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Commentary: Author works to rehabilitate Warren G. Harding’s reputation

Warren G. Harding with his wife Florence (lower right, with frightening hat) and his mistress Carrie Phillips (lower left). Tall gentleman on the left is Jim Phillips, Carrie's husband and one of Harding's best friends from his hometown of Marion, Ohio.

Contributed photo Warren G. Harding with his wife Florence (lower right, with frightening hat) and his mistress Carrie Phillips (lower left). Tall gentleman on the left is Jim Phillips, Carrie's husband and one of Harding's best friends from his hometown of Marion, Ohio.

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By Mary McCarty, Staff Writer 6:27 PM Saturday, October 10, 2009

James David Robenalt’s great-grandfather, William Durbin, played a critical role in Gov. James M. Cox’s campaign for the presidency against Warren G. Harding in 1920.

Now the Cleveland attorney finds himself in the unlikely role of rehabilitating the reputation of the 29th president.

Even more unlikely is the means by which he’s doing it — through a page-turning biography, “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War” (Palgrave, MacMillan). Among his findings: Harding had a torrid 15-year affair with Carrie Phillips, his neighbor in Marion, Ohio, and wife of one of his closest friends.

Juicier still, he unveils compelling evidence that Carrie served as a paid German spy during World War I.

Normally, this is the kind of revelation that would destroy a political reputation, not revitalize it. But Robenalt’s born-again admiration for Harding is one of the intriguing developments in a tale that has more twists than a Tom Clancy novel.

It started when Cleveland hosted the 2004 vice-presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards at Case Western University. Robenalt was asked to convene a symposium on Ohio presidents in honor of the occasion. And, of course, such an occasion deserved some star power, such as John Dean, the Nixon White House counsel who penned a 2004 biography of Warren G. Harding, the last of the eight American presidents who hailed from Ohio.

Robenalt made a casual query to archivist Kermit Pike at Western Reserve Historical Society: Would you have any materials that would be of interest to Dean while he’s in town?

Yes, Pike whispered in cloak-and-dagger fashion, but he couldn’t talk over the phone. Could Robenalt come over as soon as possible?

What could their archives contain that would be so smoking-hot more than 80 years after Harding’s death in 1923?

Only this: nearly 800 pages of highly romantic — sometimes even steamy — love letters from Harding to his adored mistress. Phillips kept them locked in a room of her home in Marion until her death in 1960.

In 1963, Ohio Historical Society curator Kenneth Duckett bequeathed bootleg microfilm copies of the letters to four historical societies, including Western Reserve. He feared the originals would be destroyed — and with good reason. They’re explosive, and unlike anything yet discovered after the death of a former president.

“Other biographers have told me they would die and go to heaven for a cache of letters like this,” Robenalt said.

He obtained permission to research the letters — previously under seal — from the Harding family and set to work. He conducted extensive research among the James M. Cox papers in the Special Collections and Archives at Wright State University Libraries. He also received invaluable assistance from Dean, who wrote the foreword for the book. “He was very accessible, and very careful with the facts,” Robenalt said of Dean. “He would challenge me about various things.”

Harding’s letters were sexually graphic at times, but also floridly romantic in the tradition of nineteenth-century verse. “My darling,” he wrote in a letter on Christmas Eve 1910, “there are no words, at my command, sufficient to say the full extent of my love for you — a mad, tender, devoted, ardent, passion-wild, jealous, reverent, wistful, hungry, happy love....”

Both Harding and Phillips were very much married throughout the course of their long affair. Florence Harding suffered from kidney disease and remained an invalid throughout much of her marriage. She died in 1924, a year after Harding’s unexpected death in office of an apparent heart attack or stroke.

“You won’t hear me say anything bad about Florence Harding,” Robenalt told his audience at Books & Co. at The Greene on Tuesday, Oct. 6. “I’m a fan of hers.”

He described as “totally unfounded” persistent rumors that Florence poisoned her husband in a jealous rage. “She wouldn’t have done that,” he declared. “She loved him. She loved being first lady.”

But Robenalt believes the affair may have changed history in other ways. “It’s very clear from the letters that Carrie talked him out of running for president in 1916,” he said.

That caused Robenalt to engage in a game of historical “What ifs” with his audience: What if Harding had defeated Woodrow Wilson in 1916? Would he have dragged the United States into World War I? (As a senator, Harding challenged Wilson’s policy to enter the war “to make the world safe for democracy.”)

What if Harding had brokered a treaty at Versailles that was more favorable to Germany, that didn’t sow the seeds of discontent that led to Hitler’s rise?

Robenalt thinks Harding has gotten a bum rap from history, which consistently ranks him among the worst presidents. (Revelations about other affairs and his administration’s notorious Teapot Dome bribery scandal haven’t helped.)

Among his unheralded accomplishments, Harding was the first sitting president to travel to the Deep South to make a plea for civil rights. In October 1921 he was booed in Birmingham, Ala., when he declared, “Democracy is a lie if blacks are denied political equality.”

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