James David Robenalt. The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 209. 400 pages.
Warren G. Harding has been consistently ranked as one of the nation’s worst presidents, and doesn’t get points for personal ethics: after his death, there were numerous scandals in his administration, and he was notoriously unfaithful to his wife Florence. Plenty has been written about his presidency, and this new book adds just a little to what is already known.
Basically, a cache of letters that Harding wrote to his longtime paramour Carrie Phillips have emerged into the historical record; the story of how they came to be accessible is told in the prologue. It would make for a good History Channel special, or perhaps an extended article in a popular history magazine. The letters themselves, however, don’t tell us much new, and they show that Harding’s reputation as a dim bulb wasn’t entirely undeserved.
This book is primarily a biography of Harding from about 1905 to 1920, more or less the years that of the correspondence between Harding and Phillips. As such, the letters take a prominent place in the text, and the reader gets to enjoy Harding’s recollection of his and Phillips’ assignations in passages like the following, as Harding remembers a tryst in Montreal: “…when the bells rang the chorus while our hearts sang the rapture without words and we greeted the New Year from the hallowed heights of heaven.” (p57)
There is an almost entirely tangential subplot of the Baroness Zollner, a young army officer, and an espionage in Tennessee. Chapters about the Zollner affair take up much of the book, but there is no real resolution and the connection to the pro-German Phillips is reed-thin, and never figures in the letters.
There is even less of a connection between “German espionage” and Harding. Phillips was clearly pro-German, and Harding was not. Their letters reflect their difference of opinion, and this is likely one of the factors that drove a wedge between them.
Overall, The Harding Affair is like Harding’s prose: bland and repetitious. The letters just don’t have the “oomph” to carry a book (at least this book) by themselves, though they would no doubt be invaluable to Harding specialists. Slogging through all 400 pages with no real payoff (the Harding/Phillips correspondence and affair end with a whimper rather than a bang) will try the patience of even the greatest history enthusiast.