Warren Harding, We Hardly Knew Ye

The book contained no small amount of titillation and salacion, including tales of illicit sex in the White House as Secret Service agents stood watch.

They said the president was sterile after suffering from mumps in childhood. Before Britton, Harding kept up an intermittent affair with a woman named Carrie Phillips, whom the Republican National Committee is suspected to have paid thousands of dollars for her silence.

The tests show that Harding was indeed the father of Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, the late Britton’s daughter. Britton unsuccessfully sought financial support from Harding’s widow and even wrote a book called The President’s Daughter.

Harding was rumored to have several mistresses, but Britton was still skewered in the press for claiming she had an affair with the president.

Though the claim got little support during Britton’s lifetime, historians had mostly accepted that it was true.

[

Britton] was consumed with Harding, who was married but had no children and was seen by women of the time as attractive.

Based on DNA from Britton’s grandson and descendants of Harding, the results are 99.9 percent certain, Ancestry said.

Nan Britton and her daughter Elizabeth Ann Britton.

But DNA testing, conducted by Ancestry.com, has now proved that Britton and Harding did, in fact, produce a child. “This is the definitive answer”.

Dr Peter Harding told the New York Times: “It’s sort of Shakespearean and operatic”.

“We just thought we have the tools now, let’s find out the truth – is he or isn’t he?” she said.

Biographer John W Dean, who expressed skepticism in his 2001 account of the president’s life, tweeted “at last!” on learning of the new DNA test. James Robenalt, author of thebook about Harding’s administration and aims, has for years accepted Britton’s story, and urged Americans to finally move past the president’s personal indiscretions. “She loved him until the day she died”, he told the New York Times. In need of money and shut out by Harding’s family, she wrote “The President’s Daughter” in 1927, inciting a fierce backlash from his supporters.

Warren Gamaliel Harding was a newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, who won a Senate seat in 1914 and captured the presidency in 1920 promising to restore “normalcy” after World War I. He is often ranked low among U.S. presidents because of the Teapot Dome corruption scandal that ensnared top advisers. She’s up in heaven right now doing an “eat me” dance around everyone who talked sh-t about her in life. “He was everything”.

“I went through this growing up in school”, said Blaesing, 65, now a construction contractor in Portland, Oregon.