The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War

Warren Harding's philandering while in the White House has already been documented, but Cleveland litigator Robenalt reveals an earlier, perhaps more unwise love affair by the Ohio politician and then U.S. senator. More than 100 love letters reveal Harding's jealous affair with Carrie Phillips—an alleged German spy—between 1905 and 1917. As Harding's political career rose, so too did his proximity to America's eventual Great War adversaries as Phillips's extended family was tried for espionage and suspicions alighted on her. This dangerous liaison illuminates a public figure at his most intimate, human and vulnerable, jealously begging for fidelity from his mistress even as he debated in letters her vocal pro-German stance and publicly addressed the nation to decry Germany's “contempt for neutral rights and horrifying disregard of the rights of humanity.” The richness of previously sealed, highly personal correspondence compensates for Robenalt's abrupt meandering between the history of Harding's affair and that of the espionage trial of Phillips's in-law, Baroness Iona Zollner. However, Robenalt fails to frame the Harding affair as one with political or historical repercussions. (Sept.)