THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: HOW BIG OIL BOUGHT THE HARDING WHITE HOUSE AND TRIED TO STEAL THE COUNTRY, by Laton McCartney, Random House, 351 pages, $27
It has been a half-century since the last book-length study was written of the Teapot Dome scandal that symbolized the massive corruption of the administration of Republican President Warren G. Harding. The author, an experienced financial and political writer, seems a good choice for the task, especially in light of the discovery of new documents from the Harding years.
For some time, historians have routinely grouped Harding with U.S. Grant and Richard M. Nixon as the most corrupt presidents in American history. Although Teapot Dome is a familiar name most students of history have heard often, many cannot explain how it related to the downfall of Harding and his Ohio cronies.
In a strong revisionist account, McCartney asserts that "Big Oil handpicked Harding" to serve as the 23rd U.S. president, then proceeded to use him to line its own pockets. The author calls Harding's Cabinet "the oil cabinet," and he implies that the Bush administration will eventually be proved to be "the oil and gas administration."
After the oil companies provided the majority of the funding for Harding's election, they presented him with "a wish list" of what they expected in return: drilling rights to naval oil reserves in California and Wyoming. In exchange, oil executives paid off senior government officials, bribed newspaper publishers and paid off the remaining Republican campaign debt.
Secret deals were made between Harry Sinclair, the president of Sinclair Oil, and Albert Fall, Harding's secretary of the interior. Previous histories have alleged that Harding was victimized by his Cabinet members, and to be kind to Harding, most analysts have assumed that the president was a victim.
But new documentation assembled by McCartney claims that Harding himself pressured Sinclair to make his payoff — and it was also Harding who demanded that The Washington Post "let up on that oil business in Wyoming."
The author also alleges that before Albert Fall resigned from the Cabinet in 1923, he "ever so quietly gave Sinclair a five-year renewable contract to buy all the so-called royalty oil from the Teapot fields that had originally been given the U.S. Shipping Board." This amounted to about 2 million barrels of oil a year, and the profit more than made up for whatever Sinclair had paid anyone.
Allegedly, Harding knew about this, too. In 1922, he wrote Fall, saying, "I have no concern about Wyoming oil matters. I am confident you have adopted the correct policy and will carry it through in a way altogether to be approved."
Historians who thought they would have to wait until 2020 to get access to the rest of the Harding documents will be surprised and somewhat skeptical that this writer has found "the smoking gun," but if it is borne out by others, Harding will no longer be seen as a victim but instead be branded as personally corrupt.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com