September 11, 2023 • 46 mins
A man is found dead from a gunshot wound in Washington DC in 1923. He’s an aide and a confidante to a powerful politician, the attorney general of the United States. Was his death a murder or a suicide? Author Nathan Masters tells us the story at the center of his book: Crooked.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Wheeler really was a David versus Doherty's Goliath. He was
an untested freshman senator who took on Washington's most cunning
political operator, and yet he essentially won.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones On Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:49):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers may,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. A man is found dead from a
gunshot wound in Washington, d C. In nineteen twenty three.
(01:12):
He's an aide and a confidant to a powerful politician,
the Attorney General of the United States. Was his death
a murder or a suicide? Author Nathan Masters tells us
the story at the center of his book, Crooked.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Well, let's get into the story.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Where does it make sense to you to start with
which person? You've got several players happening here.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, there are two big players, but I would actually
start with somebody who's not one of them. I'd start
with a man named Jess Smith who was discovered dead
of a gunshot wound almost one hundred years ago to
the day that we're recording this Memorial Day, nineteen twenty
three in the Attorney General's apartment, the bedroom of the
Attorney General of the United States. And this man, Jess Smith,
(01:57):
he was widely known around Washington as a as a
sort of a power player behind the scenes. Nobody really
understood exactly what his relationship with the Attorney General was.
Nobody really understood exactly what he did. They just knew
that he wielded a lot of influence. And this is
the dead body that opens this mystery nonfiction novel, right,
and a suspicious crime scene because first of all, the
(02:19):
very first law enforcement officer on the scene is the
director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigation,
which later became the FBI, a man named Billy Burns.
Smith's head was found seemingly stuffed into a waste basket
filled with burned papers, burned government documents, burns. The director
of what became the FBI somehow lost, maybe put lost
in quotation marks, lost the handgun, lost the suicide weapon
(02:42):
or murder weapon.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
And when he.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Finally called local authorities under the scene, he wielded a
heavy hand in directing their investigation and directed them forcefully
to a verdict of suicide or to a conclusion of suicide,
when there was really way too much going on for
the conclusion to be that quick.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Justice living with the Attorney General of the United States,
For those of us who don't know, can we define
what this person does and what is their sphere of
influence like in government? What kind of power do they
actually have.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Are we talking about Jess Smith or the Attorney General?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
The Attorney General, just so we know who Jess Smith
is influencing to begin with.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, the Attorney General in the nineteen twenties, especially today,
but even in the nineteen twenties was a very powerful office.
I mean it actually went back to the beginnings of
the Republic. But the Attorney General was entrusted with the
Department of Justice, which was created around eighteen seventy to
better enforce reconstruction laws, basically better enforced federal power in
the defeated South around this time. The attorney general he
(03:45):
was the ultimate arbiter of prosecutorial decisions. He could step
in and say to a US attorney in one of
the federal districts, don't prosecute this. He Shepherd did pardon
applications through the federal government. He managed the Bureau Investige Gation,
which was the chief investigatory body of the federal government
at the time or still is today. He wielded tremendous
(04:07):
power and his friend Jess Smith worked actually had a
desk in the Anti room just off the Attorney General's
private office. Wasn't on the government payroll, in fact, refused
a job on the government payroll, and he was in
there every day. He was seen with bundles of Department
of Justice files under his arms. He was always in
the Bureau of Investigations offices. Nobody knew quite what he did,
(04:29):
but he was so close to power. People knew that
he wielded big influence.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Is there a confirmation, like a real confirmation that they
had an intimate relationship?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
These two men.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
And actually, now it's probably a good time to introduce
who the attorney general was at this time.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, you just reminded me that I haven't named him yet.
So the Attorney general was Harry was Harry Doherty. He
was a machine politician from Ohio. He was essentially Ohio's
Republican political boss, and his pet project through most of
his political career was shepherding a man named Warren G.
Harding into the White House, a man that he plucked
(05:07):
from obscurity, got elected to as a Lieutenant governor of Ohio,
got elected to the US Senate, and then Doherty engineered
Harding's unlikely election in nineteen twenty to the presidency. He
was the definitive dark horse candidate, and yet he took
the Republican nomination and he took and he took the
presidency in November, and Doherty as his prize after engineering
(05:30):
Harding's election, he claimed the office of Attorney general. You know,
he was technically a lawyer, although he was essentially a
lobbyist or a political operator, but he wanted the office
of attorney general over anything else.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
When we talk in the wider context of presidents and
corruption of all the corrupt presidents we've had.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Would you put.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Harding in top five, top ten? Because his administration was
a mess, a mess.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
It was a total mess.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
And if we're speaking in terms of administrations, and I
think we separate the president as a person from the administration,
if we can just do that for a second, then yes,
it's in the top top three at least now. Now
there's no evidence that President Harding himself was complicit in
any of the corruption. I mean, he's certainly responsible for
everything that happened under his watch. Very late into his life,
(06:17):
in fact, his last days, he really came to regret
I believe, letting these scandals fester beneath him in his presidency.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay, so we've got these two main people, the Attorney General,
Harry Doherty, and then you've got his assistant, slash companion,
slash mystery man, Jess Smith. And Jess is the one
who has found shot to death with his head in
a waste paper basket in Doherty's apartment.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And what we want to talk about now.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Is the specifics that we know of the relationship between
Doherty and Smith, because I'm assuming at some point, either
you know, outwardly or behind closed doors, people are whispering
if Doherty is responsible for this, since this is the
closest person to Jess Smith, right.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yeah, immediately after Smith's death, those whispers began, Those rumors
found their way through Washington and ultimately found their way
to the ear of the senator who investigated Harry Doherty.
But what we can conclude about their relationship behind closed doors,
it's not much. Smith was referred to in the day
as Doherty's you know, most intimate friend or partner in everything,
(07:26):
which we can we can read as coded language for
you know, gay lovers. But there is no I didn't
I didn't come across any conclusive evidence for that.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
I will say that the Hardings themselves, Warren G.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Harding and his wife Laurence the first Lady, they treated
them essentially as a couple. They invited them to all
social functions in facts quite reminiscent of the relationship between
jig Or Hoover and Clyde Tolson, where it was probably
an open secret that they were romantically involved, even if
there wasn't a sexual component to it, but nobody really
spoke about it openly, which made it really hard for
(07:58):
me as a as a writer. And researcher to to
say anything conclusively about it.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Well, let's talk about the quote unquote investigation. I know
you said. Billy Burns with the Department of Justice arrived
and immediately tries to frame this as a suicide.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Is Doherty his boss?
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Since Doherty is the Attorney General and Billy Burns works
for what would become the FBI, is he a direct boss?
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Doherty is maybe not his direct supervisor, but effectively his supervisor.
Maybe not on the org chart. So one of Doherty's
first things upon becoming Attorney General was he launched a
reorganization of the Bureau of Investigation, which already had a competent,
respected director, but he preferred his own head of the
(08:42):
Bureau of Investigation. In fact, Billy Burns and Harry Doherty
were longtime friends. They had grown up together in Ohio.
They had met each other when they were both launching
into their respective careers, and there was a deep loyalty,
a deep bond of loyalty between the two of them.
In fact, Burns played a big role in the nineteen
twenty presidential campaign, and we have to remember that Doherty
(09:06):
was Harding's campaign manager. He actually functioned as Harding's campaign manager,
Billy Burns helped suppress numerous scandals that would have emerged
about Harding's illicit relationships or his affairs with multiple women,
including women who had been keeping love letters from him,
one who was raising Harding's love child. Billy Burns helped
(09:27):
keep those stories quiet. You know, he had people raid
local police offices and steal police records, et cetera, that
he paid them blackmail funds. Billy Burns was excellent at
uncovering secrets but also at keeping them okay.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
So it made sense.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It made sense that Dougherty would want that man installed
as the head.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Of the Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Somebody could trust to do anything care at the most
sensitive assignments.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So we cannot believe right now what Billy Burns is saying,
as sort of the lead detective in this Do we
have any objective information about the forensics at the scene, lockdoors,
the weapon that was used, the position of the body
where the gun was Do we have any kind of
source that can be trusted at this point?
