Losing It
SHORTLY BEFORE MIDDAY ON JUNE 1, 1933, a crisp and pleasant Thursday in Washington, a crowd began to gather around the timeworn steps of a narrow, stone-faced building near the intersection of E Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Soon, an auctioneer’s bell began clanging, and hundreds of restless spectators bumped elbows as they jostled for better vantage points. In the Washington of 1933, bankruptcy auctions were nothing new: Business after business had crumbled under the economic vise of the Great Depression, including entire real estate empires and scores of firms that had been fixtures in the nation’s capital since before the turn of the century. This sale, however, was something special. The capital’s second oldest newspaper, The Washington Post, was about to go on the auction block.
In his customary singsong voice, auctioneer Thomas J. Owen opened the auction at $250,000. The offers came briskly in $25,000 increments, but soon after bidding surpassed the half-million-dollar mark, the ranks of potential buyers had thinned to three. Then, Owen interrupted the auction briefly so that attorney Nelson T. Hartson could hurry inside the Post building to consult his client, who had been gazing down on the spectacle from an upper-floor window. For a few tense moments, it appeared that Evalyn Walsh McLean — whose two sons had been destined to inherit the Post — might make a dramatic, eleventh-hour attempt to keep the newspaper in the family. For two years, she had steadfastly insisted she would never permit the sale of the Post, fighting efforts by her estranged husband to get rid of the newspaper before it was forced into receivership. But now, unable to top an offer of $625,000, she was forced to drop out.
Left in the bidding were young Washington attorney George E. Hamilton, Jr., dubbed the “mystery man” because he refused to name his client, and Geoffrey Konta, a New York lawyer for William Randolph Hearst, publisher of The Washington Herald and The Washington Times. After Hamilton topped Konta’s bid of $800,000, Hartson rushed back into the building to consult Mrs. McLean. An impatient Hamilton threatened to withdraw his high bid of $825,000 unless the auction proceeded at once. So with three words from auctioneer Owen — “Going, going, sold” — The Washington Post passed out of the McLean family, which had owned it for a quarter of a century.
Before she stepped into a waiting Rolls Royce, Evalyn Walsh McLean paused at curbside for a moment to talk with reporters. Dozens of curious bystanders pressed in to gawk at her trademark: the pale blue, 47-carat Hope Diamond she wore over a dress of funereal black. “I have done everything I could to save the Post,” she said. “I love this old paper. It is true that I bid $600,000 to keep the Post for my boys, but I could go no higher.”
Three days later, an enterprising Associated Press correspondent tracked down Edward “Ned” Beale McLean, erstwhile owner and former publisher of the Post, at a Montreal hospital, where, as the reporter charitably put it, he was “undergoing treatment.” One year earlier, his name had been stripped from the Post’s masthead. His father, John Roll McLean, had bought The Washington Post in 1905, and Ned had managed the newspaper (or, many said, mismanaged it) since his father’s death in 1916. But now Ned was a broken man. His world had been shattered to the point where there were no fragments left to pick up, his mind destroyed by years of too much booze and too much stress. Now, barely managing to cling onto reality, he had simply exiled himself from further embarrassment.
There was a time, of course, when Ned and Evalyn McLean had been the happy-go-luckiest couple in the nation’s capital. Since their marriage in 1908, they had been full-fledged, front-page celebrities: the children of Washington’s two wealthiest families, carefree owners of the foreboding Hope Diamond, and the parents of a son quickly christened the “million-dollar-baby.” Beyond the Post, they had all the accoutrements of wealth and prestige — a private railroad car, magnificent mansions, summer places in Bar Harbor and Palm Beach. They owned what was reputed to be the largest private stock of liquor in Prohibition Washington, and Ned was a favored poker playing companion of President Warren Harding.
They entertained on a grand scale; so grand that Senator William E. Borah once surveyed the scene at one of their lavish parties and sniffed, “This sort of thing is what brings on a revolution.” The McLeans didn’t care. They were money-to-burn millionaires — the perfect embodiment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Lost Generation” — and more than any other Washingtonians, they laid out the city’s welcome mat for the Roaring Twenties.
