SCANDALS AT THE TOP
PART III
Here’s the final installment in our rehash of the nation’s baker’s dozen of top presidential scandals since the Civil War. As you will recall, our purpose here is to find whether the GOP claim to being the law-abiding guardians of the nation’s morals is justified.
Or just a myth that refuses to die? The evidence would seem to be convincing. But you be the judge.
We begin with a more recent scandal your blogger accidentally skipped over in digging back into our past; we then resume our dig into the early 1920s, bumper-crop years for high-level wrongdoing, with a vice for most every schadenfreuder’s palate. The President at that scandalous time was Warren G. Harding, a man synonymous with malfeasance, arguably the record holder for presidential corruption—until the present occupant arrived to make him look like a devout altar boy in comparison.
We resume here with number nine and proceed through thirteen to end our survey.
9. Plamegate (R)
The Valerie Plame Affair opened in July 2003 when conservative journalist Robert Novak outed an undercover CIA agent named Valerie Plame. Why do such an unpatriotic thing? Because Plame’s husband, diplomat Robert Wilson, had been sent by the George W. Bush Administration a year earlier to Niger, Africa, to confirm that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was trying buy “yellow cake” uranium for its nuclear weapons program—which would thereby justify the Bush Administration’s already-launched Iraq War. Wilson discovered nothing of the sort and told the world in a New York Times op-ed piece titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”
That was disloyal, and punishment was in order. The payback took a strange turn when Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was exposed as an undercover CIA agent, which happened to be a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
A lengthy legal/political drama with a cast of many ensued, implicating several prominent Neocons who wanted a war in the Middle East. They included the president and the grandest chicken-hawk of them all, Vice President Dick Cheney—who emerged from the legal proceedings unscathed. Not so for Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff and fall guy, who took the hit. He was on March 6, 2007 found guilty of obstruction of justice and four counts of lying under oath, fined $250,000, and sentenced to two and a half years in prison plus two years of probation. President Bush commuted Libby’s prison time, but did not pardon him and left the fine in force. At least the Middle East was stabilized.
10. Teapot Dome under Warren Harding (R)
President Warren G. Harding’s tenure was brief (January 1921-August 1923), but as head of the so-called “Ohio Gang” his scandals were many—reckoned too high a mark to ever be topped, until Trump’s Guinness Book performance (2017-January 2021). Harding was a handsome ladies’ man whose many amours included a long-term mistress Carrie Phillips, who blackmailed him and the GOP for a free trip to Asia and a yearly stipend until her death. Better known is his affair with a young admirer, Nan Britton, with whom he fathered a child out of wedlock, conceived in the Senate cloakroom according to mom.
Oddly, it was not for his sexcapades that Harding is best remembered, but for the Teapot Dome scandal, in which his Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted bribes from private companies to lease oil reserves in Wyoming and California with no competitive bidding. Montana Democrat Senator Thomas J. Walsh led a lengthy investigation that resulted in Fall serving two years in jail and Harry F. Sinclair of the Sinclair Oil receiving a six-month sentence.
11. “Off to the White House, Ha ha ha!” Grover Cleveland (D)
The only American president to have served two non-consecutive terms as president (1885-1889, 1893-1897), Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate son a decade before he was first nominated, a fact exposed by the Buffalo Evening Telegraph. Cleveland owned up to fatherhood and won anyway, prompting the popular chant “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa? Off to the White House, Ha ha ha!” Cleveland, a corruption fighter and the only Democrat to occupy the presidency between the Civil War and Woodrow Wilson, was rewarded for his honesty by being elected just in time to preside over the Panic of 1893, a worldwide depression, and the United States’ first.
12. The Whiskey Ring under Ulysses S. Grant (R)
President Ulysses S. Grant may have been a hero of the Civil War and a hard-nosed general, but he was a soft touch for so-called “friends” who served him ill in his two terms in office. History made no such distinction and was unforgiving in branding his administrations the most corrupt ever…until Harding’s surpassed them a half century later. In the Whiskey Ring scheme begun in 1875, Grant’s army buddies bribed liquor tax collectors to look the other way while they pocketed a cut. The scam was centered in the Midwest—Chicago and Milwaukee and especially Saint Louis—and some of the swag when divvied up went straight into—you guessed it—Republican Party coffers.
13. Crédit Mobilier under Ulysses S. Grant (R)
More of the same. Crédit Mobilier was a dummy construction company created by the Union Pacific Railroad into which they diverted profit from inflated costs for building the eastern leg of the first transcontinental railroad. From the 44 million dirty dollars shaved, a portion was paid in bribes to Washington politicians for favorable treatment. Several politicians had their careers cut short when the scam was exposed.
Final score in the Presidential Scandals League? Elephants 11, Donkeys two. A decisive decision, any way you score it. Yes, character counts…except when it doesn’t…and that’s rather often if a Republican is in office. A curious result of our survey is that Republicans seem overwhelmingly motivated in their mischief by money and power; the Democrats prefer sex. What do you make of that?
By the way, I’m hoping to land a job at The National Enquirer with a series on presidential sexual proclivities present and past.