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Nothing?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
No, there's unfortunately, there are no sources that are surviving.
There's just there are just references to sources, references to
police records that existed in.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
The nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
There were subsequent investigations into this crime scene long after
the events of my book, but unfortunately those primary sources
are just missing or presumably destroyed.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What is your understanding of what the scene was like
when Billy Burns arrives.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And what does he see?
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Is is it just I mean, I'm just picturing Jess
Smith slumped into this waste paper basket with burned papers
filled to the top in a dramatic scene.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Was there anything to add to that?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, there was a there was a bullet lodged into
the door jam. I mean the most the most dramatic
element is that is that, Yeah, there were these burned
government documents in the waste basket. He was at the
foot of the Attorney General's bed, the carpet just soaked
with blood.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
It was a grizzly scene. But Burns was no stranger.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Those So is there a possible way, knowing what you know,
that this could have been a man who took his
own life. If there's a bullet in a door jam,
with the trajectory of where did the bullet enter his head?
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Yeah, it entered into his right temple.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
In fact, there were rumors going around he was right handed,
but there were rumors going around that either the bullet
entered as left temple and he's right handed, or vice versa.
So in these rumors emerging, Mealy, there was a lot
of suspicion which fueled those rumors.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
It was incorrect.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Actually, the trustworthy sources that I came across said that
the bullet entered the temple that you would expect if
he were holding the gun with his natural hand.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Can I assume that your untrustworthy sources would be the
hearst newspaper.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, as I'm sure you know, back in the nineteen
twenties there were overly explicitly partisan newspapers.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
It was quite common, right, I mean, like the Los.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Angeles Times was a republican newspaper, and then you'd have
I mean, the New York Times was always sort of
an impartial, the non partisan newspaper. But there were republican
democratic newspapers, and you always have to infer a little
bit of spin when you're reading their reports.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Which paper, do you know, local paper would be the
paper that was really skeptical about this as a suicide,
because what happens, does it hit the newspapers later that
day or the next day that this powerful man who
is very close to the Attorney general, who is very
close to the president, is dead in the Attorney general's
(12:28):
own apartment.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
It made national headline, front page headlines all across the nation.
And I wouldn't say that there was any one paper
that was particularly skeptical. They all acknowledged that there was
a big element of mystery to this death.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
So what happens next?
Speaker 1 (12:44):
It comes out, it says there's a verdict of suicide.
Does the coroner say this is definitively a suicide?
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Eventually, local authorities did come onto the scene, the local
DC police officers and the District of Columbia corner.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
They ruled it a suicide. That was done almost immediately.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
In fact, it might have been the certificate of course,
probably would have been signed later, but the coroner was
on the scene and made that judgment there in the room.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Okay, what is the next step?
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Does this story just die, so to speak, in the
newspapers or is there anything that ramps it up in
the opposite direction.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
It dies in the newspapers for a while, it lingers
in Washington gossip circles. Probably the American people aren't, probably
not aware of it, or they've forgotten about it. But
in Washington, gossip circles certainly, And eventually we get to
the other maid character in this book, a man named
Burton Wheeler who's elected to the US Senate in nineteen
(13:40):
twenty two and as a freshman senator, decides he wants
to launch an investigation into the Department of Justice and
specifically into Attorney General Harry Doherty, and those rumors find
his ear. You know, he's interested in anything he can
find about potential wrongdoing in the Justice Department. But certainly
the name Jess Smith when whistleblowers are calling him him,
when sympathetic newspaper reporters get on the phone, the name
(14:03):
of Jeff Smith keeps coming up over and over.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
What is his beef with Doherty or Jeff Smith, whatever?
What is the thing that's sticking in his crawl about
this story? Why attach himself as a freshman senator where
you're thinking he's just trying to ingratiate himself to the Senate,
I'm assuming at this point, why go after such a
powerful department?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, so most freshman senators, you know, are as Wheeler
himself said, are expected to sort of sit quietly in
the back of the room, like you know, well, reread children,
and just watch the old gray haired deans of the
Senate do their thing and learn, and maybe after you've
been elected a couple times, you can really start to play.
Burton Wheeler didn't usually play by rules like that.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
He was no fan of tradition.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
You know, he first got the idea to target the
Justice Department in nineteen twenty two while he was running
for Senate Attorney General Doherty. You know, he already had
a reputation as being on the side of capital versus labor. Right,
he was on the side of big business versus the
working man. And Burton Wheeler was a fierce progressive, strident progressive,
which is a little surprising given that he comes from
came from Montana out in the west, but at the
(15:07):
time Montana had this really strong progressive street. Burton Wheeler
was a champion of organized labor. He had fought against
corporate interest. He fought against the corporate monopoly the mining
company that controlled Montana state politics, both as a state
legislator and then as the US Attorney for Montana, so
that was the background. In nineteen twenty two, Harry Doherty,
as Attorney General orchestrates the most sweeping injunction ever imposed
(15:31):
on American organized labor to end a nationwide railway strike.
And this injunction prohibited strikers from even commenting to the
newspapers for standing on soapboxes. Right, and Wheeler saw a
great injustice in that he saw Attorney General Doherty as
stepping in on the side of big business against the
working man. And so he pledged on the campaign trail
to quote get Doherty. And so when he arrived in
(15:54):
Washington months later, that was his top priority.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Okay, So what this Wheeler in all of his digging
around and you know, nosing around or try to find information,
what does he start to uncover not just about corruption
in Harding's administration or within the Attorney General's office and
with Doherty himself, but about specifically what happened with Jess Smith.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Right, Yes, he came across a lot of stories, a
lot of corruption stories, but with Jess Smith specifically. He
actually got a tip that Jess Smith's ex wife widowed
ex wife.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
I don't know what the term for that would be.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Oh wow, Okay, that came out of nowhere to me. Okay,
let's talk about that for a second.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, So Jess Smith had been married for a very
short time. Was a brief, ill fated marriage about twelve
years before the events of this book. He was married
to a woman named Roxy Stinson who lived in the
same town in Ohio called Washington Courthouse. For reasons that
might be obvious, the marriage just didn't work out if
he really was gay or whatever the term would be
(16:58):
at that time. She filed for devorce against him, claiming cruelty,
but nobody could believe that he was guilty of cruelty
against any woman, but especially this woman that he very
clearly adored, And in fact, after they divorced, they remained
the closest of friends, and when Jess Smith eventually went
to Washington, he would make frequent trips back to Ohio
(17:18):
and just share just gossip about all the things he
and Harry Dougherty had been doing in Washington, all the
quote deals that they'd been making. Once he came back
with a money belt filled with seventy five thousand dollars
in cash, which is a lot of money today, it
was certainly a lot more back then, gave her just
as gifts, sent one hundred dollars bills loose in an envelope,
gave her blank stock certificates that had been freshly issued
(17:39):
by these corporations that had been doing business with American government.
So Roxy Stinson, Jessaminth's ex wife knew about all of
this stuff, or.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
She had inklings.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
And then when Wheeler found out that she knew, he
made it his priority to get out to Ohio, and
he personally served a Senate subpoena on her to make
her his investigation's first witness.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Wow, not to geek out on nineteen ten to nineteen
twenty two divorce proceedings. But I wonder before we talk
about what Wheeler found out, I wonder if cruelty is
actually equal to alienation of affection. In the nineteen tens,
I'm not sure they would have had that phrase alienation
of affection, you know what I mean, Cruelty might have
been withholding the intimacy between a man and a woman.
