The correspondence revealed that he and the Republican National Committee paid the woman $5,000 per month to stay silent about their affair while he was president. Last year the Library of Congress released a batch of letters Harding wrote to his longtime mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips. “After his death,” wrote a biographer, “his reputation plummeted so quickly that only with the greatest reluctance could a Republican successor be persuaded to dedicate his tomb.”īut all that is aside from the difficulties he got into when he had trouble controlling “Jerry,” as he was wont to call his penis. In the rankings academics conduct every few years, Harding has averaged out as the worst president in American history. He presided over an administration unprecedented in its corruption, he rolled back Progressive-era reforms and he enacted racist immigration laws. Historians have long disliked Harding for reasons other than his sexcapades. And, as was underscored this week, when news broke that Harding did in fact father a child with Britton as she had claimed, no other was quite as reckless with his libido. Pouterson”) or his sense of scenery (he and Nan regularly had sex in a White House closet). No other philandering chief executive had the 29th president’s way with words (he termed the vagina of one of his mistresses “Mrs. Harding is really in a category of his own.
The year before he died, George Washington wrote to his longtime love Sally Fairfax that nothing could “eradicate from my mind the recollection of those happy moments, the happiest in my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.” And then there were the more public dalliances of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, of course.īut Warren G. Of course, sex has always been part of the presidency, both because presidents are human males (so far) and because power has its attractions. “The fact that I was so ignorant seemed to add to his cherishment of me for some reason,” Britton later recalled. That was before he took her virginity in a hotel room and later brought her to the White House for regular rendezvouses. Historians have said that during the campaign, Harding would take Britton into his office and sit her on his lap. Surely, the future president helpfully told her while his wife looked on in stony silence, she would like to have a real photograph to go with the poster collection. Passing by his house one day, she told Harding-then nearing his 50s-that she had decorated her room with his campaign posters. Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer to Salon and the Christian Science Monitor.Īs a young Ohio teenager, Nan Britton became infatuated with the state’s married Republican candidate for Senate, Warren G.
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