WASHINGTON — Anthony Weiner, step aside. Your sexting pales by comparison to steamy love letters sent by former President Warren G. Harding.
The Library of Congress on Tuesday made public about a thousand pages of handwritten letters Harding sent over 10 years to his mistress, Carrie Phillips.
“I love your poise Of perfect thighs When they hold me in paradise,” he wrote in 1912. “I love you garb’d But naked more. I love you when You open eyes And mouth and arms And cradling thighs.”
In the letters, Harding frequently invoked a code name for his penis: “Jerry.”
“Jerry sends Christmas greetings! He would come too, if I might: would he be welcomed cordially?” Harding wrote in December 1918, two years before he became President and the relationship ended.
In an August 1918 note, he wrote, “Wish I could take you to Mount Jerry. Wonderful spot . . .”
The 29th President’s time in the White House was brief. The Republican died in the middle of his first term, in 1923. History has not treated his scandal-filled tenure positively.
Existence of his love notes to Phillips — the Ohio wife of a Harding friend — had been known since 1963.
They were soon sealed by a judge, and under an agreement with Harding’s descendants, they were not to be made public for 50 years, a waiting period that ended Tuesday.
But James Robenalt, a Cleveland lawyer and author, stumbled upon microfilmed copies stashed in an Ohio library.
He spent five years carefully transcribing them for a 2009 book, “The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War.”
Certainly these letters, while graphic in parts, are a much richer record of love and of political importance than Mark Sanford’s emails or Anthony Weiner’s sexting,” Robenalt said, referring to the former South Carolina governor and New York congressman who got caught-up in extra-marital flings
