The Library of Congress says most of the letters to be released were written between 1910 and 1920, including the years when Harding was a U.S. senator from Ohio. Harding's nephew, George Harding, eventually purchased the letters from a Phillips family member. (Photo: Unknown) 
 
 Historians have long known that, before he became president, Warren G. Harding had an extramarital affair with a woman named Carrie Fulton Phillips. Number four was the most infamous and the first presidential mistress to write a memoir: In the large Oval Office closet, the president had at least one tryst with Nan Britton, Britton went under covers with the president and wrote a memoir. Phillips' lawyer and guardian found the letters after she died in 1960, but they were kept secret because of litigation. Even on the eve of his inauguration, Harding was providing more trouble for his troubleshooters. Censorship by Book Burning "The Strange Death of President Harding," written in 1930 by the notorious perjurer and former FBI agent Gaston Means, implied that Florence Harding poisoned her husband in retaliation for his adultery, but the book has long been dismissed as a fabrication. Said the Library of Congress: "In 1972, Dr. Harding donated the letters to the Library of Congress for safekeeping, with the stipulation that the Library keep the papers closed until July 29, 2014, which would be 50 years from the day the probate judge first closed them."
– A thousand pages of love letters from the man some historians say was America's most scandalous president to a mistress will see the light of day next month for the first time in around a century. The Library of Congress says the letters from Warren G. Harding to Claire Phillips, a friend of his wife's, will be released when the 50-year period of secrecy the president's nephew insisted on when he donated the letters expires, USA Today reports. The affair began in 1905, carried on throughout the years the Republican was a US senator from Ohio, and ended soon before he was elected in 1920. She successfully blackmailed the GOP over the affair, winning a monthly stipend and jobs for several relatives. But Phillips wasn't the most famous mistress of Harding, who died in office in 1923. That distinction goes to young campaign volunteer Nan Britton, who claimed in 1928 tell-all book The President's Daughter that they had sex in locations including a White House coat closet—and he fathered her child. According to a Washington Post profile, Harding had at least two other long-term mistresses, and had "assorted other flings," including with "a Washington Post employee known as Miss Allicott, and former chorus girls Maize Haywood and Blossom Jones," as well as "a string of 'New York women.'" Harding "even publicly ogled Margaret Gorman, the first Miss America, in Atlantic City, days after her crowning," the Post finds.