Casper

Warren Harding once choked a man inside the White House. Honestly, he had it coming. His name was Charles Forbes. Forbes had met Harding and his wife on a trip to Hawaii years earlier. He was charming, fun, and a great poker partner, which mattered a lot to Harding. When Harding became president in 1921, he made Forbes head of the brand new Veterans' Bureau. It was one of the biggest jobs in Washington. Hundreds of thousands of men had come home from France wounded, gassed, or shell-shocked. The bureau had a huge budget to build hospitals, buy supplies, and care for them. Forbes treated it like a personal piggy bank. He toured the country picking sites for new veterans' hospitals, and the contractors who wanted those jobs knew who to take care of. Forbes partied with them, traveled with them, and steered contracts their way in exchange for kickbacks. Hospital construction costs ballooned. Then there was the warehouse. At a massive government depot in Perryville, Maryland, the bureau had stockpiles of supplies meant for veterans' hospitals. Sheets, towels, blankets, gauze, medicine. Forbes declared huge amounts of it surplus and sold it off to a private company for a tiny fraction of what it was worth. Trainloads of brand new goods went out one gate while the bureau was buying replacements at full price through the other. At the same time, the bureau was buying some things at wildly inflated prices. It bought so much floor cleaner that, by one estimate, it would have taken a hundred years to use it all. Meanwhile, veterans were waiting for care that didn't come. Word eventually reached Harding, and he did not take it well. Forbes was called to the White House. Harding grabbed him by the neck and shook him the way a dog shakes a rat, calling him a "double-crossing bastard." The only thing that saved Forbes was the President's next appointment walking in on the two of them. Whoever that poor visitor was, they walked into the Oval Office and found the President of the United States throttling a member of his own administration. Forbes was out. He sent in his resignation in early 1923. Things got darker from there. A few weeks later, the bureau's top lawyer, Charles Cramer, took his own life. Then Jess Smith, a close aide to Harding's attorney general, did the same. Washington was buzzing about how deep the rot in the Harding administration went. Harding knew it was coming. Around that time he told a journalist that his enemies weren't the problem. It was his friends who kept him up walking the floor at night. That summer, during a trip out West, Harding fell ill and died in San Francisco on August 2, 1923. After his death, the scandals came pouring out. Teapot Dome got the headlines. But Senate investigators dug into the Veterans' Bureau too, and the numbers they put on waste and fraud ran into the tens of millions, with some estimates far higher. Forbes's life fell apart. His wife divorced him. Then, in 1925, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government and sentenced to two years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The man trusted to take care of America's wounded soldiers ended up behind the walls of one of the most famous prisons in the country, a few miles from Fort Leavenworth and the Army he'd been robbing. It's called the Veterans' Bureau scandal, and almost nobody learns about it.