'The Teapot Dome Scandal' by Laton McCartney

How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House

and Tried to Steal the Country

Laton McCartney

Random House: 354 pp., $27

CORRUPTION abounds. The U.S. secretary of the Interior is giving no-bid contracts for oil, coal and timber on public land to the president's corporate campaign contributors in secret meetings. Big Oil not only writes energy policy but also dictates military options and environmental priorities, this last mainly by dismantling protections enacted by previous presidents. The U.S. attorney general signs off on whatever comes his way, putting the administration's friends above the law. The FBI looks the other way. The president may not understand what it all means, but it's unclear whether he would disapprove if he did.

What year is it? Here are a few more hints: The president's security detail shuttles concubines in and out of the White House and delivers payoffs to former mistresses to keep them quiet. His wife consults a psychic daily and punishes petty slights with the help of government agencies. Vocal upholders of public morals keep their gay lovers in Washington and their wives back home.

Yes, it's 1922, during the presidency of Warren G. Harding, one of the most inept and corrupt in American history. Laton McCartney's new book, "The Teapot Dome Scandal," tells the story of its signature embezzlement.

Harding, a U.S. senator from Ohio, was chosen as the Republican presidential nominee by political power brokers -- including several oilmen -- at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel during the contentious GOP convention of 1920. The smoke-filled room where they met has remained ever since the cliché image of undemocratic power politics in action.

Universally acknowledged at the time to be, in the words of his attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, "an Adonis," a strapping, photogenic charmer, Harding was, by his own estimation, unprepared for the job. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1921, and died under somewhat suspicious circumstances on Aug. 2, 1923. In those 30 months, Harding's cronies, known collectively as the Ohio Gang, accomplished more unvarnished skulduggery and malfeasance than most administrations have in eight long years.