It was a great party while it lasted, but on June 13, 1933, the party was finally over. All of Evalyn’s legal appeals to block the sale of the Post had been exhausted, and on that day the newspaper told the story with a page-one, above-the-fold headline: “Eugene Meyer Announced As Washington Post Buyer.” At the time, few knew how badly Meyer, a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board, had wanted the Post — he had authorized attorney Hamilton to bid up to $2 million on the day of the auction. And even at that figure, it would have been a comparative bargain. Ned McLean had turned down an offer of $5 million from Meyer in 1929.
Fifty years later, Meyer’s daughter, Katherine Graham, announced that she was making her own son Donald publisher of The Washington Post. “You know,” she joked, perhaps in an unwitting reference to Ned McLean, “publishers’ sons are famous dopes.”
EDWARD BEALE McLEAN, AS A RICH MAN’S ONLY CHILD, was accustomed to having most of the better things in life — and many of the worst — dropped into his lap. He was born in Washington on the last day of January in 1886, the son of John Roll and Emily Beale McLean. His father, a shrewd businessman and ruthless wheeler-and-dealer in politics, was “limp and spineless where his only son was concerned,” Ned’s wife wrote. His mother, she added, “saw no wrong in anything he did” and even bribed other boys to let him win at Parcheesi and baseball. In her view, it was a way to build up “Neddie’s” self-confidence; its actual effect, of course, was to spoil him rotten by an early age.
Ned’s premature introduction to a world of privilege, prestige, and power hardly prepared him to represent the third generation of a classic American dynasty. His grandfather, Washington “Wash” McLean, had amassed a huge fortune in Cincinnati as a boilermaker and steamboat-builder, using it in the 1850s to buy control of the Cincinnati Enquirer. Within a short time he had molded it into a newspaper of national reputation, if only for the fact that it was the Democratic Party’s principal mouthpiece west of the Alleghenies.
In 1880, Wash McLean retired, moved to the nation’s capital, and left his only son, John R., in charge of the Cincinnati empire. After a shaky start (expulsion from Harvard and a brief stint with the Cincinnati Red Stockings baseball team), John R. had come to understand the power of wealth better than his father. Through much of the Gilded Age, he had enjoyed a political marriage of convenience with Republican criminal lawyer Tom Campbell, and the two milked the city dry through their complete mastery of political plunder. Their orgy of kickbacks, shakedowns, and other assorted forms of municipal corruption was ended in March 1884, when citywide riots erupted and both were forced, more or less, to leave town — Campbell for New York City and McLean for Washington, D.C.
Although McLean maintained his legal residence in Cincinnati (he harbored aspirations for political office), he moved quickly to become a leading member of the capital’s burgeoning business establishment. With the vast fortune left him upon his father’s death in 1890, he maneuvered himself into the presidency of the Washington Gas Light Company, and became a director and major stockholder of the city’s two leading financial institutions, the Riggs National Bank and the American Security and Trust Company. In 1895, he bought The New York Morning Journal for $1 million, but the newspaper faltered under his long-distance stewardship, and he was forced to sell it a year later for only $180,000. He and the new owner, William Randolph Hearst, quickly became friends.
Since the sale of The Journal, McLean had been angling behind the scenes to gain control of The Washington Post, which he finally was able to do in 1905. Over the next decade, while claiming “the people don’t want to read or hear unpleasant news,” McLean allowed the yellow tint of Hearst’s sensationalistic brand of journalism to seep into the pages of the Post and, like Hearst, found profit in mediocrity. He continued to climb his way to the upper rungs of the city’s business hierarchy, co-founding the trolley system, the Washington and Old Dominion Railway, in 1911.
As the third-generation scion of this illustrious family, Ned generally lived a life befitting a millionaire’s son. He apprenticed as a cub reporter at the Post, motoring to and from assignments in a huge yellow Packard roadster with red stripes and rumble seat (veterans at the paper groused that the automobile’s weekly upkeep probably matched their salaries). Ned cut a wide swath through Washington’s night life as a dashing, devil-may-care, and eminently eligible bachelor — in short, the perfect match for Evalyn Lucille Walsh.
Ned and Evalyn had met at his mother’s Friday-evening dancing class, and from then on — when both were in Washington — the two were nearly inseparable companions. Her Irish immigrant father, known as the Colorado Monte Cristo, probably was the only Washingtonian wealthier than John R. McLean. After 20 years of buying up abandoned mines and undeveloped claims, Tom Walsh had stumbled across a huge gold-bearing quartz vein at the deserted Camp Bird Mine in Ouray, Colorado. Overnight, he was a millionaire.
