AP President Warren Gamaliel Harding, who died in the middle of his term, was a passionate lover if his letters are any indication. Could we find geopolitical inspiration today from a dead president who called his penis "Jerry"?
The foreign affairs question could surface (inadvertently) Tuesday when the Library of Congress unveils a treasure trove from a domestic affair: the 15-year extramarital dalliance of President Warren G. Harding and Carrie Phillips, who was possibly a German agent during World War 1.
"He presciently writes that it was not our job to change governments," James Robenalt, a Cleveland lawyer-author who originally found the letters and published discreet parts of some of them.
But, Robenalt conceded, the more salacious elements of the letters are already the prime focus of attention. It's clear that young women, especially, are flabbergasted with Harding's passionate prose since some letters have already gone viral.
"Jerry sends Christmas greetings! He would come too, if I might: would he be welcomed cordially?" he wrote her in a letter to be formally disclosed Tuesday and one of several that Robenalt passed along to The Daily News.
That one was part of "A Christmas Eve" note sent sometime in December 1918. It made clear that they'd fallen for one another in 1905 and consummated the love three years later. He was president between 1921 and 1923 before collapsing and dying, with history not treating his tenure very positively.
Robenalt stumbled into a bootleg copy of the letters via a relative of his a decade ago and presented sections in a 2009 book quite favorable to the late president, "The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War."
JIM ROBENALT / THE WESTERN RESERVE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Harding wrote about matters of state, including why he thought the U.S. should enter WWI, as well as 'Mount Jerry,' a nickname for his penis. The actual letters, many on U.S. Senate stationery, will be made public since the 50-year limit expires on a family agreement to keep them secret. They've gotten a lot of play of late, almost as if Robenalt's book didn't exist, especially after a more vivid presentation than his own that was in the New York Times.
"I love your poise Of perfect thighs When they hold me in paradise," he writes. "I love you garb'd But naked more. "I love you when You open eyes And mouth and arms And cradling thighs."
"Wouldn't you like to get sopping wet out on Superior---not the lake---for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn't you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know?"
"Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry. Wonderful spot."
Harding was a Marion, Ohio newspaper editor when he and Phillips, who was married to a Harding neighbor and good friend, met for the first time. He was later elected to the U.S. Senate from political potent Ohio (which had 24 electoral votes by the time he was elected president, compared to six for Florida and 13 for California).
The letters between the two, both of whom were married, came Robenalt's way amid a Keystone Cops attempt to keep them under wraps, he said. Finally, the family cut the 1974 deal with the government, not having realized that the originals had been copied and might get into somebody's hands before Tuesday's disclosures.
JIM ROBENALT / THE WESTERN RESERVE HISTORICAL SOCIETY President Warren Harding's letters to his mistress Carrie Fulton Phillips were released by the Library of Congress Tuesday. Politically, Robenalt thinks they are suggestive in positive ways, especially given comments Harding makes during his U.S. Senate tenure between 1915 and 1921 (the Harding-Phillips relationship would end before he became president, but not before she extorted him for substantial sums of money to keep their silence).
Phillips was among those urging him to come out against U.S. involvement in World War 1. But he declined and called for us to go to war against Germany but not, like President Woodrow Wilson, because he had any notion we could make the world safe for democracy.
"He wisely and presciently said it's not our job to change their government. Germany was not ready for democracy," argues Robenalt. "And we see that today in Iraq. Harding gave us an important lesson."
Robenalt also makes a case that the letters show that Phillips was spying, a contention that some have disputed, and that she talked Harding out of running for president in 1916, when Wilson vanquished New York Republican Charles Hughes.
"He clearly would have beaten Wilson and, if he had, we would not have gotten into the war. Or, if we had, Harding would not have negotiated the same peace," said Robenalt, whose Harding book includes a foreword by John Dean, the Watergate figure and a good friend.
But one thing is clear, especially in an age of email and 140-character Tweets. Men don't write notes very often like these, even when there is a genuine love as there was between the two.
Jim Robenalt / The Western Reserve Historical Society The letters, which were mainly written between 1910 and 1920, were kept first by the President's mistress and later by her daughter. Among those notes that have not previously been publicized is one written by Harding in 1913 while he was in Marion, Ohio, and she was in Berlin. It reveals both a sense of humor and lovely view of the nature of love (not to mention use of the word "propinquity):"
There, I have replied to your note and answered every suggestion therein, save one, which I reserved for the last. You wonder about genuine love, and say it doesn't require propinquity to keep it aflame. Perhaps not, but you will agree some day that propinquity will work wonders. I am not sure whether you were questioning the genuineness of my love or not.
Of course I may be mistaken about it myself, but if I am fooled, no man ever truly loved. I have studied it a lot and scrutinized myself. If it isn't love, it is an alarming case of permanent infatuation. When a man can think of no one else, worship nothing else and craves nothing else than the one woman he adores, though he hasn't seen her in nine or ten months, and she is four thousand miles away, and can't possibly be possessed, it seems more than infatuation.
I often wish it were less, I am so obsessed, but a maturer reflection convinces me that it is really big to know such a love, and then I am content. When a man loves with all his thoughts, loves as he walks, loves in his daily business, loves as he reads, loves at his work and loves at his play, when every song [to insistent] of his lips some way, intimately or remotely, is associated with that one beloved, he is very much in love, and it must be the real thing. I grant you have reason to think I yield to the sex call. I do.
I am ever wanting to kiss and fondle, to embrace and caress, to adore and possess. I can't help it. That is not spiritual, I grant, but very real. It may be only a symptom of the greater love, or it may be a factor in the greater love's awakening. I do not know. But this I do know, my greater admiration, adoration, and worship has been inseparable from this experience. And it all endures.
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