SAN FRANCISCO — Had President Warren G. Harding not been bedridden in those midsummer days of 1923, he might have left his eighth-floor suite at the Palace Hotel and headed to the southwestern edge of the city, where a new golf course named Lake Merced Golf Links was under construction. He had played golf only days before, in Vancouver, British Columbia. But Harding never left the Palace Hotel alive again. Whatever good will that he hoped to engender on his trip, whatever hopes he had of winning re-election the next year, ended two and a half years into his largely forgotten presidency. “Most historians rank Harding as the worst of all American presidents,” according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to presidential history.

Source: International New York Times August 05, 2020 06:56 UTC