(18:24):
That seems pretty likely to me, But who knows.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
That's a very good point. Hadn't considered it, that's probably
the case.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, if they're friends afterwards, that's what I would think boy.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
The furviage for how they used, if any sort of
legal documents very different than now. Okay, So Wheeler travels
and he meets with Roxy, the widowed ex wife whatever
we want to call her. What does she say about
her ex husband, who she's very fond of.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
It sounds like the one time she's.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Reluctant to speak out. She doesn't really want to solely
his memory. And we're talking about you know, Wheeler found
Stinson maybe about nine months after Smith died, so she
doesn't want to solely his memory. But while this is
all happening, Arry Doherty and his cronies, especially like some
people in the Senate, are trying to lay all the
(19:11):
blame for the rumors of impropriety within the Justice Department
on Jess Smith. And she thinks that's unfair because she
knows that it wasn't just just Smith doing this, because
Smith had been telling her over and over, yeah, Harry
and I are doing this or you know, we're working
on this deal. So she knew that Doherty was complicit
in anything that Smith was involved in, so she wanted
to set the record straight. It took a Senate subpoena
(19:32):
to get her to Washington. But when she you know,
when she was sworn in and put before the committee,
she basically told everything, and she was she remembered, she
had a sharp memory. She remembered it all. She was
a really compelling witness. All of the newspapers described her
as like the most attractive woman in Washington courthouse or town.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Of course they did, of course they did.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, some of the reports are are.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Little sexualized, I'm sure. Yeah, Oh yeah, really gross. Yeah,
let me go back real quick. So are we saying,
unless I'm misunderstanding you, that a year after his likely
companion lover died via suicide, that Harry Doherty is now
blaming a lot of things on Jess Smith, using him
(20:16):
as a scapegoat for things that happened within the Justice Department.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Is that right?
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Yeah? Not Harry Doherty himself.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Oh, he wasn't even at the time acknowledging any of
these accusations against him. So you know what happened was
Senator Wheeler stood up on the floor of the Senate
and gave this speech basically this is what I would
say irresponsible speech, repeating verbade him all of these rumors
that he'd heard without any evidence to back them up,
and then Doherty's allies responded, and Doherty's allies decided to
(20:44):
use Jess Smith as the scapegoat.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
What were the accusations exactly?
Speaker 1 (20:49):
What are we talking about money or covering up all
these investigations. You're talking about that people covered up secrets
or dug up other secrets.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, I mean Wheeler had heard from a whistle blow
or at the Federal Trade Commission that the FDC had
recommended dozens of cases for prosecution to the Justice Department,
and under Doherty, the Justice Department had prosecuted none from
that too. He had been too cozy with criminals. And
these were unsubstantiated rumors at the time, but with organized crime,
(21:18):
with bootleggers, right, Prohibition was a huge thing then, and
bootleggers were especially the bigger operators within bootlegging, were trying
to find some angle on the federal government. And the
rumors that were later backed up that Dougherty was involved
in that.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Give me some samples.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
I know we talked a little bit about what Roxy said,
but on the Senate floor you said she was very
composed and very credible. What were the things that she
said that she heard directly from Jess Smith or you know,
just witness just materially there.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
So there were certainly details that made her testimony compelling,
such as the seventy five thousand dollars in the money belt,
but she revealed schemes that were kind of bizarre, you know.
For instance, she accused Harry Doherty and Jess Smith. I
suppose of orchestrating this criminal conspiracy to counter vent a
federal statute against the interstate distribution of boxing films. And
(22:26):
this was a statute that had been enacted about fifteen
years earlier. It was amid this racist hysteria against the
black fighter Jack Johnson. I think I'm getting that right.
But in any case, there was this federal law in
the books against taking a fight film from one state
to another, and Doherty and Jess Smith were huge boxing fans,
and it seemed that, for no reason other than Dererty
(22:48):
thought it would be fun, he came up with this
scheme to get around that law, and using his friends,
using his influence as Attorney General, he had his friends
distribute these films. There were people who sort of took
a nominal fine. There was this big fight in New Jersey,
the fight film was moved to New York, it was
exhibited there. The person in charge of the exhibition was
(23:09):
prosecuted and fined, but then Doherty would make sure that
there was just a small find.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
You pay fifty bucks and you'd be off the hook.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, and Doherty there was evidence that he received kickbacks
from the scheme, but I think my personal.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
Take is that he just really enjoyed doing it.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
He was at heart he was a schemer, and he thought, oh,
this would be fun to find a way around this
federal law.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
What is the reaction after Roxy's testimony here in the Senate?
What is the reaction from the lawmakers who are witnessing this.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
So the committee was it was five senators, it was
three Republicans and two Democrats, and pretty much everybody, despite
the partisan breakdown, was shocked. Even the most conservative Republican,
who you would expect to be most sympathetic to Doherty,
he seems sort of swept off his.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Feet by this testimony.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
And there were accusations beyond just this bizarre fight film,
that Dougherty done favors for these companies that were under investigation.
They basically quashed investigations and received stock certificates as a result,
there were allegations that he had been involved with bootleggers,
that he'd been doing quote whiskey deals, which was the
language that she used. So all of this was quite shocking, right.
(24:20):
The gist of her testimony was that the man who
was supposed to be upholding the supremacy of federal law
was doing everything he could to undermine it for whether
it was for personal gain or just for pleasure, he
was acting exactly the opposite of how the Attorney general
should act. So yes, most Senators were outraged, and in fact,
this became a huge national spectacle. Right, Not just the senators,
(24:44):
but the American public were outraged by what was going on.
They were shocked. They had never really before considered just
how dangerous the office of Attorney General could be. But Wheeler,
through his investigation, and through his use of the national
media and this emerging national media that involved tabloid newspapers
and radio, the American public was able to follow along
(25:07):
almost in real time as this scandal unfolded. It was
really the first time in American history that that could
happen in real time.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
So is Jess Smith's suicide talked about also in front
of this committee during.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
All of this.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Are there people who have been whispering about this? And
now the voices are louder because of all of this.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Actually one of the first mysteries or first issues that
Wheeler dispensed with, right he had Jess Smith's ex wife
on the stand and she was herself torn about what
had actually happened, but you know, she was able to
recount some of the odd ways that Smith had been acting.
In the days before his death, Harry Dougherty essentially betrayed Jessmith,
(25:47):
and he actually did hold him up to be the scapegoat.
Doherty had been in office for two years, there were
already these rumors of wrongdoing were emerging. Warren Harding called
him into the Oval office and said, you know, you
need to do something about Jess Smith. I'm hearing all
these wild allegations. Both of them knew. I believe that
that Doherty was probably complicit in that. But the understanding
(26:09):
between the two men was that we're going to pin
this on Jess Smith. So Doherty essentially banished Jess Smith
from the Justice Department, from his personal life, from Washington,
and Jess Smith, who was not only an intimate friend
and perhaps lover of Doherty, but he idolized Doherty right.
He lived for Dougherty. Doherty was his purpose in life.
When Doherty banished him, his life was shattered, right like
(26:32):
his son went out.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
So he went back to Ohio.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Roxy Stinson tried to console him, but he was a
broken man, and so the narrative of suicide then became
kind of compelling. And in fact, probably that revelation was
more disturbing about Harry Doherty than allegations that Doherty had
had him knocked off or killed. Right, Doherty had betrayed
the closest person in the world to him. Roxy Stinson
(26:57):
said that she considered him morally responsible for his death,
even if not legally.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
What is the time frame of when Jess Smith returns
to Ohio and is comforted by Roxy because he's rejected
by Harry Doherty, and when he obviously returns and is
somehow in this man's apartment and then dead with a
gunshot wound to the head, face down in some papers
which we should talk about the papers at some point too.
(27:25):
What were these burning papers that we were talking about.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
No one knows.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Unfortunately, uh Billy Burns that guy Golly, he covered it
all up.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
I know, I know. There were a few papers. Actually,
Burns was probably a part of this. There were a
few papers that had escaped the flames and burns or
somebody put them in a pouch. An assistant Attorney general
took them to Jess Smith's funeral in Ohio in a
sealed pouch and gave them to the executor Smith's a
state who happened to be Harry Doherty's brother, man named
(27:56):
mal Doherty. Mal Doherty opened up to one looking side
and burned the papers on the spot.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Man.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
So, yeah, there's no the good evidence has gone unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Boy do we know that timeframe between when the breakup
happens and when this something happens to get him back
into this apartment?
