When Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, he brought to Washington some of his political chums from Ohio. They played poker; they sold illegal liquor permits, pardons and paroles. They sold fixes in the Justice Department and transported contraband across state lines. They sold naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome and sheets out of Army warehouses. The Ohio Gang, an historical entertainment peopled with the characters of the day, follows Harding and his cronies from their Ohio childhoods to the smoke-filled rooms of the Republican convention and on to the White House. We meet Henry...

In a literary tour de force, Charles L. Mee Jr. interweaves images and impressions from his life with political reflections inspired by a meeting with former Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman. The meeting to discuss the possibility of collaborating with Haldeman on a book about his White House experience becomes the vehicle for Mee s probing of his own political perceptions. Here, exposed to the scrutiny of an unsparing journalistic eye, are the deep feelings of loss and failure that the Nixon debacle engendered in those Americans who came of age during Kennedy s Camelot and marched to the...