Warren G. Harding: The American Presidents Series: The 29th President, 1921-1923

Once again the American Presidents series delivers an excellent, short biography of a president that manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. Dean shows there was much more to Harding than the Teapot Dome Scandal. This biography raises many interesting points about how the media and indeed history present the legacy of a president. Harding's choice of Cabinet turned out to be disastrous. It's impossible to know how much Harding knew and when, but I did come away feeling that Harding was not as bad as he has been portrayed in history. I most appreciated Dean's ability to create some suspense in a historical context that everyone really knows about. I also like how he handled the Teapot Dome Scandal in the end of the book so it did not overshadow the biography. Overall, well researched and well written. I think John W. Dean was the right author for this book.

This is a better balanced biography of Harding than the Jazz Age President that I read just before this one. In this one Dean does do a good overview of Harding's personal life as well as well as his political life. You get a little better sense of the man and what made him. Dean does defend him quite vigorously while still not pointing out faults Harding had. No President is perfect and any biographer does a disservice if he cannot or will not point those out. To me Harding seems similar to Grant in that he surrounded himself with a number of questionable characters who were very corrupt and his presidency paid the price in a historical context. Harding had to have known things were going on but did nothing or didn't have the chance to do nothing since his life ended quickly. Hopefully someday someone will write a good even handed and thorough biography of Harding. He deserves it IMO as I do believe he was better than he has been given credit but also he is not as good as Dean and Walters have made him out to be.

The author has a much more favorable view of Warren Harding as a man and president than most earlier Harding biographers. Dean makes the case that the actual record of the Harding presidency was moderately successful, he was popular while president and got along well with the press. The author maintains the evidence for Harding’s scandals and immorality is not as iron clad as past biographers contend. There are two contributing factors to the author’s interest in Warren Harding. The first is they are both from Marion, OH, where the author growing up in the 50s knew locals who remembered Harding. Carrie Phillips, a woman from Warren Harding’s past, was still living in the town. Dean also had childhood friends who were relatives of Marshall DeWolfe, the son of Florence Harding from an earlier relationship. The second factor is that John Dean was a senior staffer in the Nixon administration, so he is a bridge between the two most scandalous administrations of the 20th century. It is intriguing to read about Warren Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal from the perspective of a Nixon administration figure and Watergate scandal survivor. The author relied almost entirely on secondary sources, mostly past Harding biographies. The positive side of this is that the author provides the reader clear analysis of past Harding scholarship starting with the hagiographies immediately after his death, next the vilifications that came out after the Teapot Dome scandal was exposed, then the biographies in the 60s and 70s that came out in response to the discovery of Harding documents believed to be lost and finally more recent studies that portray Harding as not as bad a president or man as previously thought. The author should have cited more primary sources since he is challenging the conventional thinking on Harding. I’m surprised and disappointed that he did not draw more from his memories and conversations in Marion, OH. This is a good book for high school or college students writing a report or paper on Harding. It is also valuable as a first book for anyone planning to read several Harding biographies as this author does a good job analyzing them. However, someone wanting one comprehensive and detailed book about Warren Harding should look elsewhere.

I have been reading and studying history since I was 7 years old, and earned a Master's Degree in European History. After reading Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, The Teapot Dome Scandal by Alton McCartney and sections of more general histories devoted to the topic, I felt reasonably well-informed about President Warren G. Harding and the Harding Administration. All the sources I read agreed that Harding was a weak, lazy, ignorant, mediocrity of a politician, a creature of his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, a hapless victim of his crooked Ohio friends, and a serial adulterer. In other words, I knew the same things everybody knew about Harding. The trouble is, it turns out that practically all of what “everybody knows” about Harding is false. In a new biography, Warren G. Harding: The American Presidents Series: The 29th President, 1921-1923, based on research of an enormous cache of Harding’s papers, author and former Nixon White House attorney John Dean convincingly demonstrates that the Warren G. Harding in our history books is a caricature of the real man, drawn from a farrago of unreliable memoirs by convicted criminals (Daugherty, etc.,) con men (Gaston Means, among others,) and irresponsible, hostile journalists (among whom the most prominent was H.L. Mencken.,) and published after Harding’s death in 1923, when he could no longer defend himself. In the words of Randolph Downes, author of the 1967 article “The Harding Muckfest” (Northwest Ohio Quarterly,), “It is high time for a painstakingly honest and scholarly appraisal of the life of Warren G. Harding…” adding, “The contemptuous and degrading things said about Harding…[are] poisoning the wells of American history…with false learning that is worse than ignorance.” Harding is remembered as a crook, because of the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal (despite the fact that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing on his part,) an adulterer who supposedly had sex with his mistress in the Oval Office and fathered a bastard child (according to Nan Britton’s book, The President’s Daughter, who never provided any evidence to support her claims,) and an empty suit of clothes raised to the Presidency by the political genius of Harry Daugherty (in his self-serving and unreliable The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy.) On the other hand, Harding’s real accomplishments are usually ignored or credited to others. The best-known achievement of the Harding Administration, the successful Washington Naval Conference and Treaty of 1921, invariably gives all the credit to this pioneering arms-reduction treaty to Charles Evans Hughes, Harding’s Secretary of State, while Harding’s contribution himself is barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. This is despite the fact that Hughes publicly acknowledged that Harding deserved at least as much credit as himself for the Treaty. In recent years, scholars have begun to clear the name of another President who has deserved a far better treatment from history than he has gotten, Ulysses S. Grant. Perhaps John Dean’s biography will spur historians to the task of restoring the reputation of the 29th President of the United States, Warren Gamaliel Harding.

For 2015, I made it a point that I would go back and review the 1920s....entirely. So I've gone through eight books so far. This piece by John Dean, put emphasis on the catalyst for the period and lays out a wide path of information. I admit, it is a short historical piece over Harding....mostly because there hasn't been a large assortment of historians digging into his entire career. As for the slant of the book? I'd say that Dean gives Harding a very long review. Harding has screw-ups....Harding stumbles on a few occasions....Harding delivers brilliant moves on a handful of occasions....and Harding is demonstrated to be mostly a humble and honest guy. The label given to his administration? You can draw it down to around six people around him who he felt were 'safe' and trustworthy.....and they should have been fired and sent off to jail. The story of the illicit child? Dean puts this into prospective and you come to realize that this story which gets repeated often.....was entirely bogus. If there was a negative about the book, it's the short nature of it. You can probably read the book in about seven days and I will say that it's well-written. I would recommend to anyone who needs to fill in their knowledge of the 1920s.....Harding is one of the dozen-odd characters that you need to grasp and understand....if you want the 'big-picture' of the period.

Book was received promptly and was as described

Easy to read, and incredible insights from Harding's presidency. I cannot recommend this book much more. Is a shame how personal opinions can go before fact and evidence. Dean did a masterpiece.

Good book on President Harding during his presidency but doesn't give enough information about his early years. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack about 18 months into his presidency and his administration is noted for several scandals including the Teapot Dome scandal.

Provides a very different view on the life of President Harding. Well researched, but not a long book.

very informative