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, it's roughly three weeks. So Smith said, okay, I'll
go out to Ohio. He spent some time with Roxy Stintson.
Eventually Harry Doherty came back out west to Ohio again,
and for a time it seemed like they had made up,
even if Smith wasn't going to be welcomed back to Washington.
While they were in Ohio together, they seemed to fall
into their old habits. In fact, Smith was writing even
(28:33):
though again he had no job on the government payroll.
He was writing letters on Justice Department stationary, and I've
seen those letters in the Library of Congress. But then
they had a blow up. There was a shack, they
actually called it the Shack. It was like a hunting
lodge that they shared a place called Deer Creek, Ohio.
Harry Doherty was taking a nap. Somebody came up on
what he said urgent business with Harry Doherty, and jess
(28:55):
Smith woke them up, and Harry Doherty just threw a
fit through a tantrum. First, Jessmith, probably with every word
in the book, told Jessmith that he would have to
walk the twenty miles back to Washington Courthouse on his own.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
They never really made up after that.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Smith asked Doherty for permission to go back to Washington,
just collect his papers, wrap up his affairs before returning
to Ohio. So that's how he ended up back in Washington.
They were not spending time together in Washington. In fact,
Hardy knew what was going on obviously and invited Doherty
to stay in the White House in a guest room
of the White House while Smith was in the apartment
that they shared, and that's why Doherty wasn't there that night.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
So Roxy said all of this to the.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Committee, she told all that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well, okay, so everyone is horrified both at the corruption
of the Attorney General's office and within the administration. And
then on top of that, just how terrible Harry Doherty
had have been to this man he was supposed to
be close to, and now the man's dead. How does
Wheeler tie all of this together? There's so many pieces
(29:57):
that can lead headlines in the newspaper. What is the
narrative that he has put together to present to the
Hurst papers and everybody else.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Well, unfortunately, he never really does write that narrative. He
in fact, his committee never issues a formal report. The
hearings drag on for several months, but it's really the
it's the newspapers that are doing the work there. Wheeler's
witnesses were all over the place. His next star witness
was this really shady detective who worked in the Bureau
(30:28):
of Investigation, a man who had spied for Germany during
World War One against his own country, but who nonetheless
found his way into the Bureau of Investigation under Harry Doherty.
You know, Wheeler was basically going after anything he wanted.
I know that for Wheeler himself, it must have been
particularly disturbing to see the links that Harry Doherty would
go to. This was a man capable of anything. I mean,
(30:49):
Harry Doherty fought back against roxy Stinson's testimony by deploying
some blackmail that he'd been holding over her. He'd basically
been telling her not to testify because he had pretty
good evidence that she had been carrying on an affair
with a married man in Cleveland, Ohio. And a few
days after she testified, he actually his lawyers. He and
(31:11):
his lawyers, in a formal letter to the Senate, deployed
that blackmail openly accused her of having an affair. So
Wheeler saw this and realized that this man was capable
of anything, and so he probably wasn't very surprised when
a few days later, maybe a week or so later,
he found that he himself, Wheeler himself was in the
legal crosshairs of the Justice Department.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Okay, what I was wondering, is Wheeler, who just seems
like someone who is a holier than now? And do
we find any skeletons in his closet? Or does Dougherty.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Well, so, Wheeler was generally an upstanding, upstanding politician.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
He was a man of principle. It was hard.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
There were Justice Department agents, Bureau of Investigation agents crawling
over Montana for weeks, and they really, for the longest
time struggled to find any dirt on Wheeler. There was
a long standing rumor that he had been carrying on
an affair with a married woman and they had gotten
into an automobile accident together. They found that, but they
couldn't find anything to really substantiate it. Ultimately, they started
(32:11):
looking into his professional career because he was at the time,
even as he was a US senator, he was still working.
He saw had a private practice as a lawyer, which
wasn't uncommon at the time. Today that's very uncommon, but
at the time it was actually pretty usual for a
congressman or or senator to carry on private legal practice.
And they found what might be considered a conflict of
interest there, and they spun it up into something really
(32:33):
big and went after Wheeler With that.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
You would think that a senator not would be protected necessarily,
but with everything that's happening, you would think that Dougherty
would be backing off so that it doesn't look like
he is persecuting the person who is saying he just
wants to get down to the truth on behalf of
the American people. Does this not smack to everyone in
(32:59):
the government as vindictiveness and somebody who is now trying
to create a vendetta with the person who is really
shining a light on the corruption.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
No, Kate, you're onto something there. He was as a schemer,
as a manipulator behind the scenes, you know, at twisting Arms.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Dougherty was a master, right.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
He was the most ruthless, most cunning political fixer in
Washington at the time. Probably, but yeah, maybe his political
instincts weren't all that good, right, He probably would have
been better served to stay quiet, especially not just go
after the Wheeler's star witness, which there was a big
backlash to that, right, I mean, even at the time,
people thought it was just unseemly for an Attorney general
(33:41):
to attack a witness's personal character like that. And of
course that was gender too, right, especially you can't go
after a woman like Wheeler said.
Speaker 4 (33:49):
It was an unmanly thing to do, that is what
he said.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
So this did not this revelation that she was likely
having an affair with a married man in Ohio. This
did not seem really to credit Roxy in any way
as far as the committee went or the public, you.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
Know, it did not.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
And all that I can say, yeah, all that I
can see is maybe he thought that this was the
way he maintained his credibility because he operated largely by
collecting information on people and much like Jagger Hoover later on,
and holding it over them. And maybe he needed to
demonstrate that, hey, if I have this threatening, if I
have this compromising information and you know, cross my path,
(34:28):
I'm going to deploy it.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
And he had to do that.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
So the committee does nothing.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
You said by the end of this marathon long hearing
where you have people coming in, and you said it
dragged out for months. Did the newspapers lose interest at
some point? Or did the committee? Did the Senate lose interest?
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Ultimately, sure, things petered out, but not before Attorney General
Doherty was forced to resign.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Right so Wheeler Wheeler won.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He got his big victory, which partly explains why he
never issued a report. The other reason he never issued
a report is because Doherty and his brother Mal Doherty
dragged on the proceedings. So mal Doherty was the president
of what was called Midland National Bank, which is where
Harry Dougherty and just Smith did their banking. And so
when Wheeler was looking for hard evidence that they were
(35:16):
involved in shenanigans, he needed to see their bank ledgers,
and as the president of the bank, Malderty, Hardy's brother,
refused access, he defied a Senate subpoena. The Senate ended
up sending its sergeant at arms to Ohio to arrest
mal Doherty and bring him before the Senate.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
The federal court stepped in before that happened.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court,
and this is now nineteen twenty seven, so this is
about three and a half years after this is all happening.
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the Senate's right to issue
subpoenas and compel testimony, which was a huge victory for Congress,
right for Congression, for the power of congressional oversight. But
because that took so long, the investigation kind of petered out.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So Harry Doherty is gone, He resigns, and he's no
longer the Attorney General.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Where does he go, so.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
He begins a decade's long bitter quest to restore his legacy.
He's essentially banished from Washington. Nobody wants to deal with
him anymore. I don't think he holds any office ever. Again,
I don't think he even has an illegal practice. He
writes a self serving memoir with actually the co author
of The Klansman, the book that became birth of a nation.