Walsh and his socially ambitious wife, Carrie Lee, had also moved to Washington before the turn of the century. They built the palatial mansion at 2020 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., which today is the Indonesian Embassy. The $835,000 home had 60 rooms, electric elevators and dumbwaiters, a four-story reception hall lighted through a twenty-by-forty-foot panel of stained glass, a Louis XVI ballroom, and a retinue of two dozen servants to take care of everything. The family preferred to call the home simply “2020.”
“Of all the things in this world,” Evalyn later wrote, “I hate boredom the most.” As a child, she stole nips of crème de menthe from her father’s liquor closet, squandered her allowance on ermine tails, and drove a series of governesses to look for other work. Her parents packed her off to Europe with a $10,000 line of credit, ostensibly to study French and art and music, but she preferred fashion (buying clothes) and travel (giving her chaperones the slip). Evalyn bribed her parents into buying a Mercedes by telling them of her infatuation with a slightly unsavory Italian prince.
Evalyn had something important in common with Ned — she was a spoiled brat — and not surprisingly the two, save for occasional spats, got along famously. They were engaged at least a half dozen times before finally marrying in 1908. Ned had acquired an early taste for booze, and a year before his marriage at 22, his nerves were so jittery from drinking that he rigged up a handkerchief sling to steady his hand as he held a cocktail glass. As a precondition of their marriage, Evalyn extracted a pledge from Ned to quit drinking, a promise he kept many times.
The parents of the silver-spoon children planned a magnificent and opulent wedding ceremony, but Ned and Evalyn spared them the trouble by eloping to Colorado. After several brief vacations, the two left for an extended honeymoon that would take them through most of Europe and the Middle East in the Packard, two Mercedes touring cars, and even a camel caravan. (“One day, in Leipzig,” Evalyn wrote, “we lost patience with the fact that we only had one Mercedes and went overnight to Paris and bought an extra one.”) They had been given $100,000 each by their fathers, as sort of a consolation prize for their foregone wedding celebration, and Ned and Evalyn managed to spend every cent of it — and more — before their return to the States. In Paris, the carefree newlyweds stopped off at Cartier’s, where Ned bought Evalyn a little honeymoon keepsake: the pear-shaped, 92½-carat Star of the East diamond. The stone was so huge that the couple’s dinner guests later came to call it, in whispered tones, the “carafe stopper.” On reaching the American shore, Evalyn was obliged to smuggle the $120,000 diamond through customs because the couple had, once again, run out of money.
After returning to Washington, Ned stepped into a promotion at the Post as its business manager, though it should have been evident that he couldn’t manage his own business, let alone that of a major metropolitan newspaper. His father doled out a strict monthly allowance of $1,000, but Ned could never seem to make ends meet, so he hit Evalyn’s father up for money — $7,000 on one occasion, $10,000 a few months later, and so on.
Ned and Evalyn soon made a big splash in the headlines when their first son, Vinson Walsh McLean, was born on Dec. 18, 1909. As the heir to two fabulous fortunes, the child was quickly dubbed the “million-dollar-baby,” a label that more alarmed than pleased the McLeans, who feared kidnapping plots. Little Vinson spent most of his time at Friendship, the McLean family’s 75-acre country estate north of Georgetown on Wisconsin Avenue (the site today of McLean Gardens). He was pampered and protected in every possible way. Armed bodyguards watched his every move, and he was surrounded by a platoon of nurses, servants, and tutors. When the doting parents sensed that Vinson was lonely, they obtained a companion by renting another child from his parents.
The showering of Walsh and McLean money over the nation’s capital was so profligate that even the normally reserved New York Times paused in 1911 to ask, “Is Washington Cornering Our Multi-Millionaires?” After counting them among “the pioneers of the millionaire colony here,” The Times dutifully took note of the McLean residence, “a bright spot in Washington’s social history,” and observed that the Walsh dinners were “marvels of culinary and artistic skill.” No wonder Washington was proud of this astounding parade of affluence, willing to tolerate — even be amused by — the antics of Ned and Evalyn. The city’s cave-dwellers were being forced into early retirement, as Washington’s smart set ushered in the Jazz Age, replete with big bands, ballrooms, and booze.
