A Treasury of Great American Scandals (25 page)

Yet despite Palmer's dire warnings, America was still standing. The January raids had yielded almost nothing in the way of arms or revolutionaries, just a sickening sense that things had gone too far. “Palmer,” President Wilson said at his first cabinet meeting since a debilitating stroke the previous fall, “do not let this country see red.” The admonition was a little late, but the president had been shielded from news of his attorney general's unlawful excesses because of concern for his health. Others, however, were painfully aware of the mess Palmer was making. Labor Secretary William Wilson and his assistant Louis Post took the bite out of Palmer's program by restoring the rule of law. Many of those arrested in January were released, and ultimately fewer than 600 aliens were deported. Indignant, Palmer demanded that Post be called to account for his “tender solicitude for social revolution,” but a congressional committee cleared him.

Palmer was getting desperate. He issued a series of warnings of a revolutionary plot to overthrow the U.S. government that was to be launched on May 1, 1920. The National Guard was called out and the nation was in a state of nervous agitation. Yet when the date of doom came and went without incident, Palmer was derided as the Fed who cried wolf one too many times. That July his presidential dreams were grounded for good when he failed to get the Democratic nomination. In January 1921, he was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer charges that he had misused his office during the great Red Scare. Palmer defended himself vigorously. “I apologize for nothing,” he told the committee. “I glory in it. I point with pride and enthusiasm for the results of that work. . . . [If my agents] were a little rough and unkind, or short and curt, with these alien agitators . . . I think it might well be overlooked in the general good to the country which has come from it.”

Warren G. Harding: Nice Guy Finishes Last

—WARREN G. HARDING

 

 

 

At least Julius Caesar's friends had the decency to kill him. Harding's poker-playing pals, who also served as members of his cabinet, did far worse: They disgraced him. The Teapot Dome scandal and other instances of corruption by his high-ranking circle helped destroy the twenty-ninth president, a basically good man, and secured his position in history as one of the nation's worst chief executives.

No one ever expected anything great from Warren Harding, and he did not disappoint. “We must go back to Franklin Pierce,”
²²
wrote the
New York Times
in 1919, “if we would seek a president who measures down to his political stature.” Indeed, even Harding's main benefactor, Ohio political boss Harry Daugherty, thought him a dimwit, once confessing that he had pushed Harding for the presidency only because “he looked like a president.” Daugherty was not unaware of the fact that Harding was a handsome devil, and that the election of 1920 was the first in which women could vote.

Harding brought to the presidency something no man has before or since—an overwhelming awareness of his own incompetence. “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here,” he once said in despair. He was bewildered by the job from the beginning. His inability to grasp its complexities only fed his enormous self-doubt. “I don't think I'm big enough for the presidency,” he once confided to Judge John Barton Payne.

Taxes, foreign affairs, the economy—all overwhelmed him. “I don't know what to do or where to turn on this taxation matter,” Harding once blurted out in desperation. “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it! My God, this is a hell of a place for a man like me to be!”

The president found reassurance in the letters he received from the public and spent an inordinate amount of time answering mail that should have been handled by his staff. He promised to buy tickets from an eleven-year-old boy raising funds for a swimming pool and reminisced about the creek where he used to swim as a lad. In a reply to the maker of Dodson's Bird Houses and Famous Sparrow Traps, who had suggested that the White House grounds be turned into a bird sanctuary, he asked that the crackpot inventor postpone his request “for the present.”

Harding delighted in greeting visitors to the White House, shaking hands and making small talk. “I love to meet people,” he explained to an adviser who questioned the amount of time he spent at the activity. “It's the most pleasant thing I do; it is really the only fun I have. It does not tax me, and it seems to be a very great pleasure to them.”

Harding's fatal flaw was obviously not as classically epic as pride or ambition. It was something more innocuous, but for him equally lethal—the chronic need to be liked. It defined his presidency. Such vulnerability gave those who would take advantage of it license to use their appointed posts to whatever benefit they could. Their president would be loath to offend his friends by interfering. Friends were important to Harding. His nagging self-doubt required them, and high government posts were filled with them. They played poker together in the White House, with the Prohibition-era booze provided courtesy of good old Warren. Alice Roosevelt Longworth described it as “a general atmosphere of waist-coat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside.”

Among the players was kingmaker Harry Daugherty, the skilled, if somewhat unscrupulous, political Svengali who guided Harding from Ohio politics to Pennsylvania Avenue. Harding rebuffed warnings not to appoint Daugherty attorney general: “Harry Daugherty has been my best friend from the beginning of this whole thing . . . He tells me that he wants to be attorney general and by God he will be attorney general!”

Daugherty set up an influence-peddling office at the Department of Justice and became the subject of two congressional investigations. After resigning he was twice indicted for malfeasance during his tenure (only because the statute of limitations had expired for the real charge of accepting bribes).

There also was Harding's affable friend Colonel Charlie Forbes, who was appointed director of the Veterans' Bureau. Forbes convinced Harding to transfer the planning and construction of all future hospitals from the army to his department, along with the authority for purchase and disposal of veterans' supplies. Forbes supplemented his government salary quite lavishly with hospital construction kickbacks and the sale of the veterans' supplies for a fraction of what the government had paid for them. “I am heartsick about it,” Harding said when told of his friend's treachery. The colonel had been a treasured favorite.

