The Strange Deaths of President Harding

by Robert H. Ferrell

Examines the attacks and unsubstantiated claims surrounding Harding after his death, and examines the mystery of his death

203 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Robert Hugh Ferrell was an American historian and author of several books on Harry S. Truman and the diplomatic history of the United States. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during the Second World War and was an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. He received a B.S. in Education from Bowling Green State University in 1946 and a PhD from Yale University in 1951, where he worked under the direction of Samuel Flagg Bemis and his dissertation won the John Addison Porter Prize. He went on to win the 1952 Beer Prize for his first book, Peace In Their Time, a study of the making of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

He taught for many years at Indiana University in Bloomington, starting as an Assistant Professor in 1953 and rising to Distinguished Professor of History in 1974. He has held several notable visiting professorships, including Yale University in 1955 and the Naval War College in 1974.

Reviews

[Michael]

This book was reasonably interesting. It debunked many of the myths about Warren Harding. However, being written in the 1990s, it was before DNA testing confirmed that Nan Britton's child was in fact Warren Harding's biological child. The book is well researched, however at certain points it was somewhat dry reading.

[John Ryan]

While Harding book are not award winning, this one was dry and slow moving with little new information. As short as the last book covered the president’s death, this one took forever. I was pleased when he finally died!

Again the book highlighted the relationship with Ms. Britton including how Harding would send $300-400 in cash in a single letter to her. One has to wonder where that money came from! This book shows that Ms. Britton was really a pitiful woman, threatening the dead president’s family that she needed money from them or she would have to turn to his friends. She ended up turning to W.B. Conkey Company of Hammond, Indiana and having her book published. It sold well.
The book also outlined how Carrie Phillips got a free trip from the president to the Orient. It’s said that the affair started when Harding’s friend, Jim Phillips, was ill in the Battle Creek Sanitarium and Mrs. Harding was in a Columbus hospital for a kidney problem. He then met her at home, in NYC, and in Europe, including a trip with the two couples!

The letters between the two of them were embarrassing and held back by the family. They were released in 1964 then held up by the family until recent. I remember reading the book based on the letters, a book held up in court for years.

The author points out that it was a pamphlet by College of Wooster professor William Estabrook Chancellor who claimed that Harding possessed Negro blood.

[Rick]

I recall liking it.

[Anson Cassel Mills]

Robert H. Ferrell (1921-2018) was a long-time history professor at Indiana University who wrote more than sixty books, mostly about American diplomacy, American presidents, and World War I. He was already an expert on the life Harry Truman when, in 1983, a trove of letters between Truman and his wife became available. Ferrell chose several hundred of these letters and provided an explanatory text for Dear Bess, which became a best-seller.

In The Strange Deaths of President Harding, Ferrell takes a revisionist stance about the 29th president, not arguing that he was a great, or even a near great, president, but making a cogent case that there is no sound reason why Harding should be relegated to the bottom of every ranking of U.S. presidents. Ferrell argues that Harding’s death from a heart attack seems certain, that he was not poisoned, that there was no conclusive proof he had fathered an illegitimate child, and that he had little knowledge about the scandals of his appointees, which were largely revealed after his death and not all that scandalous anyway.

Since 2015, we have known through DNA evidence that Harding did father a daughter by one of his mistresses. But otherwise, Ferrell’s commentary on the end of Harding’s presidency and the origin of his abysmal postmortem reputation remains sound. Harding’s character could hardly have been portrayed more negatively if all his personal enemies had collaborated in choosing his 20th-century biographers. (For what it’s worth, since the publication of Ferrell’s book, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce have begun to edge out Harding for the bottom of the historiographical barrel—correctly in my view.)

[Fred Kohn]

I suppose it says plenty that reading about what happened in the aftermath of Harding's death is a lot more interesting than reading about his life. Pretty informative book, but I cannot rate it higher because it is badly written and the author's biases are too obvious.