Warren Harding
Warren Harding was the 29th president of the United States and possibly its most unpopular president to date, ranking last in polls held in 1948 and 1962. Harding was only in office for two years between 1921 and 1923, before he died of a heart attack. In that time the president oversaw an administration packed with his often incompetent dishonest and cronies who accepted bribes, culminating in the Teapot Dome Scandal. Even Harding realized that he did not make the grade. “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here,” he once admitted
All this incompetence may have been averted if people had learned that Harding was not only incompetent but also adulterous. For until 1920, Harding had been cheating on his wife, Florence for fifteen years with a woman called Carrie Fulton Philips. The discovery of the affair would have ruined Harding’s political career as well as his reputation. However, Harding was very competent at subterfuge. The affair was mostly hidden, with letters from the couple only discovered in 1963. Those love letters were also written with extreme care as Harding employed a kind of code to communicate his sexual desires to his mistress.
The letters, written between 1910 and 1920, are at once romantic and carnal. “I hurt with the insatiate longing until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips, ” Harding wrote in one letter dated September 15, 1913, continuing that he also longed to bury himself in Carrie’s pillowing breasts’. However, to fully express his sexual desires, Harding employed euphemisms for his and Carries’ genitals. Harding referred to his penis as “Jerry’, while Carrie’s vagina was “Mrs. Pouterson.”
“Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry,” Harding wrote in one letter “Wonderful spot.” In the September 1913 letter, he describes how aroused Harding he is. “Jerry came and will not go.” he wrote, “says he loves you. …..I fear you would find a fierce enthusiast today.” As the affair began to flag, Harding reproved his mistress for her growing disinterest by reminding her that “When I saw Mrs. Pouterson a month ago, she persuaded me you still loved. I had a really happy day with her.” The couple parted in 1920 as Harding began to prepare to run for the presidency, buying Carrie’s silence with a handsome stipend.
Harding’s love letters aren’t the only ones available publicly belonging to politicians.