Troubled Presidency’s Scandalous Footnote

You’d never guess it from today’s bestsellers, but it wasn’t always easy to get a political tell-all book into print.

Dozens of publishers rejected Nan Britton’s manuscript before she paid to publish it herself in 1927. “The President’s Daughter” is a sometimes racy account of what Britton said was a six-year affair with Warren Gamaliel Harding, the nation’s 29th president, with whom she said she had an out-of-wedlock daughter.

Published four years after Harding died, the book was dedicated to unwed mothers. Britton had tried to get money for her daughter’s care from Harding’s estate. When his widow balked, Britton picked up a pen.

Harding’s relatives and Republican supporters mocked the book, as did another author who wrote a retort. But it became a bestseller.

Britton’s book, along with the Teapot Dome scandal, finished off Harding’s woeful reputation.

The daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 1919 and grew up in Illinois. After World War II, she moved to Glendale, where she lived quietly for decades with her husband, Henry Blaesing, and their three sons. From her Glendale home, Blaesing gave one of her first interviews; her mother was secretly living nearby.

“Mother wasn’t bitter,” Blaesing told The Times in 1964, in an article whose headline referred to her as Harding’s “love child.”

“All through the years she never spoke badly of Harding. It was all love, adoration and affection. She told me she loved him very much. She still does.... I had a normal childhood. But then I didn’t go around telling people” about her father.

Blaesing, 84, who has since left Glendale, lives a quiet life near her family, content to remain out of the limelight. Her mother died in 1991 at age 94, evidently so forgotten by history that no obituary was published.

According to her mother’s book, Blaesing was conceived on a couch in Harding’s Senate office and was born in New Jersey. Britton wrote that between the birth on Oct. 22, 1919, and Harding’s swearing-in as president just over a year later, Harding personally gave her money to support herself and the child. After he took office, he arranged for Secret Service agents to hand-deliver regular child-support payments, Britton wrote. But he refused to meet the girl.

Britton wrote that she visited Harding at the White House in 1923, surprising him with the news that their 3-year-old daughter was sitting on a park bench in Lafayette Square, visible from the second-floor window, but he refused to look.

When Harding took office in 1921, Britton’s sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Scott Willits, adopted Elizabeth Ann for appearance’s sake.

“I was the most logical one to adopt her,” Elizabeth Willits said in The Times’ 1964 interview. “I had no children, and that way we could keep her in the family. She thought we were her parents until her mother took her back when she was 7.”

The Willitses remained close to the Blaesing family, following them to Glendale.

Harding allegedly had several affairs and one other out-of-wedlock child, who died of tuberculosis. He confided in a few loyal friends and in his secretary, George Christian, about Elizabeth Ann, which Christian confirmed after Harding’s death, according to one written account.

Britton used the surname Christian on her daughter’s birth certificate.

As his administration began to collapse over illegal dealings in land, oil and loans, Harding bemoaned his plight to famous Kansas newspaperman William Allen White.

“I have no trouble with my enemies,” Harding said in 1923 as the Teapot Dome scandal erupted around two of his close friends and Cabinet officers. “But my ... friends, White, they are the ones who keep me walking the floor nights.”

Depressed and anxious to get away from the pressures of Washington, he and his wife went on a West Coast campaign swing in the summer of 1923.

They had visited Alaska and were headed to Los Angeles when Harding became ill. He died Aug. 2, 1923, in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, now the Sheraton Palace, in Room 8064. The official cause of death was listed as a stroke, or “apoplexy.” But an autopsy found Harding’s heart was grossly enlarged.

Some still like to believe that Harding’s wife, Florence, whom he called “the Duchess,” had tired of his affairs and poisoned him. Her astrologer had predicted that Harding would not survive his term.

When Harding’s widow rejected Britton’s appeal for child support, Britton published her tell-all book, including details of trysts in the coat closet just off the Oval Office. Had it not been for a Secret Service man knocking on the door to warn them, she wrote, the first lady would have caught them in the act.

The resemblance between Harding and the young Elizabeth Ann was striking. Harding’s sister, Daisy, reportedly sent Britton money each month and once wrote her that Elizabeth Ann’s cheeks and eyes are “similar to those of yours truly [Daisy Harding], or I imagine it.”

Between Britton’s book and Teapot Dome, Harding’s reputation plummeted. Los Angeles school administrators thought it best to remove the former president’s name from the recently built Warren G. Harding University High School in West Los Angeles. In the late 1920s, it became just University High School.

Within a few years, another book, “The Answer to the President’s Daughter,” was published. Author Joseph DeBarthe defended Harding and denied Britton’s accounts, accusing her of “degeneracy.” She sued the book’s distributor in federal court for $50,000 in damages to her reputation, but lost in 1931.

With her book royalties, she established the Elizabeth Ann League to help “girls in trouble” and to champion rights of children born out of wedlock.

“Unfortunately we didn’t cash in on it and make the money we could have, like everyone else does today,” Blaesing’s eldest son, Thomas, told The Times recently. “My mother’s main concern was to protect her family. That’s why she has always kept quiet about it.”

Britton, he recalled, “was a pretty feisty woman who stood up for what she believed in.” Only a few close friends and family members even knew that Britton and her family had made Glendale their home.

Moreover, Blaesing’s own sons, she said in 1964, “didn’t even know [about their grandmother’s affair with Harding].”

Thomas Blaesing said recently that he was 17 in 1964 when “I came home from school and found a reporter camped out on our doorstep,” asking about his mother’s paternity.

By happenstance, in 1964, Harding biographers discovered dozens of letters they said revealed a 15-year relationship with yet another woman, Carrie Phillips, the wife of his longtime friend Jim Phillips. Harding’s heirs sued to keep the letters private; by court order, they will remain sealed until 2014.

By today’s “kiss, tell and cash the check” standards, Britton made little money from her revelations. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it all went into a home for unwed mothers,” Thomas Blaesing said. “That’s the kind of woman she was.”