A President Warren G. Harding descendant proves a scandal true.

Peter Harding still thinks about how mad he got in 2008 when he was a supporter of John Edwards, and he saw Edwards go on TV and deny he’d had an affair.

“I could tell he was lying through his teeth,” Harding recalls. “I’ve spent my whole life as a therapist, and I have a pretty good lie detector. I went into this rage and thought, ‘What is going on?’ I didn’t think I cared that much about politics.”

Maybe the trigger is his own familiarity with presidential adultery.

He’s the grandnephew of Warren G. Harding, who became president in 1921 after campaigning on a promise of “Less government in business and more business in government.” (Harding served just the first half of one term before he died of a heart attack and Calvin Coolidge was sworn in.)

Warren G. Harding’s short-lived presidency became fraught with scandal after he suppressed information that some of his pals were enriching themselves from plush government jobs. He also hid an affair – and a daughter – with a young woman named Nan Britton. Harding took that secret to his grave, but Britton went public with her 1927 memoir, The President’s Daughter.

Some teenage girls cut out photos of musicians or athletes and tape them up in their bedrooms. When Britton was 14 and Harding, a family friend, was first running for Ohio governor, she cut out photos of him from election posters and framed them with frames she bought at the five-and-ten-cent store, she writes.

The book was treated as criminal, according to Britton’s introduction: “On June 10, 1927, six burly New York policemen and John S. Sumner, agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, armed with a ‘Warrant of Search and Seizure,’ entered the printing plant where the making of the book was in process. They seized and carried off the plated and printed sheets.” (A judge dismissed the case, and the plates were returned to the publishing house.)

Even with the book out, Britton and her story were marginalized. “The family treated [Britton] like she was delusional and crazy,” Peter Harding says.

As a kid, he knew about The President’s Daughter, but never read it; it was treated as a banned book in his family. It was only after his father died that Harding, now 73, decided to take a look, and discovered the pages were still uncut – no one had even read the book they’d so forcefully claimed was lies.

“It reads like a woman’s diary,” he says. “She’s a better writer than President Harding. No one could fake the story. I started believing, he did have an affair.”

But still, no one could prove it. Nearly a century’s worth of tabloids had probed it, with nothing definitive, and the Harding family denied it firmly – the president had never had any children, they said.

Peter wanted proof, one way or another. He found Jim Blaesing, a purported grandson, in the white pages, and called him at home in Portland. Blaesing agreed to do a DNA test, and he and Harding swabbed the insides of their cheeks and sent the samples out to a lab.

The response was definitive: second cousins. For Blaesing, it was the follow-through on a pledge he’d made to prove it was true as he cared for his mother in her dying years.

“She and my grandmother were treated so cruelly, and all for being in love with someone,” he says. “My grandmother, she was just a pure class act, always dressed to the nines.”

In Britton’s lifetime, she was viewed as a slut after having a baby while unmarried. She wrote The President’s Daughter partly to exonerate herself, but she also had another social justice motivation at work – what she called a “cause” – when writing the book: “There should be no so-called ‘illegitimates’ in the United State,” she wrote. She cited Jesus as an example of someone who loved all children equally.

When Peter Harding talks about it now, he talks about themes of redemption and forgiveness. His discovery in 2014 was far too late to do anything about President Harding’s estate, some $800,000 that had been divvied up in the 1920s (none of which went to his daughter). “At the very least, I thought, I can prove the DNA thing and show them great respect,” Peter says. “I wanted to show respect to their family, because my family has never shown their family respect.”

That took the form of a family get-together – which Harding calls a “union,” rather than a reunion, since they’d never met before – in May. About a dozen family members – grandchildren and great grandchildren of President Warren G. – gathered on Harding’s oceanfront Big Sur property and shared a spread of Mediterranean food from Petra in Monterey.

“When you tell a lie like that, it creates a wound,” Harding says. “Part of that healing is all meeting, talking about it and making it real.”