Following Tom Walsh’s death, Ned and Evalyn left on another wild European trip, speeding from one gambling casino to another. Back in Paris, they stopped in again to see Pierre Cartier, who showed them what was perhaps the most exquisite gem in the world: a blue, 47-carat stone with a dark history — the Hope Diamond. After returning home, Ned decided to buy the diamond for Evalyn, who was not concerned in the least about its baleful reputation. He paid $154,000 for it (though the sale price at the time was reported to be nearly twice that), and arranged to have it kept at the McLean family’s I Street mansion during the day and transported to a safe-deposit vault at night. Ned even bought a special automobile to shuttle the armed guards to and from the trust company’s building.
JOHN R. McLEAN, ALWAYS “POP” TO NED, died of cancer at Friendship on June 9, 1916. Afflicted with jaundice and a seemingly incurable case of hiccups, his trust in all others had been warped by paranoia. He had barricaded himself in the rambling, Georgian-style mansion, convinced that Ned was trying to poison him and threatening to shoot his son on sight. There was, finally, a reconciliation but only after Ned had retained a Pinkerton squad to get him safely inside the house.
When the elder McLean’s will was read, Ned and Evalyn were shocked to discover that he had left The Cincinnati Enquirer and The Washington Post in the custody of the American Security and Trust Company, dictating that his estate not be broken up until twenty years after the death of his son’s children. Moreover, his will was carefully crafted with one conditional clause after another, suggesting that he realized his son was woefully unfit to manage the family newspapers and other investments.
All of this, of course, was particularly disturbing to Ned. “I am only holding the Post for you,” his father had once written him. Ned felt the trust arrangement was belittling; by doling out the family fortune in allowances, it held a grown man up to ridicule. Ned and Evalyn became determined to break the terms of his father’s will, and he went to court claiming that his father had not been “of sound and disposing mind” when drafting his will. With former secretary of state Elihu Root as his attorney, Ned forced the trust company into a compromise settlement of the suit: He was made a co-trustee of his father’s estate, then estimated at $25 million, in addition to a prior agreement that he serve as editor-in-chief of both the Enquirer and the Post. He was not exactly prepared, however, for a career as newspaper editor. As Evalyn later wrote, “He would not have recognized a piece of news — not even if the man who bit the dog likewise bit Ned McLean.”
But with his added responsibilities at the Post, Ned McLean seemed to settle down a bit from his wilder days as a youth, and Washingtonians took it that maybe — just maybe — he had finally grown up. He and Evalyn had two more sons (John R., Jr., in 1916, and Edward B., Jr., in 1918), and began spending more time in Washington and less in Bar Harbor and Palm Beach. On occasion, they still had tempestuous battles: Evalyn had left Ned in 1915 with the defiant gesture of chartering a yacht, but he had won her back after sending 60 consecutive telegrams begging forgiveness. Their up-and-down relationship was more amusing than angry, and in the end, Ned always seemed to make things right. They became the frequent guests of Nicholas and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, at whose home the favored twin diversions were drinking and poker. Princess Alice, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter,described the sessions in this way: “the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand — a general atmosphere of waistcoats unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and spittoons alongside.” It was at one of the Longworths’ poker parties that Ned McLean met the man who, more than any other, was to change his life.
His name was Warren Gamaliel Harding.
SENATOR HARDING ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON IN 1915 with no aspirations for higher office. He seemed to take neither himself nor his job too seriously — he avoided even minor controversies and studiously worked to keep his political enemies list short. If Harding had one claim to fame, it was his looks: He had the chiseled countenance of a statesman. In preparation for his six-year term, Harding and his wife Florence (whom he called the “Duchess”) had purchased a newly built brick duplex at 2314 Wyoming Avenue, N.W.
The desk drawer in Harding’s Senate office always contained a flask of his favorite bourbon — for the smoother transaction of official business — and he found himself nearly unable to say no to invitations for an afternoon of golf or an evening of poker. To Harding, the chambers and anterooms of the Capitol, along with golf courses and poker tables, were a collective refuge from the domineering Duchess. She was given to endlessly badgering him, her raspy voice edged with anger, pushing him until he no longer could contain his rage. Finally, as her criticism reached a fever pitch, Harding would turn to her and snap, “Goddammit, shut up.” Only then would he have the solace of the Duchess’s silence.
