Books: Kiss Me, Harding

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Closet Drama. In retracing a political career that began in near nonentity and ended with death and the Teapot Dome oil-lands scandal, Francis Russell can do little but confirm this familiar myth—in detail. Yet even in his notorious sex life, Harding comes off as curiously passive. He was the pursued rather than the pursuer in his relations with his Lolita doll Nan Britton, a doctor's early-blooming daughter who decorated her bedroom with Harding photographs when she was 14. Later, one night in 1919, she conceived his daughter in the Senate office building and subsequently, as she told it, made love with him amid the footwear in a White House closet. Even in dealing with his most enduring mistress, Carrie Phillips, a restless American wife right off the pages of Main Street, the President appears to have been fumblingly defensive. She and her gullible husband went on trips with Harding and the Duchess. Harding had other women, including a widow neighbor in whose bathroom his toothbrush was once innocently pointed out to newsmen. But he was no more a great lover than a great statesman. His notion of a real courtship gift was a five-pound box of chocolates.

In a lawsuit brought by Harding's heirs, Russell has been restrained from reprinting sections of his letters and love poems to Carrie. As a result, some lines in the book are left suggestively blank. Russell leads up to them with come-on phrases: "His sensuality struck depths he was unaware of in himself." But readers should have no great expectations, if Nan Britton's quotes from Harding are any sample: "Oh, dearie, tell me it isn't hateful to you to have me kiss you!"

In the circumstances, it is little wonder that Russell so often hustles the strong-minded Duchess front and center or strays to little political vignettes—the best things in the book—of men like Cincinnati's "Boss" Cox, President Maker Mark Hanna, and the swarm of half-cynical, half-naive grafters who operated in the Harding power vacuum. Harding was a man to whom other people happened, and all of these people did their part in putting his body in a Marion mausoleum—he died, probably of apoplexy, on Aug. 2, 1923, two years and five months after his Inauguration—leaving his reputation in the mud of Teapot Dome.

"Leave Me Alone." Chronicling the tragicomedy of Harding's days and nights, Russell seems to examine his personal life as thoroughly as it can be or ought to be examined. It was hardly Harding's fault, however, that his main asset as President was a rugged, craggy, confidence-inspiring face. The usual explanation of why Harding became President is the U.S. longing to return to "normalcy" after World War I. But, as Herbert Hoover shrewdly put it, the word normalcy really expressed little more than that "leave-me-alone" feeling that everyone gets after a fever. A country is supposed to get the leaders it deserves. The ultimate scandal of the Harding years may rest with a body politic that could possibly find him the best available choice for the highest office in the land.