(36:27):
That's an interesting choice for a co author, right, writ's
a self serving member trying to justify his actions and
gets a little bit into the Jess Smith story. But
that's essentially all that he does.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Do you think that the collective consciousness in the nineteen
twenties and maybe for decades going forward, however long the
story lasted, was that Harry Doherty murdered Jess Smith because
he knew too much.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
I know that that version of the story still survives
to this day. I mean I actually studiously avoided watching
it because I didn't want to nix up fact with
fiction at all. But I know that this storyline made
its way into Boardwalk Empire, the HBO series. Harry Doherty
and Jess Smith were a big part of Gorvidal's novel Hollywood,
(37:15):
which was set in the roaring twenties around this time. Again,
I avoided that, so I don't actually.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
Know the specifics of how the story's told there.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
But I know that people still wonder about what actually
went down.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
What did his family think?
Speaker 1 (37:27):
And well, I'm assuming Roxy thought that Harry Dougherty was
responsible for Jess's death.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Again, she claimed that he was morally responsible. She said
that given everything that she knew about how he had
been acting, how he had been putting his affairs in order,
you know, how he had actually gone to his Justice
Department office and gathered up all the compromising information and
burned those papers. Even if he felt betrayed and probably
anger despair at being betrayed, he wanted to do one
(37:54):
final favor to Harry Doherty. He still loved the man,
and he sacrificed himself. I mean, he burned the papers
and and he got rid of himself. You know, he
was of course, he knew that he was a witness
to all of Harry Doherty's crimes.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
And the legacy of the Harding administration is really such
a mixed one, is it not.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I Mean, I don't even know why I'd say mixed it.
It's a pretty bad legacy, they sure. I mean people
forget that Warren Harding helped push through the first International
Disarmament Agreement, So there's an accomplishment there.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
One of the first things he did after taking office
was he cut the federal income tax rates. I mean,
he accomplished things that some people that some people could celebrate.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
You know. This scandal in the Justice Department was just
one of many.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
There was. Of course, we hadn't even mentioned Teapot Dome,
which was in the Warren Harding administration, which was bribes
for oil rights scandal. There was another huge scandal within
the Veterans Bureau where people were taking advantage of you know,
America's veterans. There was all this corruption happening. So I
think history's judgment against the administration is pretty severe. There
(39:00):
have been attempts recently to revise history's judgment of Harding himself.
There is evidence that in his final days, Harding wanted
to expose the scandals, wanted to clean up his administration. Again,
there's no evidence that he was personally complicit. So recent biographers,
including very interestingly John Dean, who was the White House
counsel under President Nixon, who happened to come from the
(39:22):
same town in Ohio, Maryon, Ohio as Warren Harding. He
wrote a biography of Warren Harding, he more or less
absolves him of responsibility.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
What do you think the reaction was between Harding and
Doherty when this all came down, when he had to
resign when it was all said and done, this must
have been a massive embarrassment on every level for Harding
to see how many of these criminals, because really that's
(39:52):
what it comes down to. Whatever happened with Jess Smith,
it really was that Harry Doherty allowed people to not
be prosecuted who probably should have been in prison from
violent things and really bad things.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Well, for Harding, he was lucky in that he was
spared of the embarrassment of this because he died actually
the very first days of August twenty twenty three, when
we're coming up on the centennial of that, So he
died before any of these scandals emerged, So he did
not have to see his own reputation tarnished.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
He did not have to see his.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Friend and political mentor, Harry Doherty a force from office.
All of those problems fell on his successor Calvin Coolidge,
and this was the problem that Coolidge didn't want, especially
because this all happened during an election year.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
And I think, if I remember right, Coolidge was sort
of was he not like sort of a breath of
fresh air where it was very much like the country
just came off of all of these terrible corruptions and
there's prohibition happening and everything, and then Calvin Coolidge was
a little like the old grandfather who was going to
stabilize everything.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, he was a little slow, I think to certainly,
certainly was slow to force Dougherty from office.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
He did it for what he considered principal reasons.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
He thought Doherty was Warren Harding's choice for attorney general.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
He was his friend.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
If Harding was going to stand up for anybody, it
was gonna be Dougherty. So Harding was the man elected president,
not Coolidge. So Coolidge thought it was his responsibility to
stand by Doherty. So he stood by him for a
long time, to his political peril. Right, I mean, he
took a political hit for doing this. He thought it
was a principled stand. But yeah, Coolidge, especially with Teapot Dome,
he acquitted himself pretty honorably.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
He actually stepped in.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
When Harry Doherty refused to investigate the teapot dome scandal,
Coolidge stepped in, said.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
Doherty, you're no longer responsible for this.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
He appointed special counsel a Democrat and a Republican to investigate,
and actually called the Republican into the White House and said,
however it shakes out, you got to follow follow the
leads wherever they go. It doesn't matter if the Interior
Secretary who's responsible is a Republican.
Speaker 4 (41:52):
Just go after the wrong doers.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
So Coolidge acquitted himself pretty well.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
I think if.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Jess Smith had not died, either by suicide or murder,
whatever happened to him, do you think any of this
would have come out? Do you think Harry Dougherty would
have just retired at some point and faded into the
would work with money that he had with you, the
power that he had, or do you think at some
point this had to have been revealed.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
I think it was more likely to come out if
he'd survived. It was hard for Wheeler to prove anything
conclusively because Jess Smith was the one firsthand witness to
a lot of these transactions.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Right Roxy Stintson.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Was recounting things that she'd heard secondhand, so it would
probably would have come out quicker. In fact, I think
the plan was to hold Jess Smith up as this scapegoat.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Wow. Okay, what is the lasting message that you wanted
people to take away from the book? About government? About corruption,
about interpersonal relationships where people are supposed to trust one
another and someone is betrayed.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
What I hope people take away from it is that
is the importance of a free per and congressional oversight
in reinging in an out of control presidency or administration.
Sometimes bad political actors truly do operate above the law.
Right Doherty never spent a single day in jail for
any of his crimes. He avoided jail time because he
(43:17):
was a shrewd lawyer. He was, really, but also because
of his high political office right as Attorney General, he
was kind of shielded from that. But Senator Wheeler kind
of shrewdly recognized that and said, well, even if he
can't be convicted in a court of law, we can
convict in him in the court of public opinion.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
And he did right.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
His investigation shocked Americans into caring about what the Attorney
General was doing what was happening in the Bureau of Investigation,
what was happening in the Justice Department, and he relegated
Harry Doherty to the ash bin of history. That's a
lesson that we can have for today when we're worried
about maybe we can never send this bad political actor
to jail, but we can at least discredit him in
(43:56):
history's judgment.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
What ends up with Wheeler? What does he do?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
So Wheeler has an interesting story after all of this happens.
You know, he started out as this fierce progressive and
then kind of wound up as a cranky conservative. He
opposed the New Deal, He opposed FDR's court packing scheme.
He most infamously opposed American intervention in World War Two.
He was aligned with the America First Movement, was friends
with Charles Lindberg. That led, of course, to charges of
(44:22):
Nazi sympathy. His reputation really suffered over the decades despite
this real triumph early in his career. What maybe a
lot of your listeners might be from Earth is a
direct consequence of this story. A movie called Mister Smith
Goes to Washington. It was loosely patterned after the story
here right, it was. In fact, the original screenplay was
titled A Gentleman from Montana, which was Wheeler's home state.
(44:44):
It's about, you know, this young, naive politician arriving in
the Senate and having the tables turned on him when
he tries to take on a corrupt older politician.
Speaker 4 (44:52):
That's exactly what happened to Wheeler.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
And when Frank Kappra premiered the movie in Washington in
nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 4 (44:58):
He shared a box with Wheeler. They watched the movie together.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
You know, really going back to the victim here and
ending with the victim Jess Smith, there is a blind
devotion there that just seems so sad, whether or not
it is a physically intimate relationship he had with Doherty
or just you know, emotional. To put that much trust
in someone then to be betrayed must have been just
(45:24):
the final moments of his life. Whatever caused his death
must have been so painful for this man who it
just seemed like, even though he probably was complicit and
a lot of the corruption here, really seemed devoted to
someone who it doesn't sound like really deserved his devotion.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
No, he truly didn't deserve the devotion, and that's something
I wonder I've wondered about whether Smith realized that it's
a tragedy.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(46:24):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(46:45):
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This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Wheeler really was a David versus Doherty's Goliath. He was
an untested freshman senator who took on Washington's most cunning
political operator, and yet he essentially won.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones On Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:49):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers may,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. A man is found dead from a
gunshot wound in Washington, d C. In nineteen twenty three.
