Here is a book that is more effective in its destruction of a national figure than the muck raking, mud slinging books of the past (The Strange Death of President Harding and The President's Daughter). With deliberate and careful scholarship, Adams has marshalled the facts, and let the records speak for themselves. In the last analysis, as in virtually the first, Harding emerges as ""100% party man, 95% stand patter, loyal adherent of Big Business, cautiously anti-labor, wet in belief and practice, dry as self preservative, imperialist, supporter of measures of defense, ill-informed on internationalism, follower of the Penrose-Smoot-Lodge school of politics."" A tragic milestone in our history.