The Book of Bastards

by Brian Thornton

  In order to dodge her, Harding used to meet his “secretary” — a buxom, curvy blonde named Nan Britton — in the cloakroom that President Theodore Roosevelt had converted into the first phone booth in the White House. Apparently it was the only place in the entire mansion where the Duchess didn't think to look for Ol' Warren.

  BASTARD IN A CHINA SHOP

  Warren G. Harding once ran out of cash while playing cards in the White House and wound up gambling away all of the White House china in an attempt to reverse his losing streak! Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth later described the “ambiance” in Harding's Executive Mansion poker games as follows: “the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey, cards and poker chips ready at hand — a general atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and spittoons alongside.” Never mind the fact that these games took place during Prohibition: the booze the president and his cronies were drinking was illegal!

  Then the inevitable happened: Harding sired a child in the room. (Britton wrote about it several years after his death, in a book titled The President's Daughter.) Harding's handlers gave Britton $100,000 in hush money and sent her on a cruise around the world.

  Shortly before his death, Harding began to get wind of all of the grafting taking place. The potential for scandal began to worry him. While traveling west on a summer tour in 1923, Harding asked his secretary of commerce (and future president) Herbert Hoover for his two cents: “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?”

  Hoover, a very honest fellow, responded that in such a case he would expose the scandal. Harding never made up his mind what to do about it. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco later that same summer.

  54

  ALBERT FALL

  Teapot Dome and the Original “Fall” Guy (1861–1944)

  “I have no trouble with my enemies, I can take care of my enemies all right. But my friends, my goddamned friends, they're the ones who keep me walking the floor at nights!”

  — President Warren G. Harding

  Everyone knows the term “fall guy.” He's the person who will take the blame and consequences of someone else's criminal act, even if it's murder. This poor soul may not even know the criminal; he may simply be getting “framed” and is otherwise blameless. But where did the term originate? Meet the original “fall guy”: former Senator and Interior Secretary Albert Fall of New Mexico. He was a far-from-blameless man involved up to his eyebrows in one of the greatest bilking schemes of the twentieth century: the Teapot Dome scandal.

  Fall settled in New Mexico while it was still a territory, began to practice law there, and jumped feet first into local politics. Fall was a fixer, a guy who got deals done. He also represented and got off several notorious gunmen accused of murder, including one for the death of Fall's longtime political rival. Fall became a senator when New Mexico became a state in 1912. During his nine years in the Senate, Fall allied himself with Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding and his followers.

  Elected president in 1920, Harding appointed Fall secretary of the interior. Fall then persuaded Navy Secretary Edwin Denby that the Interior Department should manage the Navy's huge oil reserves inside the United States like Buena Vista, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Fall immediately leased these deposits for a ridiculously low price to two old friends from his early days in New Mexico: Henry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny. He didn't bother allowing for bids on the oil leases (a violation of federal law). In return Fall received a $100,000 cash “loan” (worth over $1 million today) from Doheny's son. Doheny immediately became the wealthiest man in the country.

  Too much money and too many people were involved in the swindle for it to remain a secret, and The Wall Street Journal broke the story about the “loans” to Fall on April 14, 1922. Sloppy before this story broke, Fall managed to cover his tracks afterward. By the time the Senate named a subcommittee to investigate, Fall had made everything look perfectly legal.

  BASTARDS BY ASSOCIATION

  Fall's co-conspirators Sinclair and Doheny hardly escaped the scandal scot-free. Sinclair tried to bribe the jurors in his trial and went to jail on a contempt charge. He wound up having to sell his Fifth Avenue French Renaissance-style mansion in New York City as a result. Doheny spent a fortune on a crack legal defense team and got off. To add insult to injury, he later foreclosed on Fall's New Mexico ranch for failure to repay the $100,000 “loan” with which he had been bribed. But Doheny paid too. On February 16, 1929, the son who had handed off the $100,000 bribe to Fall feared that federal investigators were closing in on him; he shot his best friend and manservant (who had also been present when Fall took the bribe), then turned his gun on himself.

  When Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh uncovered the “loan” Doheny's son had hand-delivered, Fall and Denby were quickly forced out of office. In 1927 the Supreme Court invalidated the original leases; by this time, however, millions of barrels of oil had been pumped out of these lands at an immense profit for Sullivan and Doheny. In 1929 Fall was convicted on bribery charges and spent a year in jail; he was the first cabinet-level government official in American history to do so. He died broke in El Paso, Texas, in 1944.

  55

  HUEY LONG

  The Kingfish (1893–1935)

  “No man has ever been President of the United States more than two terms. You know that; everyone knows that. But when I get in, I'm going to abolish the Electoral College, have universal suffrage, and I defy any sonofabitch to get me out under four terms.”

