The Wall Street Journal-20080205-A Gusher of Trouble
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A Gusher of Trouble
Full Text (967 words)The Teapot Dome Scandal
By Laton McCartney
(Random House, 351 pages, $27)
'In the history of lovers, there was, I am sure, none to compare with Warren Gamaliel Harding," wrote his mistress, Nan Britton. By contrast, the mistress of Jake Hamon, the "Oil King of Oklahoma" whose largess had helped to secure for Harding the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, was far less devoted.
In Laton McCartney's bravura opening to "The Teapot Dome Scandal," Hamon -- whose ethics were encapsulated in his announcement, "All I want to do is make money, and I don't care much how I make it" -- gets plugged in the chest by Clara, the sexpot he is dumping. Jake the Snake is renouncing adultery in order to pass moral muster with Mrs. Harding and receive the plum appointment of secretary of the interior. From that post he intends to sell off the Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming. But Clara's aim is true, Jake dies, his dream cabinet job goes to the corruptible New Mexico Sen. Albert Fall, and scandal gushes forth.
Teapot Dome was a cozy name for the Wyoming oil field that, along with two California sites, was coveted by American oilers. They saw it, in Mr. McCartney's words, as "a bonanza so rich that it was almost beyond comprehension." The problem: The three sites were part of the Naval Petroleum Reserve -- government-owned land meant to keep the Navy's ships well-fueled.
Sen. Fall's solution: transfer the sites to the Interior Department, open them to commercial drilling, and lease them in sweetheart deals with oil titans Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair. For his services, Sen. Fall received hundreds of thousands of dollars in "loans" and Liberty Bonds. He bought a ranch and a one-way ticket to disgraceland.
Flacks at the Interior Department tried to prettify the leases as a federal "partnership with private capital," but Wisconsin Sen. Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette demanded an investigation, as did the scads of oil men who wondered why the Navy oil fields had not been bid out competitively.
When caught, Sen. Fall reverted to the national-defense defense: The leases were "a military matter," he said. Then, drinking heavily and lying through his teeth, he fell back upon the "too ill to testify" defense, which was also unavailing. Arkansas Sen. T.H. Caraway cracked: "I have known more robust constitutions to be ruined by criminal courts than all the plagues put together."
The scandal, with its latticework of bribes and payoffs, is as convoluted as a Raymond Chandler plot, but Mr. McCartney tells the twisted tale drolly. The details could be deadly dull if reported with the outraged earnestness implied in the book's overwrought subtitle ("How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country"). But you can't help liking an author who says that Denver Post owner H.H. Tammen "accumulated a little capital the old-fashioned way -- filching from the till."
The hero of Mr. McCartney's story -- Sen. Thomas Walsh (D., Mont.), who diligently investigated the Teapot Dome tempest -- is no match in the magnetism department for the rascals he pursued. The most colorful was Harry Sinclair, a Kansas pharmacist who "accidentally blew off a toe with a shotgun, got a $5,000 check from the insurance company, and used the stake to get into the oil business." In 1923, Sinclair won the Kentucky Derby with his horse Zev, but four years before he had lost $90,000 betting on the Black Sox in the World Series. (His bookie was Arnold Rothstein, the gangster who fixed the Series -- apparently without letting all his clients in on his plans.) A superb poker player, Sinclair was in the habit of forfeiting large sums at the table to politicians whose favors he desired. Lady Luck knows when to take a dive.
Even Albert Fall was more than a petty crook. He "had once disarmed the quick-triggered [outlaw] John Wesley Hardin in an El Paso saloon," writes Mr. McCartney. As a lawyer, Fall defended Jesse Wayne Brazel, the man accused of murdering Billy the Kid's killer, Pat Garrett, a onetime lawman. Sen. Fall was a hard man, probably a bad man, but he was not a bore.
Sinclair, the corrupt oil man, spent seven months in prison, smoking Cuban cigars and wearing silk pajamas (his fellow petro-mogul, Doheny, was acquitted of bribery charges). When a jailmate offered condolences, Sinclair replied: "Don't worry about that, young fellow! We all get bad breaks. My colors will still be flying when this thing is over." And fly they did. He lived in high style for the rest of his long life, unlike the pathetic Sen. Fall, who after nine months in the New Mexico State Prison was released to a grim future of penury and chronic illness. As for Clara, the dead-eye mistress: She was acquitted of murder and married a Hollywood director.
For all the pleasure of "The Teapot Dome Scandal," I do have one complaint: Mr. McCartney accepts the conventional view of Warren Harding as a bloviating Babbitt who chased (and usually caught) toothsome women and played poker with his cronies. This is only half the picture. Harding won in 1920 because Americans had tired of Woodrow Wilson's war, economic controls and Palmer Raids. Harding promised "normalcy," which is to say peace and prosperity, with a side order of graft and a dash of hypocrisy (in the form of Prohibition, which the boozehound Harding supported). His biographer Francis Russell described Harding as "jovial and indolent," but there is something to be said for men of splendid inaction and arrested ambition in the presidency. Peace, tax cuts, the freeing of political prisoners: Harding accomplished a fair bit between Martinis and assignations.
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Mr. Kauffman's latest book, "Ain't My America," will be published in April by Holt/Metropolitan.