Up until the time he met Warren G. Harding, Ned McLean had summoned up little direction in his pay-as-you-go life. While he had managed to wrest away the management of two newspapers from his father’s estate, he possessed little of John R.’s strong-willed determination or character. Ned was regarded in Washington as sort of a kind-hearted buffoon; a naive fish in a cruel pond; or, more charitably perhaps, a playboy publisher. But now, almost by accident, he had become a friend of a future president. McLean must have sensed that some of the political power his father had accumulated in small chits over the years was about to be his in one fell swoop; once again, he was to have something substantial without the burden of having to lift a finger for it.
As the 1920 presidential election neared, two events were to bring the Hardings and the McLeans into a more intimate friendship. Mrs. Harding had been seriously ill, and it was Evalyn who rushed to her side to comfort her, to rescue her from psychological desolation. After the Duchess’s recovery, Evalyn began gracefully introducing her to Washington society. Upon leaving a gathering of the so-called smart set, the Duchess’s question to Evalyn was always the same: “What did they say of me?” In 1919, the McLean’s “hoodoo” gem, the Hope Diamond, exacted a tragic toll on the family, and it was the Duchess’s turn to reciprocate with kindnesses. While the McLeans were attending the 1919 Kentucky Derby in Louisville, young Vinson eluded his valet, ran across the roadway in front of Friendship, and was killed by a passing Model-T Ford. The child’s playthings — like midget ponies and a brightly painted carnage that once belonged to General Tom Thumb — were, to the McLeans, only rueful reminders of happier times.
But with his friend on the 1920 Republican presidential ticket, Ned found a way to forget the tragedy by plunging into the high-stakes political world of his father. He severed one important connection with the past. Democratic nominee James M. Cox had called on the McLeans in hopes of securing endorsements from the Enquirer and the Post, editorial imprimaturs that would have been matter-of-factly granted under John R.’s ownership of the papers. Ned, however, wanted Harding to win — and wanted it badly — so he did everything within his power to make sure that happened, short of an outright endorsement, which Harding himself had cautioned against.
During Harding’s front-porch campaign for the presidency in Marion, Ned and Evalyn were frequently at his side. When Harding occasionally left his hometown for a round of speeches, Ned had his own private railway car, the Enquirer, hooked up to The Superb, the Republican campaign train. After Harding soared, and the two couples seemed nearly inseparable, at least from a social standpoint.
Harding rewarded Ned’s puppy-dog faithfulness by putting him in charge of all arrangements for his inaugural celebration. Ned’s plans were so garish and expansive, however, that a few party-pooping senators, led by isolationist William E. Borah, began to publicly grumble that he was going overboard. Such a celebration, Borah said, hardly befitted an administration pledging austerity. Harding caved in to the complainers — as he often did — and settled for a simple swearing-in ceremony and a modest White House reception. (McLean was thoroughly disappointed, but made up for it by inviting the new cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge and his wife over to I Street for an enormous dinner and reception.)
After agonizing over his cabinet appointments, Harding began filling up the lower ranks of the executive bureaucracy with friends, campaign workers, and Ohio cronies. “God,” he complained to a friend, “I can’t be an ingrate.” Ned McLean, in turn, was rewarded with something he considered a juicy plum of patronage: a dollar-a-year appointment as a special agent of the Justice Department, along with the accompanying paraphernalia — a code book, government identification card, and starred badge.
By now, Ned was an unofficial member of Harding’s cabinet. He loaned his father’s old office-in-a-home at 1508 H Street to Attorney General Harry Daugherty and his right-hand man, Jess Smith. Ned saw to it that the two were comfortable. He dispatched his 50-year-old servant, Walter DeMarquis Miller, to be “valet, butler, chambermaid, and everything,” and also sent over a cook. The liquor was delivered in suitcases, and Armour and Company obligingly provided free hams and bacon. For security, the booze was locked up in John R.’s old wall safe. The the new administration’s unofficial patronage and social headquarters (not to be confused with the Little Green House on K Street, site of the bootlegging operations). McLean kept it well supplied with liquor and food, and Attorney General Daugherty once estimated that he had up to 500 visitors there daily — a steady stream of job-seekers, influence-peddlers, and assorted others seeking to buy or sell political favors. “The love nest,” he called it.
