Yes, one of them really did write about wanting to “bury my face on your pillowing breasts.”
The president of the United States may be the most powerful person on the planet, but everyone who’s held the office is also a regular person, just like the rest of us — and nothing illustrates that more effectively than their love letters.
The fascinating book Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust from the White House, written by married couple Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, reveals intimate and personal correspondence from commanders-in-chief of the past, all the way from George Washington to Barack Obama. That memorable title comes from President Woodrow Wilson. In an 1894 letter to his wife, he celebrated his upcoming return from a trip by asking, “Do you think you can stand the innumerable kisses and the passionate embraces you will receive? Are you prepared for the storm of love making with which you will be assailed?”
And if that seems surprisingly spicy for the leader of the free world, you’ll be blown away by the suggestive notes from Warren G. Harding, which we’re sharing in an excerpt below. These letters, which Harding sent to his mistress, Carrie Phillips, were written before he moved into the Oval Office in 1921, but they’re nonetheless a fascinating insight into his presidency, given that Phillips attempted to blackmail him with these romantic missives as he was preparing to kick off his campaign for the highest office in the land.
Think you can handle the “benediction of blissful joy,” as Harding called it? Read on for insight into a historical figure unlike anything you’ve read before — including the nickname Harding gave his, um, equipment.
Love Letters from Warren G. Harding to Carrie Phillips
Warren G. Harding was the twenty-ninth president of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death in 1923. Although Harding had married in 1891, when he was twenty-five, he didn’t let it stop his continual philandering, both before and during his time in the White House. (His father supposedly said, “It’s a good thing Warren wasn’t a girl. He’d be in the family way all the time.”) Before his political career, he was the owner and editor of the Marion, Ohio, newspaper and had many opportunities to meet people.
Among his friends and neighbors were James and Carrie Phillips. During the summer of 1905, Harding began an affair with Carrie, when James was recuperating from a nervous breakdown and Harding’s wife, Florence (known as the Duchess for her haughty bearing), was suffering from a kidney ailment that would never be fully cured.
Fortunately for us, Warren was in the habit of writing letters to his lover, many of which were quite explicit in their descriptions of her charms. He requested that she destroy them, but she and her husband later used them to blackmail Harding when he was running for president in 1920.
Harding’s letters to Carrie were hidden for many years until recently, when they were made public by the Library of Congress. Today, more than a century after they were written, we can read Harding’s love- stricken words — even when he indulges in verse to glorify his beloved:
Jan. 28, 1912
I love your poise
Of perfect thighs
When they hold me
in paradise. . . .
I love the rose
Your garden grows
Love seashell pink
That over it glows
I love to suck
Your breath away
I love to cling—
There long to stay…
I love you garb’d
But naked more
Love your beauty
To thus adore…
I love you when
You open eyes
And mouth and arms
And cradling thighs…
If I had you today, I’d kiss and
fondle you into my arms and
hold you there until you said,
‘Warren, oh, Warren,’ in a
benediction of blissful joy.
In the fall of 1911, Carrie Phillips visited Germany with her daughter. On her return, she spent New Year’s Eve in Montreal with Harding. They apparently rang in the New Year by having sex at midnight, an experience so pleasurable that Harding often referred to it in his letters.
Jan. 2, 1913
I stopped play to have sandwiches and crack a bottle of wine, so I could dwell with my thoughts. You can guess where they centered—on the New Year’s beginning a year before, when the bell rang the chorus while our hearts sang the rapture without words and we greeted the New Year from the hallowed heights of heaven. . . . When I got home I was too tired to sleep, but I rested, and you were summoned in finally. And you came—a vision vividly plain, a goddess in human form—and a perfect form— clad only in flowing hair, and you were joyously received, and Jerry came and insisted on staying while we all retrospected in the happiness of a Sunday in Richmond.
-Warren
When Harding mentions “Jerry,” as in the preceding letter, and the following one, he is using a code word for his penis. Carrie’s sex organ was dubbed “Mrs. Pouterson.” The full code occupies several pages of notes.
Sept. 15, 1913
Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts. Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied. . . . Wouldn’t you like to hear me ask if we only dared and answer, “We dare,” while souls rejoicing sang the sweetest of choruses in the music room? Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior—not the lake—for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond? . . .
Oh, Carrie mine! You can see I have yielded and written myself into wild desire. I could beg. And Jerry came and will not go, says he loves you, that you are the only, only love worthwhile in all this world, and I must tell you so and a score or more of other fond things he suggests, but I spare you. You must not be annoyed. He is so utterly devoted that he only exists to give you all. I fear you would find a fierce enthusiast today.
-Warren
When Warren G. Harding died unexpectedly in San Francisco in 1923, he was so popular with the American public that people lined up along the tracks to see the railroad car carrying his body back to Washington. Only later did the corrupt activities carried out by officials in his administration come to light, causing later historians to rate him one of the lesser presidents.