(01:12):
He's an aide and a confidant to a powerful politician,
the Attorney General of the United States. Was his death
a murder or a suicide? Author Nathan Masters tells us
the story at the center of his book, Crooked.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Well, let's get into the story.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Where does it make sense to you to start with
which person? You've got several players happening here.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, there are two big players, but I would actually
start with somebody who's not one of them. I'd start
with a man named Jess Smith who was discovered dead
of a gunshot wound almost one hundred years ago to
the day that we're recording this Memorial Day, nineteen twenty
three in the Attorney General's apartment, the bedroom of the
Attorney General of the United States. And this man, Jess Smith,
(01:57):
he was widely known around Washington as a as a
sort of a power player behind the scenes. Nobody really
understood exactly what his relationship with the Attorney General was.
Nobody really understood exactly what he did. They just knew
that he wielded a lot of influence. And this is
the dead body that opens this mystery nonfiction novel, right,
and a suspicious crime scene because first of all, the
(02:19):
very first law enforcement officer on the scene is the
director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigation,
which later became the FBI, a man named Billy Burns.
Smith's head was found seemingly stuffed into a waste basket
filled with burned papers, burned government documents, burns. The director
of what became the FBI somehow lost, maybe put lost
in quotation marks, lost the handgun, lost the suicide weapon
(02:42):
or murder weapon.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
And when he.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Finally called local authorities under the scene, he wielded a
heavy hand in directing their investigation and directed them forcefully
to a verdict of suicide or to a conclusion of suicide,
when there was really way too much going on for
the conclusion to be that quick.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Justice living with the Attorney General of the United States,
For those of us who don't know, can we define
what this person does and what is their sphere of
influence like in government? What kind of power do they
actually have.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
Are we talking about Jess Smith or the Attorney General?
Speaker 1 (03:16):
The Attorney General, just so we know who Jess Smith
is influencing to begin with.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, the Attorney General in the nineteen twenties, especially today,
but even in the nineteen twenties was a very powerful office.
I mean it actually went back to the beginnings of
the Republic. But the Attorney General was entrusted with the
Department of Justice, which was created around eighteen seventy to
better enforce reconstruction laws, basically better enforced federal power in
the defeated South around this time. The attorney general he
(03:45):
was the ultimate arbiter of prosecutorial decisions. He could step
in and say to a US attorney in one of
the federal districts, don't prosecute this. He Shepherd did pardon
applications through the federal government. He managed the Bureau Investige Gation,
which was the chief investigatory body of the federal government
at the time or still is today. He wielded tremendous
(04:07):
power and his friend Jess Smith worked actually had a
desk in the Anti room just off the Attorney General's
private office. Wasn't on the government payroll, in fact, refused
a job on the government payroll, and he was in
there every day. He was seen with bundles of Department
of Justice files under his arms. He was always in
the Bureau of Investigations offices. Nobody knew quite what he did,
(04:29):
but he was so close to power. People knew that
he wielded big influence.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Is there a confirmation, like a real confirmation that they
had an intimate relationship?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
These two men.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
And actually, now it's probably a good time to introduce
who the attorney general was at this time.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, you just reminded me that I haven't named him yet.
So the Attorney general was Harry was Harry Doherty. He
was a machine politician from Ohio. He was essentially Ohio's
Republican political boss, and his pet project through most of
his political career was shepherding a man named Warren G.
Harding into the White House, a man that he plucked
(05:07):
from obscurity, got elected to as a Lieutenant governor of Ohio,
got elected to the US Senate, and then Doherty engineered
Harding's unlikely election in nineteen twenty to the presidency. He
was the definitive dark horse candidate, and yet he took
the Republican nomination and he took and he took the
presidency in November, and Doherty as his prize after engineering
(05:30):
Harding's election, he claimed the office of Attorney general. You know,
he was technically a lawyer, although he was essentially a
lobbyist or a political operator, but he wanted the office
of attorney general over anything else.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
When we talk in the wider context of presidents and
corruption of all the corrupt presidents we've had.
Speaker 3 (05:48):
Would you put.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Harding in top five, top ten? Because his administration was
a mess, a mess.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
It was a total mess.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
And if we're speaking in terms of administrations, and I
think we separate the president as a person from the administration,
if we can just do that for a second, then yes,
it's in the top top three at least now. Now
there's no evidence that President Harding himself was complicit in
any of the corruption. I mean, he's certainly responsible for
everything that happened under his watch. Very late into his life,
(06:17):
in fact, his last days, he really came to regret
I believe, letting these scandals fester beneath him in his presidency.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay, so we've got these two main people, the Attorney General,
Harry Doherty, and then you've got his assistant, slash companion,
slash mystery man, Jess Smith. And Jess is the one
who has found shot to death with his head in
a waste paper basket in Doherty's apartment.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And what we want to talk about now.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Is the specifics that we know of the relationship between
Doherty and Smith, because I'm assuming at some point, either
you know, outwardly or behind closed doors, people are whispering
if Doherty is responsible for this, since this is the
closest person to Jess Smith, right.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Yeah, immediately after Smith's death, those whispers began, Those rumors
found their way through Washington and ultimately found their way
to the ear of the senator who investigated Harry Doherty.
But what we can conclude about their relationship behind closed doors,
it's not much. Smith was referred to in the day
as Doherty's you know, most intimate friend or partner in everything,
(07:26):
which we can we can read as coded language for
you know, gay lovers. But there is no I didn't
I didn't come across any conclusive evidence for that.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
I will say that the Hardings themselves, Warren G.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Harding and his wife Laurence the first Lady, they treated
them essentially as a couple. They invited them to all
social functions in facts quite reminiscent of the relationship between
jig Or Hoover and Clyde Tolson, where it was probably
an open secret that they were romantically involved, even if
there wasn't a sexual component to it, but nobody really
spoke about it openly, which made it really hard for
(07:58):
me as a as a writer. And researcher to to
say anything conclusively about it.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Well, let's talk about the quote unquote investigation. I know
you said. Billy Burns with the Department of Justice arrived
and immediately tries to frame this as a suicide.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Is Doherty his boss?
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Since Doherty is the Attorney General and Billy Burns works
for what would become the FBI, is he a direct boss?
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Doherty is maybe not his direct supervisor, but effectively his supervisor.
Maybe not on the org chart. So one of Doherty's
first things upon becoming Attorney General was he launched a
reorganization of the Bureau of Investigation, which already had a competent,
respected director, but he preferred his own head of the
(08:42):
Bureau of Investigation. In fact, Billy Burns and Harry Doherty
were longtime friends. They had grown up together in Ohio.
They had met each other when they were both launching
into their respective careers, and there was a deep loyalty,
a deep bond of loyalty between the two of them.
In fact, Burns played a big role in the nineteen
twenty presidential campaign, and we have to remember that Doherty
(09:06):
was Harding's campaign manager. He actually functioned as Harding's campaign manager,
Billy Burns helped suppress numerous scandals that would have emerged
about Harding's illicit relationships or his affairs with multiple women,
including women who had been keeping love letters from him,
one who was raising Harding's love child. Billy Burns helped
(09:27):
keep those stories quiet. You know, he had people raid
local police offices and steal police records, et cetera, that
he paid them blackmail funds. Billy Burns was excellent at
uncovering secrets but also at keeping them okay.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
So it made sense.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It made sense that Dougherty would want that man installed
as the head.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Of the Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Somebody could trust to do anything care at the most
sensitive assignments.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So we cannot believe right now what Billy Burns is saying,
as sort of the lead detective in this Do we
have any objective information about the forensics at the scene, lockdoors,
the weapon that was used, the position of the body
where the gun was Do we have any kind of
source that can be trusted at this point?