There was no warmly welcomed guest in the White House who did more to devastate the reputation of the president than his good friend Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, a passionate poker player and architect of the great Teapot Dome swindle. Harding befriended the fiery, anticonservationist senator from New Mexico when he himself was the new senator from Ohio. After he was elected president, Harding appointed Fall, “that star of a fellow,” to his cabinet. Fall's fellow senators voted with jovial unanimity to confirm him without reference to committee. The Department of the Interior was his, and he didn't ignore the advantage.

Although he was born in Kentucky, Albert Fall epitomized the spirit of the West. One of Theodore Roosevelt's “Rough Riders,” he owned a sprawling ranch in New Mexico and was a fierce and vocal opponent of the government setting aside land for conservation—including a series of oil reserves controlled by the U.S. Navy. It was one of those reserves, Teapot Dome in Wyoming (so named for its vague resemblance to a giant sandstone teapot), that gave its name to one of the greatest scandals in the nation's history.

Fall succeeded in transferring control of several of the oil reserves, including Teapot Dome, from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. He then leased them out to the private interests of Harry Sinclair and E. L. Doheny, multimillionaire oil producers doing business as Mammoth Oil Company and Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company respectively. The leases were granted without competitive bidding, which was not illegal, but Fall received “loans” from Sinclair and Doheny amounting to $400,000 in exchange for their licenses to secretly plunder the reserves. The loans were never documented or acknowledged, which made them bribes, and Fall, the man Teddy Roosevelt once called “the kind of public servant of whom all Americans should feel proud,” came to be the first cabinet member in history to serve time in prison.

Fortunately, Harding would never know the extent of Fall's activities. He died in 1923, before completing his first term as president. Nor would he feel the full brunt of a stunned public's reaction to their gradual discovery of an administration teeming with dirty dealers. “No one can hurt you now, Warren,” his wife said at his casket. No one but History.

Joe McCarthy: Wisconsin Sleaze

 

 

 

Calling Joe McCarthy a common bully is a little like calling Hitler a run-of-the-mill racist. It just doesn't do him justice. McCarthy, perhaps the most notorious demagogue of the twentieth century, exceeded the boundaries of ordinary bullies, aiming his devastating lies and distortions not just at weaker government workers, but also at some of the nation's most powerful people—including the president of the United States. He might, then, be called an
über
-bully, one who smeared reputations without regard to the strength or status of his victims.

Before launching his now infamous crusade against Communists and other subversives he claimed were lurking in all levels of government, McCarthy was just a poorly regarded junior senator from Wisconsin—part of the famed congressional class of 1946 that included John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.
²³
Aside from a few questionable financial dealings that brought him unwelcome atten-tion,McCarthy's greatest claim to fame during his early years in the Senate was perhaps the complete ass he made out of himself during what was known as the Malmédy affair. It was a disturbing preview of the senator's later career, although instead of chasing enemies of the United States—in this case, a group of Nazi murderers—McCarthy was actually coddling them.

The Germans in question had been tried and convicted in 1949 for the massacre of American prisoners of war five years earlier near the French village of Malmédy. The defendants claimed to have been framed by the U.S. Army and alleged their confessions had been beaten out of them. McCarthy, aghast, demanded a Senate hearing on the matter. It was quite a spectacle, with the senator from Wisconsin ranting about an elaborate conspiracy against the Nazis and the special committee's utter indifference to it. At one point, McCarthy stormed out of the hearings, declaring dramatically that he would no longer be party to such “a shameful farce . . . a deliberate and clever attempt to whitewash the American military.” The incident failed to enhance the senator's reputation. Clearly he needed something other than mistreated Nazis to make a national name for himself. It didn't take him long to latch onto the threat of domestic communism as a career-making cause.

On February 9, 1950, in a speech before a Republican ladies group in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy made his debut as a Red hunter, alleging that the U.S. Department of State was crawling with Communists. “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” McCarthy gravely told the gathered women, according to a report in the Wheeling
Intelligencer,
“I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” It was a preposterous lie, but McCarthy clung to it with the ferocity of a rottweiler. He had finally hit upon a theme that resonated quite nicely with an American public thoroughly paranoid over mounting Soviet aggression, the emergence of Red China, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. Joe McCarthy, once voted the worst U.S. senator in a press corps poll, was finally getting a little respect, and he was not about to let the truth interfere with that.

“McCarthy was surely the champion liar,” Richard Rovere writes in his biography of the senator. “He lied with wild abandon; he lied without evident fear; he lied in his teeth and in the teeth of the truth; he lied vividly and with bold imagination; he lied, often, with very little pretense to telling the truth.” And while his widely scattered accusations occasionally bore fruit, far more often they were total nonsense—like his charge against the Truman administration for conniving with Communists several weeks after his speech at Wheeling. “The Democratic label is now the property of men and women who have . . . bent to the whispered pleas from the lips of traitors,” he said, “men and women who wear the political label stitched with the idiocy of a Truman, rotted by the deceit of a [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson. . . .”

Indeed, McCarthy had a special loathing for Acheson, “that striped-pants asshole,” as he privately called the dapper secretary of state who he felt personified the very worst of two decades' worth of Democratic administrations. It didn't help that Acheson had spoken in support of Alger Hiss, who had been convicted of perjury for lying about passing secret documents to the Soviets—just the kind of ammunition McCarthy craved. Acheson and his ilk exerted “a tremendous, almost hypnotic influence” on President Truman, McCarthy charged, warning that the American people would have to suffer the consequences, including the continued growth of the “sinister, many-headed and many-tentacled monster” that was the Communist conspiracy within the government—“one which was conceived in Moscow and given birth to by Dean Gooderham Acheson.”