Many of the letters Harding wrote to Carrie Phillips indicate that he was a man who continually had sex on his mind. But occasionally he wrote a letter like the following that indicated he was more complex than that. The complete letter occupies twelve sheets of paper and was written over four days.
Sept. 21-24, 1913
My Dear Carrie:
. . . There, I have replied to your note and answered every suggestion therein, save one, which I reserved for the last. You wonder about genuine love, and say it doesn’t require propinquity to keep it aflame. Perhaps not, but you will agree some day that propinquity will work wonders.
I am not sure whether you were questioning the genuineness of my love or not. Of course I may be mistaken about it myself, but if I am fooled, no man ever truly loved. I have studied it a lot and scrutinized myself. If it isn’t love, it is an alarming case of permanent infatuation. When a man can think of no one else, worship nothing else and craves nothing else than the one woman he adores, though he hasn’t seen her in nine or ten months, and she is four thousand miles away and can’t possibly be possessed, it seems more than infatuation. I often wish it were less. I am so obsessed, but a mature reflection convinces me that it is really big to know such a love, and then I am content. When a man loves with all his thoughts, loves as he walks, loves in his daily business, loves as he reads, loves at his work and loves at his play, when every song of his lips in some way, intimately or remotely, is associated with the one beloved, he is very much in love, and it must be the real thing.
I grant you have reason to think I yield to the sex call. I do. I am ever wanting to kiss and fondle, to embrace and caress, to adore and possess. I can’t help it. That is not spiritual, I grant, but very real. It may be only a symptom of the greater love, or it may be a factor in the greater love’s awakening. I do not know. But this I do know, my greater admiration, adoration, and worship has been inseparable from this experience. And it all endures…
I send you my love, all yours, all the time, always,
-J.J.A.
We haven’t been able to decipher the meaning of these three initials he used to close this letter, but they were underlined three times. A curator at the Library of Congress suggested that one of the Js might stand for the Jerry in Harding’s private code.
Harding’s ardor for Carrie did not dim even after she began to blackmail him, as the following letter from Harding shows. Her threat to expose him was made more powerful by the fact that she knew Harding was preparing to run for president that same year.
Feb. 2, 1920
Your proposal to destroy me, and yourself in doing so, will only add to the ill we have already done. It doesn’t seem like you to think of such a fatal course. I can’t believe your purpose is to destroy me for paying the tribute so freely uttered and so often shown. . . .
Now to specific things. I can’t secure you the larger competence [blackmail payment] you have frequently mentioned. No use to talk about it. I can pay with life or reputation, but I can’t command such a sum! To avoid disgrace in the public eye, to escape ruin in the eyes of those who have trusted me in public life—here I have never betrayed—will, if you demand it as the price, retire at the end of my term and never come back to [Marion, Ohio] to reside. . . . I’ll pay this price to save my own disgrace and your own self-destruction to destroy me. That is one proposal, complete, final, and covers all.
Here is another. If you think I can be more helpful by having a public position and influence, probably a situation to do some things worthwhile for myself and you and yours, I will pay you $5,000 per year, in March each year, so long as I am in that public service. It is not big, but it will add to your comfort and make you independent to a reasonable degree. It is most within my capacity. I wish it might be more, but we can only do that which is in his power. Destroy me, and I have no capacity, while the object of your dislike is capable of going on in her own account. . . .
Don’t make me fool the public or my friends. If I must quit to pay the penalty, let me start at once on the plans which make it the least difficult. I can’t just quit and be a yellow quitter, but I can plan and work it out in a fairly seemly way, so that no one knows but ourselves. Can’t you send me a night letter, @ 143 Senate Offices. No fast telegram. In a night letter you can say: “We are writing. Go ahead with program with our best wishes. Think it will be fine.” I’ll construe that to mean go ahead, and do the best I can.
-Warren
Harding was reaching the end of his six-year term as US Senator from Ohio and faced the loss of his seat if the letters were made public. However, his wife, Florence, known as the Duchess, decided to push his candidacy for president. It was well-known that the Duchess’s ambitions were far greater than her husband’s. A political cartoon, drawn after he became president, showed the couple with the caption “The President and Mr. Harding.”
Fortunately for the Duchess, the Republican nominating convention of 1920 was deadlocked among three other candidates. The leaders of the party met in a suite in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel to hammer out a deal. This became known as the “smoke-filled room” where Harding’s candidacy was decided on. Only after the delegates made Harding their choice did the party bigwigs find out about the letters that Carrie Phillips had. It was too late to withdraw the nomination, so the Republican Party and Harding’s wealthy friend Ned McLean, owner of the Washington Post, paid Carrie $25,000 and a monthly stipend of $2,000 for her and her husband (who was perfectly happy to profit from his wife’s infidelity) to go on a round-the-world trip until the presidential campaign was over. That fall Harding was elected the twenty-ninth president of the United States.
Excerpted from Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust from the White House by Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler. Copyright © 2024 by Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
