Customer Reviews

Our Man in Washington

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although the story line of this book is Pres. Harding's administration in the early 1920s, there is a relevance to today's presidential political scene. For example, Harding engaged in illicit sexual affairs which the author exemplifies by Harding's "jollying" of a young women in a White House broom closet. Pres. Clinton did his in the oval office. Also Harding was not one of this nation's most intelligent presidents. And in the current presidential election there is a question about the intelligence of one of the candidates. The author chose a real person,H. L. Mencken to conduct a fictionalized investigation of the corruption in Harding's administraion. The author also tries to depict Mencken as he revealed himself in his writings and as he was depicted in his biographies. Mencken, perhaps the nation's most famous iconoclast who had an opinion on everything in American society, relishes his role in this book of observing and commenting on the morons and clowns in Harding's administration known as the "Ohio Gang" who Harding brought with him to Washington. They are also real people who appear in the book. Harding's attorney general was tried twice for his misdeeds. His secretary of the interior and his director of the the Veterans Bureau were imprisoned. Mencken is paired with another real person, James Cain, who is best know for his hard-boiled crime fiction. This duo takes the reader on an entertaining tour of Harding's corrupt Washington. And along the way readers will meet such literary notables as Henry Luce and Sinclair Lewis. There is also a fictionalized sexual affair by Cain and a real woman who was the darling of the Washington press corp when she testified in real life against Harding's attorney general at a senate hearing. The entertaining part of this novel are Mencken's conversatins which permeate the book