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Nothing?
Speaker 2 (10:06):
No, there's unfortunately, there are no sources that are surviving.
There's just there are just references to sources, references to
police records that existed in.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
The nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
There were subsequent investigations into this crime scene long after
the events of my book, but unfortunately those primary sources
are just missing or presumably destroyed.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What is your understanding of what the scene was like
when Billy Burns arrives.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
And what does he see?
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Is is it just I mean, I'm just picturing Jess
Smith slumped into this waste paper basket with burned papers
filled to the top in a dramatic scene.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Was there anything to add to that?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, there was a there was a bullet lodged into
the door jam. I mean the most the most dramatic
element is that is that, Yeah, there were these burned
government documents in the waste basket. He was at the
foot of the Attorney General's bed, the carpet just soaked
with blood.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
It was a grizzly scene. But Burns was no stranger.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Those So is there a possible way, knowing what you know,
that this could have been a man who took his
own life. If there's a bullet in a door jam,
with the trajectory of where did the bullet enter his head?
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Yeah, it entered into his right temple.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
In fact, there were rumors going around he was right handed,
but there were rumors going around that either the bullet
entered as left temple and he's right handed, or vice versa.
So in these rumors emerging, Mealy, there was a lot
of suspicion which fueled those rumors.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
It was incorrect.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Actually, the trustworthy sources that I came across said that
the bullet entered the temple that you would expect if
he were holding the gun with his natural hand.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Can I assume that your untrustworthy sources would be the
hearst newspaper.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, as I'm sure you know, back in the nineteen
twenties there were overly explicitly partisan newspapers.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
It was quite common, right, I mean, like the Los.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Angeles Times was a republican newspaper, and then you'd have
I mean, the New York Times was always sort of
an impartial, the non partisan newspaper. But there were republican
democratic newspapers, and you always have to infer a little
bit of spin when you're reading their reports.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Which paper, do you know, local paper would be the
paper that was really skeptical about this as a suicide,
because what happens, does it hit the newspapers later that
day or the next day that this powerful man who
is very close to the Attorney general, who is very
close to the president, is dead in the Attorney general's
(12:28):
own apartment.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
It made national headline, front page headlines all across the nation.
And I wouldn't say that there was any one paper
that was particularly skeptical. They all acknowledged that there was
a big element of mystery to this death.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
So what happens next?
Speaker 1 (12:44):
It comes out, it says there's a verdict of suicide.
Does the coroner say this is definitively a suicide?
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:51):
Eventually, local authorities did come onto the scene, the local
DC police officers and the District of Columbia corner.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
They ruled it a suicide. That was done almost immediately.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
In fact, it might have been the certificate of course,
probably would have been signed later, but the coroner was
on the scene and made that judgment there in the room.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Okay, what is the next step?
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Does this story just die, so to speak, in the
newspapers or is there anything that ramps it up in
the opposite direction.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
It dies in the newspapers for a while, it lingers
in Washington gossip circles. Probably the American people aren't, probably
not aware of it, or they've forgotten about it. But
in Washington, gossip circles certainly, And eventually we get to
the other maid character in this book, a man named
Burton Wheeler who's elected to the US Senate in nineteen
(13:40):
twenty two and as a freshman senator, decides he wants
to launch an investigation into the Department of Justice and
specifically into Attorney General Harry Doherty, and those rumors find
his ear. You know, he's interested in anything he can
find about potential wrongdoing in the Justice Department. But certainly
the name Jess Smith when whistleblowers are calling him him,
when sympathetic newspaper reporters get on the phone, the name
(14:03):
of Jeff Smith keeps coming up over and over.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
What is his beef with Doherty or Jeff Smith, whatever?
What is the thing that's sticking in his crawl about
this story? Why attach himself as a freshman senator where
you're thinking he's just trying to ingratiate himself to the Senate,
I'm assuming at this point, why go after such a
powerful department?
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, so most freshman senators, you know, are as Wheeler
himself said, are expected to sort of sit quietly in
the back of the room, like you know, well, reread children,
and just watch the old gray haired deans of the
Senate do their thing and learn, and maybe after you've
been elected a couple times, you can really start to play.
Burton Wheeler didn't usually play by rules like that.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
He was no fan of tradition.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
You know, he first got the idea to target the
Justice Department in nineteen twenty two while he was running
for Senate Attorney General Doherty. You know, he already had
a reputation as being on the side of capital versus labor. Right,
he was on the side of big business versus the
working man. And Burton Wheeler was a fierce progressive, strident progressive,
which is a little surprising given that he comes from
came from Montana out in the west, but at the
(15:07):
time Montana had this really strong progressive street. Burton Wheeler
was a champion of organized labor. He had fought against
corporate interest. He fought against the corporate monopoly the mining
company that controlled Montana state politics, both as a state
legislator and then as the US Attorney for Montana, so
that was the background. In nineteen twenty two, Harry Doherty,
as Attorney General orchestrates the most sweeping injunction ever imposed
(15:31):
on American organized labor to end a nationwide railway strike.
And this injunction prohibited strikers from even commenting to the
newspapers for standing on soapboxes. Right, and Wheeler saw a
great injustice in that he saw Attorney General Doherty as
stepping in on the side of big business against the
working man. And so he pledged on the campaign trail
to quote get Doherty. And so when he arrived in
(15:54):
Washington months later, that was his top priority.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Okay, So what this Wheeler in all of his digging
around and you know, nosing around or try to find information,
what does he start to uncover not just about corruption
in Harding's administration or within the Attorney General's office and
with Doherty himself, but about specifically what happened with Jess Smith.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Right, Yes, he came across a lot of stories, a
lot of corruption stories, but with Jess Smith specifically. He
actually got a tip that Jess Smith's ex wife widowed
ex wife.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
I don't know what the term for that would be.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Oh wow, Okay, that came out of nowhere to me. Okay,
let's talk about that for a second.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, So Jess Smith had been married for a very
short time. Was a brief, ill fated marriage about twelve
years before the events of this book. He was married
to a woman named Roxy Stinson who lived in the
same town in Ohio called Washington Courthouse. For reasons that
might be obvious, the marriage just didn't work out if
he really was gay or whatever the term would be
(16:58):
at that time. She filed for devorce against him, claiming cruelty,
but nobody could believe that he was guilty of cruelty
against any woman, but especially this woman that he very
clearly adored, And in fact, after they divorced, they remained
the closest of friends, and when Jess Smith eventually went
to Washington, he would make frequent trips back to Ohio
(17:18):
and just share just gossip about all the things he
and Harry Dougherty had been doing in Washington, all the
quote deals that they'd been making. Once he came back
with a money belt filled with seventy five thousand dollars
in cash, which is a lot of money today, it
was certainly a lot more back then, gave her just
as gifts, sent one hundred dollars bills loose in an envelope,
gave her blank stock certificates that had been freshly issued
(17:39):
by these corporations that had been doing business with American government.
So Roxy Stinson, Jessaminth's ex wife knew about all of
this stuff, or.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
She had inklings.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
And then when Wheeler found out that she knew, he
made it his priority to get out to Ohio, and
he personally served a Senate subpoena on her to make
her his investigation's first witness.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Wow, not to geek out on nineteen ten to nineteen
twenty two divorce proceedings. But I wonder before we talk
about what Wheeler found out, I wonder if cruelty is
actually equal to alienation of affection. In the nineteen tens,
I'm not sure they would have had that phrase alienation
of affection, you know what I mean, Cruelty might have
been withholding the intimacy between a man and a woman.
