His tone changed into one of severe criticism with his next remark.
"Wilson's a plain damned fool!" he muttered, as to himself, still perusing the front-page headlines.
I meekly acquiesced in Mr. Harding's view that the world was "in a bad way" and that Wilson was "a plain damned fool." "But, sweetheart," I reminded him, "wait until the next election, when you will be President!" He smiled indulgently and leaned over the table, head bent to one side in the appealing pose he sometimes affected when he made love to me.
"If I'm President, Nan, I'll make you White House stenographer!" were his exact words. "A President can do just about as he pleases, you know!" he added, smiling.
I recalled vividly that statement three years later when I visited him at the White House and heard from his very lips, lips that were set in grim determination to bear up at any cost, that "the White House was a veritable prison," and that he could not even retire to the privacy of his toilet without being guarded—"shadowed" as he termed it.
"I'm in jail, Nan!" he would say in a broken voice, shaking his head sadly, "and I can't get out; I've got to stay," and he would lift his hands in a gesture of futility. No, Warren Harding did not like being President of the United States, as I am sure no man with real American blood and a love of life and fair play and freedom would or could like it. What a pity the highest honor a great republic can bestow upon a loyal citizen should be one which saps that citizen's vitality, and makes impossible the achievement of certain ideals through breaking him down physically! And, in my humble opinion, the "system" of American politics is wholly responsible for these hellish conditions. No, Warren Harding did not like being President. Six months after he went into the White House he was a broken man. The seven million majority of votes cast for him by the American people was his death sentence. And I, too, cast my vote for him!
