned the dubious honor of becoming the first cabinet officer to go to jail as a felon. Sinclair served a comfortable term of nearly seven months in the District of Columbia Jail and Asylum. A jury would acquit the 73-year-old Doheny in 1930. Fall expressed perplexity that the bribee could go to prison while the briber got off.

As for Harding, he had died of a stroke in California on Aug. 2, 1923. His vice president, Calvin Coolidge, succeeded him.