Book Review: The Teapot Dome Scandal

William Grimes - International Herald Tribune

Feb 14, 2008

The Teapot Dome Scandal

How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country

By Laton McCartney

351 pages. $27. Random House.

Scandals in Washington come and go, but Teapot Dome remains one of the real humdingers. In a scheme of breathtaking audacity a handful of oil tycoons and corrupt government officials nearly managed to make away with a hefty percentage of the nation's petroleum reserves. It was, in the words of Thomas Walsh, the senator whose committee hearings blew the lid off the teapot, "the most stupendous piece of thievery known to our annals, or perhaps to those of any other country."

This is a story that has it all - a Jazz Age background, a pleasure-loving president surrounded by booze and chorus girls, boomtown capitalists from the Wild West, conniving politicians, mysterious suicides and a glamorous star witness named Roxy. Laton McCartney, in "The Teapot Dome Scandal," duly notes all of the above, but in his pedestrian retelling of the affair somehow manages to turn pulp drama into a bureaucratic dossier.

Granted, he faces an uphill climb. Teapot Dome is shorthand for a complex scheme involving multiple players moving a lot of shells at lightning speed. In brief, a coterie of oil barons, led by Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, bribed Albert Fall, the secretary of the interior under Warren Harding, to lease them Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two oil fields in California, all controlled by the Navy.

Since Harding and Fall had, in effect, been installed by these same oilmen, the deal went smoothly.

Senate investigators took years to figure it out. McCartney, who has written books on the Bechtel Corp. and the Oregon Trail, does his best to marshal the facts, sort out the intricacies of the plot and keep his extensive cast of characters in formation, but in the end it all proves too much for him.

Signs of struggle appear about halfway through. Chapter-ending cliffhangers languish, never to be revisited until so late in the book that their impact has been nullified. Desperate cues to the reader begin to appear, as names proliferate, and characters previously introduced but long absent suddenly reappear.

McCartney has nothing new to say about the scandal, but he does have a certain zest for Teapot's sordid comedy and a rich appreciation of the characters involved. Intermittently, when not tangled up in the minutiae of the evolving scandal, he delivers fresh, arresting portraits of the main players.

Harding, a back-slapping bon vivant who preferred a good game of poker and a curvaceous blonde to the dull routine of the Oval Office, beams like the sun. Doheny, a rapacious brute, seduces press and public with a carefully cultivated persona. Will Hays, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, skulks and slithers. A wizened sourpuss, up to his elbows in dirty deals, he flies out to Hollywood after serving as Harding's postmaster-general. There, as the studios' chief enforcer of morals, he created the Hays Code to censor risque material.

Like most conspiracies, Teapot Dome unraveled because there were too many people involved and too many details to cover up. The public learned all about it through Senate hearings that, in the words of one journalist, "had all the atmosphere of a murder trial."

Walsh, the relentless, incorruptible senator from Montana, eventually prevailed, no thanks to the government, which obstructed his every effort. In one of the great spectacles of the 20th century, the American people got to take a close look at how their public servants operated. And, it has to be said, they did not particularly care. The economy was recovering nicely, nearly anyone could buy a Ford, and happy music was in the air.

This, perhaps, is the great lesson of Teapot Dome. No one suffered too much. Fall, whom McCartney erroneously credits as the inspiration for the term "fall guy," became the first cabinet member to be convicted of a felony and died in disgrace. But the rest of the big fish made out fine.

When you commit a crime, be sure to sign up the government as a partner.

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