[Source: historycentral.com]

Jeremy Kuzmarov

Covert Action Magazine

Evidence Suggests that First Lady Florence Harding Killed Her Husband, the 29^th President Warren G. Harding, A Century Ago Today to Protect His Reputation and Legacy.

On the night of August 2, 1923, exactly one hundred years ago, President Warren G. Harding, 57, suddenly fell ill and died at the opulent Palace hotel in San Francisco.

In most history books, the cause of Harding’s death is listed as a heart attack. But significant contemporary testimony—including that of the heir of the man who owned the San Francisco hotel where Harding died, says Harding should be added to the list of presidents who have been assassinated while in office, and that he was actually murdered—with the primary suspect being his wife Florence.^[1]

On the night Harding died, Florence was reading to her husband, who had been traveling on the West Coast after visiting Alaska.

When Warren suddenly stopped breathing, Florence screamed for doctors. After he was declared dead, the doctors kept switching the cause of death, first claiming that a blood vessel in Harding’s brain had burst, then saying he had died of a stroke, and then of a heart attack and gall bladder condition.

Florence ordered that no autopsy be performed and that Warren’s body be embalmed immediately.^[2]

Shortly before he died, Harding had been asking Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover’s advice on publicly exposing “a great scandal in our administration.”^[3] Hoover said that when he walked into Harding’s room, his doctor, Charles Sawyer was oddly lying on the bed next to his dead body.^[4]

When Janet Johnston, the granddaughter of the Palace Hotel’s founder, U.S. Senator William Sharon (R-NV) entered the Hardings’ room and saw that Warren was dead, Florence flew into a rage, claiming that the hotel’s food had killed her husband and that she was going to sue.

Janet, however, told Florence that the claim was ludicrous as no one else staying at the hotel suffered from any food-borne illnesses.

When Janet picked up a half-filled glass near President Harding’s bed, she found that it had a noxious odor and suspected that whatever was in the glass had something to do with his death.

Janet told Florence that she intended to have the contents of the glass analyzed, at which point Florence snatched the glass away and managed to pour whatever was in it down the drain. She then turned to Janet and said “there will be no lawsuit.””^[5]

[…]

The Duchess and “her Warren”

Florence was among the more popular First Ladies whose words were quoted in newspapers and magazines and whose image was displayed in newsreels.

A feminist who supported suffrage and championed the interests of the nation’s World War I veterans, Florence had opened the White House to visitors and encouraged women to exercise, play sports and be as physically fit as men.^[6] At the same time, she wrote and corrected her husband’s speeches and weighed in on his choices for important Cabinet posts.^[7]

Florence’s behavior on the night of her husband’s death was not out of character as she had a domineering nature and was fiercely loyal to “her Warren,” who called her “the Duchess.”

Gaston Means, a private investigator hired by Florence to look into her husband’s extramarital trysts, described Florience as a “woman of brains: cold, logical [and calculating]” with a “consuming thirst for power.” For years she was the financial head of the Harding household since Warren was a “child in business matters.”Possessing beautiful blue eyes and a delicate body with unusually large hands, Florence had worked tirelessly behind the scenes to place her husband “in the highest position in…the greatest nation of the world.”

She was “familiar with everything pertaining to governmental affairs to the last detail,” Means wrote. This included “every phase of state and diplomatic strategy.” As First Lady, Florence “continue[d] to be the central moving factor [in her husband’s political career]: the determining factor.”^[9]

What Kind of President Was Warren G. Harding?

A newspaper publisher from Marion, Ohio, Harding defeated his Democratic Party challenger, James Cox, in the 1920 presidential election, campaigning on a slogan of a “return to normalcy” after the tumult of World War I and the first Red Scare.

During a five year career in the U.S. Senate Harding introduced 134 bills of which 122 were local Ohio affairs, with the other 12 focusing on mundane matters like promoting celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims. The New York Times considered Harding to be the “firm and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the Senatorial cabal.”^[10]

As President, Harding reduced the federal debt and released political prisoners like Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who had been jailed for opposing U.S. entry into the Great War.

He also proposed a reduction in military spending, withdrew U.S. troops from Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and oversaw the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922 in which the world’s major powers agreed on a naval limitation program—albeit one that maintained strategic advantage for the U.S. and England vis-à-vis Japan, which expanded its program of militarization and regional colonization in response.^[11]

In 1923, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge confided to a friend that “Harding is very satisfactory to the financial interests.”^[12] His Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, “quashed prosecution of war profiteers and other spoilsmen of Wall Street and waged vigorous warfare against labor organizations” while the Commerce Department, under the direction of Herbert Hoover, was transformed into a “marketing agency for the big industries.”^[13]

Harding’s white supremacist outlook was apparent in his praise for Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) warned about the destruction of white society by invading non-white hordes.