  — Huey Long

  Huey Long's picture ought to be next to the word “demagogue” in the dictionary. The irony is that Long didn't start out that way. He started out as just one more little guy trying to help other little guys.

  A middle child in a large Louisiana family, Long's elder siblings were able to go to college; by the time young Huey was of age to consider an higher education, however, the cost of college had skyrocketed. The luxury was well beyond his middleclass, farm-owning family's means, even though he'd won a scholarship that would have taken care of his tuition. Instead Long went to work as a traveling salesman, peddling everything from medicine to canned goods to books.

  During this time he discovered that he had the common touch. A born politician, Long had a way of ingratiating himself with people almost immediately.

  In the interim he attended college here and there, and after just one year at Tulane Law School he convinced the local bar association to allow him to take the bar exam. He passed it, and was admitted to the Louisiana Bar in 1915. He immediately went into private practice, mostly working for poor clients suing large companies.

  By 1922 Long had been elected chairman of Louisiana's Public Service Commission; representing that entity he sued Cumberland Telephone & Telegraph for price gouging. He won, and forced a settlement that called for CT&T to reimburse over 80,000 of its ratepayers a total of nearly $440,000. This made him quite popular with the poor and middle class, and Long ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1924.

  He ran again in 1928 with the campaign slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” As part of his program, Long promised voters services many of them had never envisioned before, including paved roads to replace the dirt ones that turned into red clay muck during the Gulf Coast's rainy season. This time he won.

  Long immediately set about redistributing Louisiana's wealth mostly at the expense of its oil companies. He taxed the big corporations at ever-higher rates and cut the taxes of what he called “the rest of us.” All the while he increased services for the poor, including supplying free textbooks to schoolchildren and state-sponsored night adult literacy courses. This cemented Long's power-base with lower and lower– middle class voters.

  And the people loved him as much as his growing list of enemies among the rich and intellectuals loathed him. But at some point fo
r Long it became about power, and not about the people he served.

  After two years as governor, Long ran for the U.S. Senate in 1930 without resigning his seat. He won, and was sworn in to the Senate in 1931, still without resigning his seat. Long held two posts for over a year: he was both the governor of Louisiana and the state's U.S. Senator. Not since John Marshall had served as both U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice had anyone done that.

  Long emerged as a critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt, announcing as early as 1934 that he intended to make a primary challenge of FDR in the 1936 election. He never got the chance. A doctor whom Long had smeared by claiming he had “coffee blood” (a euphemism for being mixed-race) shot Long dead in the Louisiana State Court House on September 8, 1935.

  “[Huey Long] is not a fascist, with a philosophy of the state and its function in expressing the individual. He is plain dictator. He rules, and opponents had better stay out of his way. He punishes all who thwart him with grim, relentless, efficient vengeance.”

  — Raymond Gram Swing in The Nation, January, 1935

  56

  HARY S. TRUMAN

  The “Senator from Pendergast” (1884–1972)

  “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whore-house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.”

  — Harry S. Truman

  The world knows President “Give 'Em Hell” Harry Truman for his blunt speech, forthright manner, and historic endeavors. He used an atomic bomb to end World War II, faced down the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War, integrated the U.S. Armed Services, and won reelection in the most stunning upset in American political history.

  He was also a machine politician connected throughout his career to one of the most corrupt “kingmakers” in American history.

  Truman had been a failure as a farmer and as a haberdasher. He seemed the most unlikely of political hacks, but he needed help to get into the game. So Truman called on Kansas City political machine boss Tom Pendergast. He backed Truman's run for the comparable position to a county commissioner's seat in eastern Missouri. Pendergast exerted his powerful influence on Truman's career for the next two decades, and helped the young man rise through the ranks. Though he rejected Truman's desire to run for Congress or the governorship at first, Pendergast got him elected as a U.S. Senator from Missouri in 1934. Truman won by a large margin, but had trouble getting meetings with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who airily dismissed the Missourian as “the Senator from Pendergast.”

  In spite of his reputation as a machine politician, Truman carefully built up his reputation for honesty. He let Pendergast choose the people Truman would appoint and support in government jobs (this was known as Truman's “patronage”), but made it clear that Pendergast never influenced his congressional votes. Keeping it that way wasn't easy. Political machines would sink hooks into politicians who could serve their interests. The poor chump would arrive at a hotel room for a “meeting” and find young women waiting for him. Whether or not any hanky-panky went on, if the sucker got caught, then the machine had leverage against him.

  BASTARD FUNERAL

  When Pendergast died on January 26, 1945, newly sworn-in Vice President Truman attended his funeral — the only elected official to do so. When asked by a reporter what he was doing there, Truman spoke with characteristic bluntness: “[Pendergast] was always my friend and I have always been his.”

