Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [49]
The following month the Hardings set off on an official tour of the Rockies, Alaska and the West Coast. For once, the McLeans were not invited to attend them. Earlier that spring, Alice Roosevelt Longworth had told Florence about what she called Evalyn’s kindness in allowing the President to use Friendship to entertain “women friends from Marion”; by this she meant Nan Britton. Evalyn’s betrayal wounded Florence deeply just at the time she most needed a friend.
Throughout the trip, both Warren and Florence were ill and seriously worried about the escalating allegations of misconduct. Death and bad luck seemed to hang in the air: three journalists died when their car crashed into a canyon; a tram collision was narrowly avoided; their train engineer was killed in a landslide. Harding was only able to muster up his customary energy and good spirits when pretty girls were around. To calm his nerves he played bridge day and night with exhausted aides. “My God! This is a hell of a job!” he said to the journalist William Allen White. “I have no trouble with my enemies . . . But my damned friends, my God-damn friends, White, they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor at night.”
One afternoon Harding asked Herbert Hoover, who was with them on board their ship traveling south from Alaska, to join him in his cabin. “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?” he asked. Hoover replied, “Publish it, and at least get credit for integrity on your side.” Harding “remarked that this method might be politically dangerous. I asked for more particulars. He said that he had received some rumors of irregularities, centering around [Jess] Smith, in connection with cases in the Department of Justice. Harding gave me no information about what Smith had been up to. I asked what Daugherty’s relation to the affair was. He abruptly dried up and never raised the question again.”
Harding came down with a bad attack of food poisoning as the presidential entourage continued southwards. By the time they had reached San Francisco it had developed into pneumonia and he died, either of a heart attack or a stroke, on the evening of 2 August. He was fifty-seven. Florence, utterly dependent—as she had been for years—on the unreliable advice of their quackish personal physician, “Doc” Sawyer, refused to permit an autopsy. This led to wild speculation that she had poisoned her husband to prevent him being implicated in the scandals swirling around him. Perhaps Hoover’s assessment was closest to the truth. “People do not die from a broken heart,” he wrote of Harding’s death, “but people with bad hearts may reach the end much sooner from great worries.”
One consolation for Harding would have been that he was never implicated in the corruption of his so-called friends—his only crime seems to have been that he was too loyal to them to suspect what they were up to—and that when he died and was buried it was as one of America’s best-loved presidents. Millions of bareheaded mourners queued alongside the train tracks as his coffin thundered back across the country towards the capital, quietly singing his favorite hymns.
Granite-like, Florence Harding returned to Washington with her husband’s body. After his funeral, having made her peace with Evalyn McLean, she went to stay at Friendship. There the two women burned all the Hardings’ private papers. Over the bonfires, Florence said to Evalyn, “Now that it is all over I am beginning to think it was all for the best.” Within a few months, the kidney disease that had plagued her for fifteen years persuaded her to return to her home town of Marion. She died there just over a year after Warren in November 1924.
Revelations of the corruption of Forbes, Smith, Daugherty, Fall and Sinclair, among others, continued throughout the 1920s. In 1924 Daugherty managed to avoid cross-examination by a Senate committee on the grounds that his personal relations with the Hardings made it impossible for him to