Two evenings a week, Harding convened a poker game at a rectangular table in the north end of the White House library. Just as she had done for years, the Duchess hovered in the background, mixing drinks and occasionally cooking scrambled eggs for the poker-players. When the cocktail glasses were emptied, Ned or one of the others would say, “Duchess, you’re laying down on the job,” whereupon she would pour another round. After getting to know Mrs. Harding a little better, Ned called her “Boss.”
At least once a week, what Harding called his “poker cabinet” gathered elsewhere, usually at either the McLeans’ I Street mansion or at Friendship. For Harding, who in gloomier moments likened the White House to a prison, the freewheeling sessions were a chance to completely unwind in the company of friends who would not sneer at his suspenders or chewing tobacco.
Two afternoons a week were devoted to Harding’s other passion, golf. Ned was willing to do everything for the president but caddy. In 1921, McLean spent $300,000 to build a nine-hole course on the grounds of Friendship, importing the sod from Switzerland. Harding was not much better than a duffer (his average score was 101), but Ned could not play even that well. So, once again, his money came to the rescue. He hired a nationally known golf professional, Freddie McLeod, to be his full-time tutor, at $10,000 a year. Harding, whose favorite section of the newspaper was the sports page, closely followed prize-fighting, too, and Ned stood ready to indulge the president’s whims. The day after heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey knocked out French boxer Georges Carpentier in Jersey City, films of the fight were rushed to McLean’s I Street place to be shown before an audience that included Harding, Daugherty and Smith, cabinet members, and several foreign ambassadors.
Ned’s high-rolling habits even earned him the attention of Harding’s least favorite political allies, the “drys.” (Harding had never really been opposed to the stuff; in 1919, the year before national prohibition, his liquor bill for one month had been more than $500.) The chief lobbyist of the powerful Anti-Saloon League passed a warning along to the president, via a clipping from something called the Auto Piano Weekly, published out of New York. An excerpt:
“The continued rush of applicants for federal jobs to the White House is giving wide-spread circulation in the Capitol to a story that is causing the Anti-Saloon League and other ‘drys’ grave concern. At the time the Hardings moved into the executive mansion aspirants for soft government berths had noticed that the incoming President had been the guest of Edward B. McLean (playboy newspaper publisher), who is reputed to have the most extensively stocked cellar in Washington.”
For 18 years, since his father had bought The Washington Post in 1905, Ned McLean had been enjoying a fun-and-games ascent to the top of Washington society and politics. But 1923 was, suddenly, to change all that. In June, the Hardings left for Alaska. Ned and Evalyn, rather than going along, as they had done so many times in the past, decided to get some rest at Bar Harbor. The presidential journey ended with Harding’s death in San Francisco on August 2. The McLeans rushed back to Washington upon hearing the tragic news, Ned to accompany the funeral train and Evalyn to console the Duchess. For the next few weeks, she stayed with Evalyn at Friendship, burning in the fireplace some of Harding’s personal papers she thought ought not be preserved for history.
But history was not to be denied the truth about Harding’s scandalous administration. For Ned McLean, the Harding era had been the best of times. But now, with the President’s untimely death, the worst of times were yet to come.
IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF JANUARY 9, as Democratic Senator Thomas J. Walsh (no relation to Evalyn) lay sleeping in an overnight Pullman traveling southward from the nation’s capital, a curious telegraph message passed along the wires overhead. Its destination, by no coincidence, was the same as Walsh’s — a millionaire-in-hiding’s cottage in Palm Beach, Florida. The coded text, transmitted over a private wire from a secret office within The Washington Post, read: JAGUAR BAPTISTICAL STOWAGE BEADLE 1235 HUFF COMMENSAL FITFUL LAMBERT CONATION FECUND HYBRIDIZE. The 12-word telegram, signed “W.O.D. ,” was just one of hundreds recently buzzing between the Post and Palm Beach. William O. Duckstein, confidential secretary to the newspaper’s publisher and editor, had been keeping the wires hot with cryptic messages for his boss, Edward B. McLean.
McLean was terrified. He had sequestered himself in his Palm Beach cottage in a last-minute, desperate effort to avoid testifying before Walsh and his congressional investigating committee. His proffered excuse was “severe sinus trouble,” but in reality he was plagued by an acute case of rattled nerves. McLean’s condition, however, did not keep him from feverishly orchestrating batteries of high-priced attorneys and influential friends in Washington, all as part of a clumsy campaign to divert Walsh from his trail.
