I have a good friend who is the great-grandnephew of president Harding. Not only does he claim that the president raised his grandfather to whom he is very close with, but also gets very offended when people talk about how bad of a president Warren G. was, and offers lots of evidence to the contrary. I’d like to stay neutral and get to the objective truth. Can someone please bring everything they have to the table to defend/destory President Warren G. Harding? Thanks
The Staff Report being referred to is Did President Harding’s wife catch him in the closet with a lover?
Wooglin, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards. It’s helpful to other readers if you provide a link to the Column or Staff Report you’re commenting on, helps keep us all on (roughly) the same page.
The Friends of Harding have a Website where they list Harding’s “accomplishments”; they are few and of dubious merit. Reading between the lines of the short biography they provide, one can see that Harding was a man of minor achievement, swept along by events and greatly dependent on his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge. Sound like anyone who’s been elected recently? 
I’d just like to point out there’s a typo in the column. Second paragraph, the first word is “Hhow”.
Carry on.
Wow. Re the accomplishments: Damned by faint praise.
Thanks, Irish… in the to-do list, to get corrected.
I don’t know about that… Anyone who likes waffles and gravy can’t be all bad.
I don’t recall reading much at all about Harding and Coolidge working together. I can’t imagine that those two men had much in common besides being Republicans.
Coolidge was a man who would be described as (borrowing from the Simpsons) a man “whose rod up his butt has a rod up its butt.”
Charles Evans Hughes and Andrew Mellon were the more powerful Cabinet members. At least among those who weren’t on the take.
John C. mentions that Carrie Phillips was paid $20,000 and sent on a world cruise to keep quiet about Mr. Harding and their affair. I have read that her cruise coincided with the Harding campaign and was financed at least in part by Albert D. Lasker.
Mr. Lasker has also been attributed to describing Harding as “a first rate second rate man.”