The Strange Death of President Harding

by Gaston B. Means

This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

Genres: Presidents

314 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1930

Reviews

[Guera25]

What malarkey! But it's such gleeful, audacious malarkey that I don't care. The historical credibility of this supposed expose of President Harding's alleged murder at the hands of his vengeful, fanatical wife was discredited and repudiated after its publication, but if read as a work of fiction, it's gloriously entertaining. Presidential philandering! Love children! Seductive Lolitas seducing older men! A beleaguered President blackmailed by his own cabinet! A vindictive wife with dreams of assuming the reins of power! Shady government ops! That anyone could have believed this patent load of codswallop astounds. It's pure dime-novel pap, panting and cliched and almost feverish in its enumeration of its endless twists.

The syntax is terrible; I've never seen so many inexplicable emphatic dashes, and sometimes, they were even used in place of commas for no discernible reason. Truly confusing and godawful. I can hardly credit the claim that the writer was a journalist. If so, she was a poorly-educated hack who must've used the pages of her copy of Strunk and White in the privy.

[Richard Elam]

The book reads like historical fiction but without knowing the historical backstory of Harding’s presidency how is one to know fact from fiction? I read this believing that what was said was true.

[David Corleto-Bales]

Back in 1930, an unscrupulous private investigator named Gaston Means, (just out of the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for various offenses) wrote this book that cast doubt on the "official" version of President Harding's sudden 1923 death. Means was used as an investigator and henchman by Harding's wife Florence and by the president to hide some of his more unsavory habits, (his mistress Nan Britton, for example, who was smuggled in and out of the White House) and numerous other questionable things that smeared the Harding Administration with a veneer of corruption. The book was explosive when it came out, although the basic story has absolutely no corroboration whatsoever. President Harding was under enormous pressure due to scandals in his administration and had gone on a long western trip in the summer of 1923, succumbing to a heart attack in San Francisco. Means supposed that he had been poisoned, possibly by enemies, possibly by Mrs. Harding to "save his reputation" before they destroyed his presidency. Neither theory has ever come close to being proved, but it is a fascinating book about a mostly forgotten president.