Warren G. Harding

"Warren G. Harding is best known as America's worst president. This erroneous conclusion endures because the actual record of his presidency has, in fact, been largely overlooked. It was long believed, incorrectly, that Mrs. Harding had destroyed all of her husband's presidential papers. So the Harding history was largely written before it was learned that his papers were intact. He became a defenseless target of decades of false accusations and distortions. Those presidential papers have now been available for almost as long as they were not. Yet in the thirty-eight years that this information has been accessible, only a few published works have relied on Harding's senatorial and presidential papers. Even then, many who have written about Harding have uncritically perpetuated specious and baseless stories. My undertaking, however, has not been to challenge or catalogue all those who have gotten it wrong about Harding, only to get it right. I was curious to discern, as best I could, the truth of who he was, how he was elected, and how he operated and performed as president of the United States."—John W. Dean on Warren G. Harding

"Dean credibly highlights Harding's successes, [and gets] it about right when he writes that Harding 'was a natural at being head of state, but not at the administrative side of the presidency, that of being head of government' . . . The book is well-written and a welcome addition to the sparse Harding literature."—Library Journal

"[Here is a] brief account of a failed, scandal-ridden presidency, seen through the eyes of someone quite familiar with such things . . . Laboring valiantly to prove that the man infamous for his largely posthumous connection to the Teapot Dome scandal of 1923 does not quite merit the worst-president epithet, Dean credits Harding, who was inaugurated in 1921, for being unusually forward-thinking in his views on civil rights and social welfare. He was also, Dean writes, a highly effective practical politician who had few personal enemies (except for his wife’s father, who in this account personifies everything bad about small-town capitalism) and valued consensus-building at all levels of government. The author credits Harding for braving unpopularity by taking a consistently conservative stand on fiscal matters, as when he risked damaging his career by refusing to pay a bonus to WWI veterans . . . Whatever his merits, Harding unwisely surrounded himself with self-serving counselors, among them a treasury secretary who brokered tax breaks for the wealthy, an interior secretary who enriched himself by selling off favors and titles from the public domain, and a veteran’s affairs administrator who looted his department’s budget.Although Harding served only 882 days in office before dying of a stroke, his relationship with those men and assorted other wrongdoers has served to tarnish his reputation ever since, even if, as Dean insists, none of the associated criminal investigations 'implicated Warren Harding in any corrupt activity or wrongdoing' . . . [Dean provides] a useful view of the long-forgotten leader."—Kirkus Reviews