Notes on a Scandal

Well, one minor mystery of the American presidency was clarified this week.

According to the New York Times, DNA testing seems to have confirmed that Warren Gamaliel Harding, who served in the White House during 1921-23, had in fact fathered a daughter by one of his mistresses, Nan Britton. The child, named Elizabeth Ann Britton Harding, was born in 1919, and so had been conceived when Harding was a senator, not president. But her paternity had been a matter of speculation, and some controversy, ever since her mother published a sensational memoir, The President’s Daughter (1927), about her six-year liaison with Harding.