John W. Dean (1) (1938–)

When I was a lad, perched on the wall there was a chart of the ratings of Presidential greatness. The two failures were Presidents Grant and Harding; their administrations were plagued by scandal. I've noticed latterly that the historians' scorn has this century tended more toward policy failures (e.g., Andrew Johnson, Buchanan, Pierce) than those beset by scandal, though I don't know whether Grant and Harding have actually escaped the category. I had assumed that the series' editors assigned John Dean to the Harding project because of his association with Watergate, which, along with Harding's Teapot Dome, ranks as the twentieth century's great political scandal, but it transpires that Dean hails from Harding's hometown and is a Harding hobbyist.

Dean has drawn a fascinating subject; Harding, both in life and death, has attracted an impressive vapor trail of calumny, some true, some dubious, some extremely dubious. He has managed to be credited with, inter alia, Afro-American ancestry, fathering an illegitimate child, having carnal relations with his mistress in a White House closet, and being poisoned by his wife. Dean gives us a full-throated apologia for the man. He credits almost none of the tittle-tattle and sets out a case that Harding was, if not quite great in his conduct of office, at the least a well-meaning, hard-working man who wanted to do well and often succeeded. To his credit, Dean does document Harding's fall from grace in the years after his death in great detail in a longish coda which takes up about an eighth of the book. He makes his case pretty well, and it's a voice which deserves to be heard. The problem is that this is, at bottom, a hagiography.. Some of the villains he excoriates were doubtless malevolent fast-buck artists, but their ranks also include many extremely reputable writers and thinkers. I ended up convinced that Harding meant well and to take most of the folklore surrounding him with a grain of salt. I'm not so sure that he had greatness within him, far less that he achieved it in the presidency.… (more)