When they were teenagers growing up in Marion, Ohio, Nan’s sister Elizabeth, in the presence of Warren Harding and his wife Flo said, “You know, Mr. Harding, Nan talks of nothing but you! She has little campaign poster pictures of you all over the walls of her room!” Nan would later write she was “secretly elated that he should actually be told of my adoration in my presence, though outwardly (I was) greatly perturbed.”
When Harding was the Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio in 1910, Nan Britton, then 13, was so obsessed that she shadowed him. She would go to his office at the newspaper in Marion and sit outside trying to spot him in the window. She would even follow him home on Mt Vernon Ave sometimes, walking a block behind.
Several years later in the spring of 1917, upon graduation from secretarial school in New York, Nan wrote a letter to Harding in Washington (then a Senator) to help her find a job. He responded in three days, ending his letter saying that “there was every probability of his being in New York the following week.”
Nan admits that she read the letter multiple times. “Under the cordial phraseology of his letter there was more than the mere desire to be of assistance to me. It was almost sweet ingratiation. ‘You see I do remember you’ was his concluding sentence.”
His second letter included “I like your spirit and determination. It is like I have always imagined you to be.” That second line thrilled her to no end.
They met at the Manhattan Hotel on Madison Ave & 42nd Street. The two greeted each other in a reception room about 10:30 in the morning. She was 20 years old. He had secured the bridal chamber in the Manhattan and invited her up so they could continue their conversation without interruption.
“We had scarcely closed the door behind us when we shared our first kiss, it seemed sweetly appropriate.”
“I shall never, never forget how Mr. Harding kept saying, after each kiss, ‘Oh dearie, tell me it isn’t hateful to you to have me kiss you!’ And as I kissed him back I thought that he surpassed even my gladdest dreams of him.”
Harding was 52. By most accounts he was still involved in a twelve-year affair with his wife’s former friend Carrie Fulton Phillips.
His first love letter to Nan in June 1917, while she was staying at the Colonial Hotel in Chicago, was forty pages long.
Thanks to Warren Harding’s assistance, a month later, Nan Britton went to work for U.S. Steel Corporation in New York. On July 30 Mr. Harding came to New York for a visit. The couple registered at a hotel on Broadway and in a room high enough not to be bothered by street noise. Nan wore a “pink linen dress which was rather short and enhanced the little girl look.” After the bell boy threw open the room’s two large windows and left, Nan lost her virginity. “I became Mr. Harding’s bride – as he called me – on that day.”
Shortly thereafter there was a loud rap at their door which was then unlocked and two men entered their room. They began questioning the couple, telling them they would be escorted to police HQ and would have to answer to a judge for their actions of which they knew nothing about. Then, when the two men discovered a hat with the inscription WG Harding, they realized they had the wrong man. They apologized and quickly excused themselves.
Nan learned she was pregnant in Feb 1919. She resigned her position in July and moved to a rooming house in Asbury Park, NJ. Baby Elizabeth Ann arrived on October 22. Warren sent her ample funds to pay both her and the baby’s expenses. An adoption arrangement was worked out with sister Elizabeth and husband Scott to take Elizabeth Ann, however Nan still had legal guardianship and therefore full control over the child.
Harding formally accepted the nomination for president in Marion on July 22, 1920. He delivered a speech to thousands in Garfield Park and his front porch campaign in Marion began.
Warren G Harding was elected the 29th president in a landslide on Nov 2, 1920, his 55th birthday. That morning he played a round of golf at Scioto Country Club in Columbus and then made the drive home to await the returns.
In June 1921, Nan made her first visit to the White House. She was escorted into a room with one window and then through another door which led into his own private office where her and the president made love.
In 1923, Nan got an offer to travel in late summer with a former secretarial teacher and a party of twenty-five to Europe. At the same time, the president left on a business trip to Alaska.
As Nan lay down to sleep while in France one night – August 2 – she became aware of something floating in her room above her. To her horror, she finally surmised it was a coffin draped with American flags and heaped with blood red roses.
She found out the next day Warren Harding had died on August 2, 1923, in San Francisco of cardiac arrest. “The world seemed without bottom. Things suddenly lost their meaning,” she wrote.
Because Harding had no legal will, Nan spent the next year telling her story to the Harding family, but little assistance came. In late 1926, therefore, to finance her and her child’s living expenses, Nan turned to writing a tell-all book about her torrid affair with the former president.
“Bills were introduced in the U.S. Congress to stop publication of Nan’s book or to make possession of it illegal. The New York City Vice Squad raided the printing plant and confiscated all the plates. No major reputable book publisher would touch the book. All turned it down.”
Finally,The President’s Daughter, dedicated to unwed mothers, was published in 1927 and became a best seller.
Former First Lady Florence Harding died on November 21, 1924, certainly knowing of his infidelities, but possibly not knowing of her husband’s love child.
Nan Britton never married. She lived a full life, passing away at age 94 on March 21, 1991, in Sandy, Oregon.
It wasn’t until 2015 that DNA test results proved Elizabeth Ann Blaesing, Nan’s daughter, was indeed the daughter of American President Warren G Harding.
Sources: The President’s Daughter by Nan Britton; Lena Fiszman, https://www.booksamillion.com; The President’s Daughter by Nan Britton, Sam Sloan (Preface), www.goodreads.com; President Warren G Harding’s Love Letters: Released by the Library of Congress by Benjamin Shapell, Sara Willen, July 29, 2014, www.shapell.org; The President’s Daughter by Nan Britton, 1927; Women’s History Month speaker, Ohio Statehouse, Sherry Hall, Warren G Harding presidential sites, Mar 18, 2025; Ohio’s Presidents by Heather S. Cole, 2024; Confronting the presidents by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, 2024; Son of Harding’s out-of-wedlock daughter wants former president’s body exhumed by Julie Carr Smyth (AP), Sep 13, 2020, Akron Beacon Journal, www.beaconjournal.com; Warren Harding’s Child, David Bruce Smith’s Grateful American Foundation, https://gratefulamericanfoundation.org; Did you know: This US president played golf after voting on election day, www.golfdigest.com; Featured picture of Warren G Harding was taken in front of the Athletic Club in Columbus, just before his nomination for president in 1920. Courtesy the Columbus Metropolitan Library.