But the Montana senator, like a hound on a hot scent, sniffed something rotten, and McLean’s long-distance string-pulling only fueled his determination to get some answers from the man who seemed to be running away from him. So Walsh, easily the most aggressive member of the Senate Public Lands Committee, had decided he would single-handedly take the panel’s investigation to Ned McLean.
Against his will, McLean was being slowly sucked into a scandal that up to now had been mostly rumor and suspicion, guilt by innuendo. But it was a situation from which he could not neatly extricate himself, as he had done so many times in the past. Alcohol, his frequent refuge from reality, provided no security this time. His millions could not buy safety; his money, in fact, had gotten him into this fix in the first place. And even his team of lawyers, including a former attorney general of the United States, was unable to call the dogged Walsh off the scent.
Less than a month from his 38th birthday, Ned McLean was not weathering the pressures very well. Just a few years earlier, he had cut a dapper and handsome figure: his six-foot-three frame carried 220 pounds better than ought to have been expected, a trim black mustache added the necessary dose of distinction, and immaculately tailored suits completed the portrait of a distinguished newspaper publisher. Dark, deep-set eyes gave him, when he wanted them to, a kindly, charitable look.
But now, Ned McLean’s face had taken on almost a haunted look. Added weight seemed to make his eyes sink even further into his face, his hairline had receded a bit, and his chin had virtually vanished. In contrast to the boundless enthusiasm of his wife, he seemed aloof, sullen, withdrawn. Much of the time he looked unhappy, and was.
The message McLean received in the wee hours of the morning of the Ninth, decoded, said: WALSH LEAVES COASTLINE TONIGHT 12:35 INSTEAD OF SEABOARD. LAMBERT ON SAME TRAIN. Wilton J. Lambert, Ned’s regular attorney, had an important mission — namely, to save his client from a perjury charge. Though Senator Walsh, now en route to Florida, did not yet know it, McLean had done an old friend and poker companion, former Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, a small but dangerous favor: He had agreed to tell Walsh’s committee by letter that he had loaned Fall $100,000 in 1921, when in fact he hadn’t. Fall had played his friend Ned for a fool and, not entirely out of character, Ned had happily obliged. As Walsh was preparing to grill his quarry, Ned was telling Fall (his guest in Palm Beach): “Albert, this thing has gone as far as it can go. I have gone down the line for you. I have done everything, but it has come to the point where I have got to tell the truth.”
The “thing” was Teapot Dome. When McLean did tell Walsh the truth, the senator was “dumbfounded” at the startling disclosure. His investigation of government oil leases, limping along for several months, had gotten mired in trivia and technicalities. Walsh finally had gotten discouraged, and seemed ready to close down the public hearings. Ned McLean, however, had unwittingly provided revelations dramatic enough to change his mind. McLean’s testimony, in fact, would be the turning point in Teapot Dome, breaking wide open what would remain until Watergate the biggest political scandal in American history.
It was also the turning point in his own life. His subsequent two-and-a-half hour ordeal before Walsh’s committee was, by all accounts, convincing, but beyond that, McLean was reduced to concluding: “I don’t know what on earth this is all about.” His testimony was peppered with statements like “I’ll be goldarned if I know, Senator, but I am telling the absolute truth,” and, “I have read so many of these telegrams my head is dizzy, Senator, trying to figure them out.”
Those coded telegrams, ironically, had provided the somber drama of Teapot Dome with its only moments of comic relief. In them, McLean was, alternately, “TKVOUEP,” “the Chieftain,” or “the Big Bear.” Some were from Ned’s own Justice Department code book, others from the Bentley code commercially available in bookstores. The cryptic messages — like HAXPW SENT OVER BY BONKA AND HOUSEHOLDER BONKA SULTRY TKVOUEP PROZOICS SEPIC BEPELT GOAL HOCUSING THIS POUTED PROPONENT — found niches in the front pages of newspapers all over the nation, to the endless amusement of their readers. Ned McLean, the publisher of The Washington Post, had become the laughingstock of the entire nation.
After 17 bittersweet and stormy years, Ned and Evalyn’s marriage was on the rocks too. Each sued the other for divorce in 1925, and Ned took to drinking with a vengeance. On one occasion, Evalyn received a Christmas package decorated with tiny reindeer and holly. Tucked inside was proof of Ned’s sense of humor: a Latvian divorce summons. Evalyn finally decided she had had enough in the middle of 1929, when she took the children with her and moved into the Little House on H Street. John F. Major, Ned’s right-hand man, said the loss of Evalyn left him “like a ship without a rudder. He didn’t give a damn where he went or what he did.”
