Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [47]
It was Fall who introduced the Hardings to Harry Sinclair. Sinco, as he was known, was a self-made oilman designed to appeal to Warren. He knew Daugherty, had contributed to Harding’s campaign fund, was a keen poker-player and, as part-owner of a baseball team and owner of a Kentucky Derby winner, had attractive connections to the sporting world. When Fall asked Harding to approve the lease to Sinco of oil rich naval land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, Harding was only too pleased to sign. As a mark of gratitude, Sinclair’s company gave Fall’s son-in-law $233,000 in bonds, $85,000 in cash and a herd of pedigree cattle.
Sinclair was not the only oilman to benefit from his ties to Fall. In return for a black bag containing $100,000 in cash Edward Doheny, head of Pan-American Petroleum, was granted the lease of naval property at Elk Hills, California, also on extremely favorable terms. Like Sinclair, Doheny had supported Harding’s presidential campaign, donating $25,000 to pay for publicity photos of Harding with his parents to counteract rumors of Harding’s black ancestors.
The Hardings had befriended the ingratiating Charles Forbes and his wife when they were vacationing in Hawaii in 1915 and Forbes was supervising the construction of the new naval base at Pearl Harbor. Six years later, despite having almost no relevant experience, Forbes was placed at the head of the new Veterans’ Bureau with a $450 million budget at his disposal. The gallant wounded veterans of the Great War were the official cause closest to Florence Harding’s heart. Genuinely moved by their plight, she fund-raised on their behalf, nursed them in hospital and tirelessly pursued individual cases brought to her attention. Utterly taken in by Forbes’s boastful affability, she had urged her husband to appoint him to what she considered the most important of roles.
In just two years, Forbes sucked the Veterans’ Bureau dry. He reported medical and hospital supplies damaged and then sold them, pocketing the profit, and bought replacements from the companies that paid him; he inflated the price of government land sold for hospitals in return for a share of the profit from the sale; he awarded hospital construction contracts to firms who gave him a cut. One of these firms belonged to the husband of one of his mistresses—who just happened to be Warren Harding’s sister; a second mistress was the wife of another rich building contractor to whom he also gave access to his rivals’ bids. He took friends and girlfriends on lavish, bootleg-fueled junkets across the country, ostensibly on Veteran’s Bureau business. In all, it is estimated that in two years he cost the Government $200 million—of which he personally appropriated perhaps $36 million.
These unprincipled men recognized that Florence Harding needed to be flattered and cajoled into bestowing her support upon them. Both Fall and Edwin Denby, the Secretary of the Navy implicated in Fall’s leasing of naval land, wrote to the First Lady assuring her that they would do all they could “to do as you desire.” Daugherty himself wrote, almost in apology for having seen the President without her, “Of course you know it—you know everything which he or I do or think . . . I am loyal to him—that is as loyal to him as I can be considering that I always give your instructions preference over his.” Only Forbes—perhaps the closest socially to Florence—paid little attention to her demands that he investigate the cases of specific veterans with whom she was concerned. But finally Mrs. Harding’s suspicions