VERY explicit letters that married former President Warren G Harding wrote to his mistress are revealed – laying bare details of their sordid trysts… and the cheeky nickname he gave his PENIS

Warren G Harding wasn’t the first president to indulge in extracurricular affairs that fell outside the respectability of marriage – Lyndon B Johnson, a competitive womanizer, claimed he had more wives by accident than John F Kennedy did by design.

But Harding’s adoration letters sent to his mistress are certainly among the most brutal.

Many of the juiciest remained hidden until recently, when the Library of Congress finally made them public.

Now the true extent of his sexual exploits has been revealed in a new book of amorous letters written within the walls of the White House, entitled Are you prepared for the storm of lovemaking? (itself a quote attributed to Woodrow Wilson in a letter to his first wife, Ellen).

The 29th president – ​​and the man who coined the term “Founding Fathers” – Harding was married to Florence, who was called The Duchess because of her superiority complex. But his philandering was so well known that his own father said it was a good thing he wasn’t a girl or “he would always be in the family.”

He began a torrid affair with family friend and neighbor Caroline “Carrie” Phillips in the summer of 1905, when he owned and edited a newspaper in Ohio, and when Florence was recovering easily (or uncomfortably) from a kidney infection.

In one of his letters, written in January 1912, his ecstasy drove him to poetry:

“I like your poise

Of perfect thighs

When they hold me

in paradise…

I like the rose

Your garden is growing

I love seashell pink

That glows above

I like sucking

Your breath goes away

I like to hold –

There is still a long way to go…

I love you dressed up

But naked more…’

Some of his musings were so explicit that he had to write them in code. For example, in this letter, which reminded him of an erotic New Year’s Eve he had spent with Carrie in Montreal, where he had had sex as the clock struck midnight, he used the word “Jerry” to refer to his penis, and “Ms. Pouterson’ to describe Carrie’s vagina.

‘I stopped playing to eat sandwiches and crack a bottle of wine so I could focus on my thoughts. You can guess where they focused – on the beginning of the new year a year earlier, when the bell rang the chorus as our hearts wordlessly sang the rapture and we greeted the new year from the sacred heights of heaven…

“When I got home, I was too tired to sleep, but I rested and eventually you were called in.” And you came – a clear vision, a goddess in human form – and a perfect form – dressed only in wavy hair, and you were joyfully received, and Jerry came and insisted on staying while we all looked back on the happiness of a Sunday in Richmond.’

Later that year, Harding – and Jerry – clearly missed the pleasures that only Carrie could provide:

“Honestly, it aches me with insatiable desire, until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild swallow on your lips and then bury my face on your kissable breasts…

“Wouldn’t you like to get soaked on Superior – and not on the lake – for the joy of feverish caressing and melting kisses? Would you not make the presumed occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did at morning communion in Richmond? …

“Oh, Carrie for me! You can see that I have given in and written myself into a wild desire. I could beg. And Jerry came and won’t go, says he loves you, that you’re the only, only love worth having in this whole world, and I gotta tell you that, and a score of other precious things he suggests , but I spare you. You shouldn’t be irritated. He is so completely devoted that He only exists to give you everything. I fear you will find a fierce enthusiast today.”

But by 1920 their love had apparently turned sour. And while Harding was running for president, Carrie and her husband used the letters to blackmail him (this despite the fact that he had ordered all his loved ones to burn his letters).

Harding received the nomination before party representatives learned of the plot, and his close friend, Ned McLean, owner of The Washington Post, paid Carrie a sum of $25,000 and a monthly stipend of $2,000.

She and her husband used the money to take a trip around the world until the presidential campaign was over and on November 2 of that year, Harding won the presidency – the only presidency ever elected on his birthday.

Are you prepared for the storm of lovemaking? Letters of Love and Lust from the White House by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler is published by Simon & Schuster