Up to now, Ned had sought peace at his $30,000 ducking camp on the Potomac River, or at his $90,000, 2,600-acre Belmont Farm in Leesburg, Virginia. In 1928, he had been the area’s leading owner of thoroughbred horses, winning more than $200,000 with horses like The Porter, Crossbones, Prince of Wales, Port Harlem, and Neddie.
Ned packed his bags and went to Los Angeles for a few months, where he met Rose Douras Davies at a Santa Monica party thrown by her sister Marion, the movie actress and mistress of William Randolph Hearst. He leased a house in Beverly Hills from actor Tom Mix, and the two whooped it up for a while. He even brought her back to Washington, where, with obvious embarrassment, he introduced her to some staffers at the Post.
Beginning with their separation, Ned had been paying Evalyn $7,500 a month, but the payments became irregular in the early part of 1930 and stopped altogether in September. On November 8, 1930, charging desertion and non-support, Evalyn sued Ned in Washington for separate maintenance, asking for at least $4,000 a month. He had sued for divorce several times, but legal maneuvers by Evalyn’s attorneys frustrated every effort. Nasty rumors about Ned started floating around Washington; one particularly mean one said he had a “urination syndrome,” once displayed in the fireplace of the White House’s East Room during the Harding administration, on another occasion down the trouser leg of the Belgian ambassador.
From 1931, Ned was tied up in legal battles over his continued ownership of The Washington Post. Early in the year, he apparently wanted to sell the paper. But Evalyn, aghast at the prospect of losing the Post for her two surviving sons, managed to block the sale in court; she then began legal procedures to try to have Ned removed as co-trustee of his father’s estate. She charged that he had squandered at least $100,000 borrowed against the Belmont Farm in Leesburg on an extravagant European fling with Rose Davies. Ned had, apparently, run out of money in Paris, where he managed to borrow nearly $8,000 from the owners of the Hotel George V. He eventually wound up in the American Hospital there. Ned’s problem was an old one — too much booze — but the newspapers generally chose to report the ailment as myocarditis (inflammation of the heart’s muscular walls).
In May 1932, McLean began seeing The Washington Post pulled out from under him. Corcoran Thom, president of the American Security and Trust Company, the McLean estate’s other trustee, charged that Ned had been using money owed to the Post for payment of personal debts. Within 10 days, McLean was forced to yield all control over the Post’s future, including the veto power over possible sale granted by his father’s will, and to resign from his positions as publisher of the newspaper and president of The Washington Post Company. Four days later, Eugene Meyer would buy the newspaper at public auction.
IN 1931, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE SALE of The Washington Post, journalists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen had written of the dissolution of a dynasty:
“There was a day when two bands imported from New York jazzed alternately at the opposite ends of the McLean ballroom, when several hundred bottles of champagne were opened in an evening, and when the most select of social Washington danced the New Year into the dawn. There was also a day when Ned McLean dined regularly at the White House, and on such days that he didn’t, Warren Gamaliel Harding dined or cocktailed with him. There was a day when The Washington Post influenced administration policy and brought both Evalyn and Ned power and prestige.”
Those days, of course, were gone. Up until her death in 1947, Evalyn Walsh remained the matriarch of Washington society, the Hope Diamond still worn on her breast as a symbol of independence and vanity. In her ghostwritten autobiography, published in 1936, she said of her estranged husband: “I often wonder what he would have been, what he might be, if he never had much money. But he had money, or rather, it had us.”
Lamentably, Ned McLean never had a chance to contest Evalyn’s verdict of him. In October 1933, his wife had filed a petition asking the court to appoint a committee to manage her husband’s interests. As a result, psychiatrists were called in to testify, and on Halloween Eve a sheriff’s jury in Towson, Maryland, declared McLean to be insane and incapable of managing his own affairs. For nearly seven more years, Ned McLean remained confined to the closed ward of the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, a private mental institution near Baltimore.
He died on July 27, 1941, at the age of 55. He remained hostile to all outsiders who addressed him by his right name, insisting right up to the end that he was not — and had never heard of — Ned McLean.
This article originally appeared in the February/March 1982 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan