Underrated Harding gets his due

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

WARREN G. HARDING

By John W. Dean

Times Books, $20, 202 pages

REVIEWED BY MARTIN SIEFF

Warren Harding is the Rodney Dangerfield of American presidents: More than 80 years after his death he still can't get no respect.

Liberals hate Harding for burying their beloved League of Nations and succeeding their sainted Woodrow Wilson. They regard his presidency from 1920 to 1923 as the start of a dark age of repression and reaction when ordinary Americans were ground into the dust.

Prudish conservatives turn up their noses at his Clintonesque philandering ways in the White House and the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration. Neoconservatives and liberals alike regard him as the epitome of isolationism and national selfishness.

It took a British conservative historian, Paul Johnson, to start the long-overdue rehabilitation of poor Harding in his influential work of two decades ago, "Modern Times." Now along comes another unlikely champion, John W. Dean, Richard Nixon's chief counsel through the Watergate scandal, to continue the job.