As a precursor to modern day conservatives, Harding supported a harsh anti-immigrant bill mandating deportations and drastic income tax cuts (the top marginal rate was reduced from 75% in 1921 to 25% in 1925) based on the argument of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon^[14] that lower rates would increase tax revenues because, when income taxes were high, money was driven underground or abroad.

Libertarian historians credit these cuts with ushering in a dramatic period of economic growth, though many other historians blame Mellon’s economic approach for the sweeping inequality and economic volatility that produced the Great Crash of 1929 and the Depression.^[15]

An Administration Scarred with Shame and Corruption

When Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. polled historians to measure presidents’ standing in 1948 and 1962, Harding ranked dead last. Schlesinger concluded that Harding and Ulysses S. Grant were “morally obtuse” and conducted administrations “scarred with shame and corruption.”^[16]

According to historian Ferdinand Lundberg, Harding was a product of Mark Hanna’s Standard Oil machine in Ohio and his administration was “soaked in petroleum.”^[17]

The Ohio gang was a collection of powerful political figures and industrialists mainly from Ohio who held sway over Harding and pushed him to sign legislation that benefited the petroleum industry and made them rich.^[18] They were involved in an array of criminal schemes, including arranging for the sale of permits to people who wanted to withdraw liquor from bonded government warehouses and worked out illegal sales of government property.^[19]

A popular saying held that “everything was for sale in Washington during the Harding administration—except the dome of the Capitol.”^[20]

Just three months after his inauguration, Harding issued an executive order transferring the Navy’s oil reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior so they could be acquired by private companies.

The Ohio gang derived enormous profits from buying up oil company stocks. Hundreds of thousands of dollars derived from illicit financial dealings and graft were stored in secret vaults, as members of the gang “had daily banquets of the finest food and finest wines.”^[21]

The corruption in Harding’s administration was exemplified by the Teapot Dome scandal in which a Senate investigation led by Senators Thomas J. Walsh (D-MT) and Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) uncovered that Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies—Sinclair and Pan American Petroleum and Transport—at low rates without competitive bidding after taking $404,000 in bribes.^[22]

Government investigators and people linked to the scandal died suddenly before they were slated to testify. Harry Daugherty’s gopher, Jess Smith, was said to have shot himself with a pistol in Washington’s Wardman Hotel; however, nobody heard the shot, and Smith never fired a pistol in his life—he was mortally afraid to ever hold one.^[23]

Senator James Thomas Heflin said: “nobody knew what he [Smith] knew, and with him dead there was nobody to tell the story—so Jess Smith was murdered.”^[24]

Who Tipped Off The Wall Street Journal Publisher?

Clarence Walker Barron, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, seems to have had foreknowledge of Harding’s death–which would seem to corroborate that he had been poisoned.

During a bridge game at his home the night Harding died, Barron had his secretary phone his office until news came across the wire that Harding had a stomach ache from eating crab.

Barron then exclaimed: “That’s it! get me the vice-president [Calvin Coolidge]”–who was spending the evening with his father and one of Barron’s good friends.^[25]

Revelations of Gaston Means

Gaston Means was hired by Mrs. Harding to investigate Warren’s affair with a young woman named Nan Britton who alleged that Harding fathered her child—a claim that was validated by correspondence found 40 years after Harding’s death and recent DNA testing.^[26]

In 1930, with the assistance of a ghostwriter, May Dixon Thacker, Means published a book, The Strange Death of President Harding (New York: Guild Publishing Corporation, 1930), which suggested that Mrs. Harding had killed her husband to prevent his impeachment and protect his legacy, which would have been tarnished by revelations about his philandering and the deep corruption in his administration which was in the process of being exposed.^[27]

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Postscript: For weeks after Warren’s death, smoke could be seen rising from the White House chimney as Florence burned her now deceased president’s papers in order to protect him—a task that she continued after she returned to live on a farm in Marion, Ohio.^[37]

A year later, Florence died—like her husband under suspicious circumstances. Perhaps she too was a victim of the machinations of the Ohio gang, which either sought revenge on her or wanted to ensure that the truth of her husband’s death never got out.