From the bbc.com, September 14: The illegitimate grandson of Warren G. Harding seeks to exhume the ex-President’s remains to establish further his claim to Harding’s “legacy” by virtue of his being a descendant of the President and his assignee, Nan Britton.
My grandson wants to exhume me. I hear he wants to be acknowledged as part of my legacy. Well, if the kid really wants a piece of my legacy, he ought to look before he digs.
To start with, I’m generally regarded as one of our worst Presidents. In all fairness to me, though, I was a mediocre Governor and a back-bench Senator, so what were people expecting? Teddy Roosevelt?
Also, and I know this is a little selfish, butI enjoy being dead. I was having a few with Pierce and Filmore a while ago – boy, Pierce can toss ‘em back! -- and we were discussing which of the three of us was the worst, since there’s no sense discussing which of us was best. But then, Buchanan ambles over – we Presidents have our own little section – and we all had to defer. We demeaned our country – Buchanan broke it. We all felt proud we weren’t him.
The whole fracas is about my love child – excuse me, my other love children’s half-brother. So what? Presidents breed outside the stable as often as they write Memoirs. Washington sent General Nathaniel Greene off to fight in the field so his wife, Kitty, could be Bathsheba to his David. And Jefferson! The man thought rape was on par with horseback riding while drunk. Sally Hemmings was only 14 when he took her to Paris. He fathered her six kids, and I doubt she ever looked at him adoringly and said, “Gee, Tom, can’t we have another?” Still, six kids out of Jefferson impresses me, since anyone with Jefferson’s full-blown OCD would have had trouble getting past the sink on his way to bed. (Think about it; he wrote down the temperature every day for twenty years. In Ohio, we call those guys “hermits.”)
William Henry Harrison, the one-month President, and John Tyler, his 47-month successor, both saw chattel slavery as an early version of The Bachelor and a prequel to Bringing Up Baby. (But don’t ask about their statues.) Pleasuring Nan in a White House coat closet looks like dinner at Delmonico’s compared to that. Grover Cleveland was the County Sheriff when he assaulted a local woman in her room and knocked her up, then shanghaied her to a local lunatic asylum and had her declared insane. Somewhere, one of his descendants has a shovel ready.
Then there are the First Bastards we don’t know about. Yet. Kennedy did half the Wellesley student body on his desk, giving new meaning to the word Resolute. I wish I had college interns. Clinton did, but practiced birth control, of a sort. And then there’s the rumor Trump had a baby with his housekeeper, but I think that’s just like those stories about George Bush the Kid doing cocaine in his rough and rowdy days -- sleazy, unfounded, and probably true.
If the kid wants the legacy of my escapades with Nan, he’s welcome to them. Like they‘d say today, we “met cute.” I was on a streetcar in Marion, Ohio, my hometown, back in ‘12, and I ran into Sam Britton, my doctor. He tells me his seventeen-year-old daughter, Nan, had my campaign posters all over her room, like I was a doughy David Hasselhoff. Smitten was the word he used, meaning “a likely prospect.”
I told him, “Send her over to my office and I’ll tell her to forget about me and go out and meet the man of her dreams.” She did, both. Given the difficult logistics of carrying on with a high school girl in her parents’ house, I had the decency to wait until she graduated. She moved to New York to find secretarial work and it was there I introduced her to my friend Jerry. We ended up in more hotel rooms than the Gideon Bible.
When I became President, she’d drop by the White House for a turn – not enough room for a roll -- in an out-of-they-way five foot coat closet. The secret service stood by the door and would knock if Mrs. Harding walked by. Who says romance is dead? On the plus side of my legacy, I was fifty-five years old and still capable of a knee-buckler. Kennedy couldn’t, even with steroids.
I felt badly about the Nan business, though, because it was unfair to the woman I loved. Unfortunately, that woman wasn’t my wife. Mrs Harding -- Florence -- was wealthy, divorced, older than me, and not very interested in animal husbandry, so in that respect Washington, a very good President, and I had something in common. I was the publisher of the Marion newspaper and she turned it into a thriving business. While she did, I did my own thriving business, first with her childhood best friend for three years and one baby (not the one with the showgirl, that was different) before moving on to Florence’s best friend in adult life, a good-looking flapper named Carrie Phillips.
Oh, Carrie! Those were fifteen wonderful years. The Phillipses and Hardings even travelled the world together as a foursome. Can you imagine? What a vacation! I passed through the port of entry more often than her steamer trunk did. When we went our separate ways, the Republican National Committee gave her a considerable monthly stipend in exchange for her silence. I might not have been a good President, but I am proud to be the father of this venerable Presidential tradition.
My grandson would do better to discuss my legacy with his cardiologist. I’d been showing
signs of congestive heart failure for years, and all this thump and bump ended up contributing to my demise of a heart attack at fifty-seven. Some people think Florence poisoned me, but they can only point to two pieces of circumstantial evidence: first, she had me embalmed an hour after I croaked; and, second, everything I’ve written here up until this sentence.
So, if my grandson wants to be part of my legacy, he’s welcome to it. I’m buried back in Marion, Ohio. Come and get me, kid. Your Mom was the product of the 29th President’s affair with a woman thirty-five years his junior.
Let’s see Pierce and Filmore match that.
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