  Truman never forgot this. He was a devoted family man and was never linked to any of the “other women” stories that so often crop up in the closets of prominent politicians. Late in life, Truman was asked how he was able to avoid even the hint of bad behavior in an age where politicians kept mistresses the way modern campaign managers keep opinion polls; Truman was as forthcoming as ever. The key, he said, was never to allow himself to be caught dead in a room alone with a woman not related to him. Not only would he walk out of a room in which a woman was alone, he made a point of getting up and walking out of any room into which a single woman was sent — even if he was to be there with other men. And it worked.

  Pendergast helped fix one too many elections, and in 1939 the newly elected Missouri governor (who owed his new office to Pendergast) threw the boss under the bus. Pendergast went to jail and his political machine was broken. Pendergast was finished as a machine politician, and he lived out the rest of his life in a quiet Kansas City suburb. Truman, so careful to keep clean and clear of the fray, was never even questioned about his relationship with Pendergast.

  57

  STROM THURMOND

  Racist in Public; “Integrationist” Behind Closed Doors (1902–2003)

  “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra [sic] race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

  — Strom Thurmond in a speech given while running for the presidency as a “Dixiecrat” in 1948

  Remember Thomas Jefferson, the great sage and enlightened thinker who secretly fathered several children with one of his slaves? Or Woodrow Wilson, the enlight-ened president who was also not so secretly a bigot?

  Well, meet James Strom Thurmond, a noxious combination of the two. The Southern racist supported segregation well into his sixties. And apparently Thurmond wanted to keep the races separate because he was afraid that more white people might do what he had done himself: have children with black people.

  Thurmond grew up in a family of well-to-do farmers in South Carolina. In 1925, shortly after he graduated college at Clemson, Thurmond fathered a daughter with the family's fifteen-year-old maid, Carrie “Tunch” Butler. The baby's name was Essie Mae Washington.

  Thurmond sent Essie to live with relatives of her mother in Pennsylvania, but she had no idea who her father was until the late 1940s, when her mother took her to secretly meet Thurmond in Washington, D.C. Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter. Instead he paid for Essie's upkeep and education. He put her through school and helped her become a teacher as he had briefly been before turning to politics. Thurmond and Essie met many times. She later recalled that she attempted to talk to him about his antediluvian views on segregation in Southern society on several occasions. Thurmond, the same man who owns the record for the length of a filibuster by a single senator (at just over twenty-four hours) while singlehandedly trying to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957, didn't have much of an answer. He brushed off her questions, saying that it wasn't personal.

  HEROIC BASTARD

  Like so many bastards before and since, Thurmond was an honest-to-goodness war hero. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was decorated for bravery a number of times. He received both the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart during his career, and he was honored for the day he landed at Normandy in a glider with other members of the 101st Airborne Division. He rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel before the end of the war.

  After all, Thurmond was the poster boy for segregation. He led a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats embittered by President Truman's racial integration of the U.S. Armed Forces after the war and Truman's attempts to rid the country of racially motivated “poll taxes.” Thurmond became the presidential candidate of these “Dixiecrats” — known officially as the States Rights Democratic Party — in the election of 1948. Thurmond received thirty-nine electoral votes and won four states, all of them in the Deep South.

  As the Democratic Party continued to become more liberal over the course of the twentieth century, Thurmond felt more and more out of step with the party. He crossed the aisle and joined the Republican Party in 1964. He served in the Senate continually from 1956 until shortly before his death in 2003. During that time he moderated his views on race, but never once acknowledged his biracial daughter Essie.

  Perhaps he didn't think the time was right. Perhaps he didn't think people would understand. Perhaps he fel
t he'd done the best he could.

  But surely the man who stormed ashore in Normandy on D-Day didn't fear public opinion. Thurmond lived to be one hundred. By the time he was in, say, his seventies, and his daughter in her fifties, he had made a career for himself several times over. What, really, was there left to fear?

  58

  ALLEN DULLES

  Defying the Popular Will (1893–1969)

  “From an early age [Dulles] set out to make people like him. Affability, he discovered, was a most useful character trait.”

  — Peter Grose

  The grandson, nephew, and brother of three different U.S. secretaries of state, Allen Dulles felt from an early age that he was born to make a difference. This former Wall Street lawyer and diplomat had starkly contrasting sides. He was, by turns, engaging and cruel; he was possessed of rock-solid moral certitude and a habitual womanizer. And as director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, he betrayed everything he supposedly stood for.

  At Dulles's behest, the CIA in the 1950s toppled two legitimate, democratically elected governments; coups d'état brought down and replaced Iranian Mohammed Mossadeq and Guatemalan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. And the most relevant question is “why?” Simple: the specter and threat of potential nationalization.

  Both Iran and Guatemala had long histories of serving as economic colonies of the West. In Iran's case the British Empire had exploited its vast oil reserves and paid the Iranian government a mere sixteen percent of the net profits it enjoyed.