This is a concise biography of the 29th president that follows the usual outline: an Ohio child becomes a respected newspaper publisher, state politician, and U.S. senator, then an admired president and, in death, a disgraced former president.
What makes the book fun to read is knowing that Dean lived in Marion as a child, which fostered a life-long interest in Harding, and that Dean served as Richard Nixon's counsel during the Watergate scandal. He knows about presidential scandals.
I turn to this book whenever I want a quick refresher of Harding's life, and each read is different than the last, especially if I've recently crammed my head with new Harding trivia (and decided to blog about it). This last read is the first time I've identified a minor error in Dean's book. He states that "Calvin Coolidge attended [Harding's] acceptance speech [in Marion] and was kept generally informed about the campaign, but his role was minimal" (p. 71). My understanding after months of researching what Harding was doing every day of 1920 is that Coolidge's first visit to Marion came in December 1920 after they won the national election. None of the coverage of Harding's speech mentions that Coolidge was in attendance. Coolidge spent much of July in seclusion in Vermont, preparing for his own acceptance speech, which would occur a week after Harding's.
That quibble aside, this is the best Harding primer in print.
Other Details:
- Information about the book from the publisher
- A C-SPAN interview with the author
No comments:
Post a Comment