Jason Roberts
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 15 Jun
Jason Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, definitely in many dimensions. I do think he's more complicated than people realize. And while I think the scandals are relevant and the scandals did happen, I think they overshadow other aspects of Warren G. Harding's presidency. And while I would not put him on Mount Rushmore by any means, I think he did have his fair share of accomplishments.
that I think don't always get the coverage they deserve.
Psychologically, I mean, I'd say in terms of like his personality, this is actually someone I think who was really perfectly designed for American politics. If you were going to pick someone and say who would make the perfect politician, who would make the perfect candidate, I think Harding would be near the top of the list.
I think as far as politicians go, he is one of the most skilled politicians we've ever had as president. And really one of the keys to his success was his personality. This was someone who was, if you met him, he was very warm. He was very likable. He was extroverted. people liked him because they knew he liked him. So men would meet him and they'd say like, this is a great guy. He's cool.
I can golf with him. I can drink with him. I can smoke cigars with him. And women would meet him and like, wow, this guy, he's so good looking and he's so charming. So on a personal level, I mean, he was very successful at relating to people, getting people to like him. I think that's one thing that stood out about him. And he was also a very caring person, a very humane person.
So he was known for helping others, giving money to charity. When he ran his newspaper, the Marion Star, he never fired any of his employees. He paid them well. And the newsboys, as they were called, you know, when they're interviewed later. They all loved Warren G. Harding.
Well, I think the cabinet is, I think it's a little more complicated than people realize. So I think too often historians and others focus on, you know, the bad appointments he made in the cabinet. So that, you know, Albert Fall at the Interior Department, Harry Daugherty at the Justice Department, and then you have Charles Forbes.
It's not really a cabinet office, but Charles Forbes at the Veterans Bureau. So there were these bad appointments. But actually he had a number of great appointments in the cabinet. Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State did a phenomenal job for Harding in foreign policy.
The star of the cabinet was Herbert Hoover at Commerce, who ironically he was seen as like the activist in the Harding administration. So a number of the appointments were very solid. I think often don't get the credit that they deserve and they're kind of overshadowed by the bad ones.
Yeah, the letters had been known about between Carrie Phillips and Warren G. Harding going back to the 1960s, though they weren't fully published. published until I think 2014, 2015 by the Library of Congress. And so now you can go to their website and all the letters are there. And usually what gets a lot of play is the graphic nature of the letters.
He's very explicit about their sex life, their sexual activities. He had a nickname for his private part. He called it Jerry. So that gets a lot of play. But I think maybe those graphic accounts get too much play, Because I do think that most likely she was the love of his life, that it wasn't just some like tawdry one night stand for him.
There's obviously the physical attraction, but I think he really did fall in love with her.
Yes. So she comes out with her book, The President's Daughter in 1927. And, you know, it's very sensationalistic. You know, there's a 30 year age gap. And She alleges that she would have these rendezvous with Harding in the White House closet and the Secret Service were used to pay child support. But there were historians over the decades who questioned her account.
And in fairness to those historians, what they focused on was we don't have hard, solid evidence, at least in the Carrie Phillips case, you have those letters. So there, you know, there was no doubt of an affair. So people said, you know, you basically have Nan Britton's word. You know, where's the letters? Though there's evidence that Hardy may have told her to destroy letters.
So some people said maybe she made it up. Maybe she knew about the Carrie Phillips affair. And then she took that and kind of ran with it and said, oh, I had an affair. So that was one of the allegations against her to say that it wasn't true. And you did have Secret Service agents who said, we never met Nan Britton. She was never in the White House. We never paid child support to her.
So I think there were reasons to question her account of the affair. And certainly... I think John Dean of Watergate fame wrote a book about Warren G. Harding. He questioned her account. The prominent historian, Robert Farrell, who wrote about Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he questioned her account. Other historians questioned her account.
But ultimately, it's resolved in 2015 when the results of a DNA test come out. And the DNA test shows, as Mari Povich would have said, yes, Warren G. Harding, you are the father of Nan Britton's child. I mean, it's pretty clear that the DNA test is conclusive.
The only thing I would say about it is that I think there was an affair, obviously, but I do think it's possible that she exaggerated parts of the affair. So she may not have been telling the truth when she said she met him in the White House and she had a rendezvous in the White House closet because you do have Secret Service agents who were interviewed later and they said, we never saw her.
Yeah, he was good at kind of juggling his political career with these personal affairs. And I mean, no one knew about it until after he died. So it's kind of similar to John F. Kennedy. It's like, I think Harding might have been flattered by the fact that she was obsessed with him, apparently, when she was a schoolgirl. You know, she would write, like, I love Warren G. Harding in her textbook.
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