(18:24):
That seems pretty likely to me, But who knows.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
That's a very good point. Hadn't considered it, that's probably
the case.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, if they're friends afterwards, that's what I would think boy.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
The furviage for how they used, if any sort of
legal documents very different than now. Okay, So Wheeler travels
and he meets with Roxy, the widowed ex wife whatever
we want to call her. What does she say about
her ex husband, who she's very fond of.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
It sounds like the one time she's.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Reluctant to speak out. She doesn't really want to solely
his memory. And we're talking about you know, Wheeler found
Stinson maybe about nine months after Smith died, so she
doesn't want to solely his memory. But while this is
all happening, Arry Doherty and his cronies, especially like some
people in the Senate, are trying to lay all the
(19:11):
blame for the rumors of impropriety within the Justice Department
on Jess Smith. And she thinks that's unfair because she
knows that it wasn't just just Smith doing this, because
Smith had been telling her over and over, yeah, Harry
and I are doing this or you know, we're working
on this deal. So she knew that Doherty was complicit
in anything that Smith was involved in, so she wanted
to set the record straight. It took a Senate subpoena
(19:32):
to get her to Washington. But when she you know,
when she was sworn in and put before the committee,
she basically told everything, and she was she remembered, she
had a sharp memory. She remembered it all. She was
a really compelling witness. All of the newspapers described her
as like the most attractive woman in Washington courthouse or town.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Of course they did, of course they did.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Yeah, some of the reports are are.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Little sexualized, I'm sure. Yeah, Oh yeah, really gross. Yeah,
let me go back real quick. So are we saying,
unless I'm misunderstanding you, that a year after his likely
companion lover died via suicide, that Harry Doherty is now
blaming a lot of things on Jess Smith, using him
(20:16):
as a scapegoat for things that happened within the Justice Department.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Is that right?
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Yeah? Not Harry Doherty himself.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Oh, he wasn't even at the time acknowledging any of
these accusations against him. So you know what happened was
Senator Wheeler stood up on the floor of the Senate
and gave this speech basically this is what I would
say irresponsible speech, repeating verbade him all of these rumors
that he'd heard without any evidence to back them up,
and then Doherty's allies responded, and Doherty's allies decided to
(20:44):
use Jess Smith as the scapegoat.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
What were the accusations exactly?
Speaker 1 (20:49):
What are we talking about money or covering up all
these investigations. You're talking about that people covered up secrets
or dug up other secrets.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, I mean Wheeler had heard from a whistle blow
or at the Federal Trade Commission that the FDC had
recommended dozens of cases for prosecution to the Justice Department,
and under Doherty, the Justice Department had prosecuted none from
that too. He had been too cozy with criminals. And
these were unsubstantiated rumors at the time, but with organized crime,
(21:18):
with bootleggers, right, Prohibition was a huge thing then, and
bootleggers were especially the bigger operators within bootlegging, were trying
to find some angle on the federal government. And the
rumors that were later backed up that Dougherty was involved
in that.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
Give me some samples.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
I know we talked a little bit about what Roxy said,
but on the Senate floor you said she was very
composed and very credible. What were the things that she
said that she heard directly from Jess Smith or you know,
just witness just materially there.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
So there were certainly details that made her testimony compelling,
such as the seventy five thousand dollars in the money belt,
but she revealed schemes that were kind of bizarre, you know.
For instance, she accused Harry Doherty and Jess Smith. I
suppose of orchestrating this criminal conspiracy to counter vent a
federal statute against the interstate distribution of boxing films. And
(22:26):
this was a statute that had been enacted about fifteen
years earlier. It was amid this racist hysteria against the
black fighter Jack Johnson. I think I'm getting that right.
But in any case, there was this federal law in
the books against taking a fight film from one state
to another, and Doherty and Jess Smith were huge boxing fans,
and it seemed that, for no reason other than Dererty
(22:48):
thought it would be fun, he came up with this
scheme to get around that law, and using his friends,
using his influence as Attorney General, he had his friends
distribute these films. There were people who sort of took
a nominal fine. There was this big fight in New Jersey,
the fight film was moved to New York, it was
exhibited there. The person in charge of the exhibition was
(23:09):
prosecuted and fined, but then Doherty would make sure that
there was just a small find.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
You pay fifty bucks and you'd be off the hook.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yeah, and Doherty there was evidence that he received kickbacks
from the scheme, but I think my personal.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
Take is that he just really enjoyed doing it.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
He was at heart he was a schemer, and he thought, oh,
this would be fun to find a way around this
federal law.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
What is the reaction after Roxy's testimony here in the Senate?
What is the reaction from the lawmakers who are witnessing this.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
So the committee was it was five senators, it was
three Republicans and two Democrats, and pretty much everybody, despite
the partisan breakdown, was shocked. Even the most conservative Republican,
who you would expect to be most sympathetic to Doherty,
he seems sort of swept off his.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Feet by this testimony.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
And there were accusations beyond just this bizarre fight film,
that Dougherty done favors for these companies that were under investigation.
They basically quashed investigations and received stock certificates as a result,
there were allegations that he had been involved with bootleggers,
that he'd been doing quote whiskey deals, which was the
language that she used. So all of this was quite shocking, right.
(24:20):
The gist of her testimony was that the man who
was supposed to be upholding the supremacy of federal law
was doing everything he could to undermine it for whether
it was for personal gain or just for pleasure, he
was acting exactly the opposite of how the Attorney general
should act. So yes, most Senators were outraged, and in fact,
this became a huge national spectacle. Right, Not just the senators,
(24:44):
but the American public were outraged by what was going on.
They were shocked. They had never really before considered just
how dangerous the office of Attorney General could be. But Wheeler,
through his investigation, and through his use of the national
media and this emerging national media that involved tabloid newspapers
and radio, the American public was able to follow along
(25:07):
almost in real time as this scandal unfolded. It was
really the first time in American history that that could
happen in real time.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
So is Jess Smith's suicide talked about also in front
of this committee during.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
All of this.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Are there people who have been whispering about this? And
now the voices are louder because of all of this.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Actually one of the first mysteries or first issues that
Wheeler dispensed with, right he had Jess Smith's ex wife
on the stand and she was herself torn about what
had actually happened, but you know, she was able to
recount some of the odd ways that Smith had been acting.
In the days before his death, Harry Dougherty essentially betrayed Jessmith,
(25:47):
and he actually did hold him up to be the scapegoat.
Doherty had been in office for two years, there were
already these rumors of wrongdoing were emerging. Warren Harding called
him into the Oval office and said, you know, you
need to do something about Jess Smith. I'm hearing all
these wild allegations. Both of them knew. I believe that
that Doherty was probably complicit in that. But the understanding
(26:09):
between the two men was that we're going to pin
this on Jess Smith. So Doherty essentially banished Jess Smith
from the Justice Department, from his personal life, from Washington,
and Jess Smith, who was not only an intimate friend
and perhaps lover of Doherty, but he idolized Doherty right.
He lived for Dougherty. Doherty was his purpose in life.
When Doherty banished him, his life was shattered, right like
(26:32):
his son went out.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
So he went back to Ohio.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Roxy Stinson tried to console him, but he was a
broken man, and so the narrative of suicide then became
kind of compelling. And in fact, probably that revelation was
more disturbing about Harry Doherty than allegations that Doherty had
had him knocked off or killed. Right, Doherty had betrayed
the closest person in the world to him. Roxy Stinson
(26:57):
said that she considered him morally responsible for his death,
even if not legally.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
What is the time frame of when Jess Smith returns
to Ohio and is comforted by Roxy because he's rejected
by Harry Doherty, and when he obviously returns and is
somehow in this man's apartment and then dead with a
gunshot wound to the head, face down in some papers
which we should talk about the papers at some point too.
(27:25):
What were these burning papers that we were talking about.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
No one knows.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Unfortunately, uh Billy Burns that guy Golly, he covered it
all up.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
I know, I know. There were a few papers. Actually,
Burns was probably a part of this. There were a
few papers that had escaped the flames and burns or
somebody put them in a pouch. An assistant Attorney general
took them to Jess Smith's funeral in Ohio in a
sealed pouch and gave them to the executor Smith's a
state who happened to be Harry Doherty's brother, man named
(27:56):
mal Doherty. Mal Doherty opened up to one looking side
and burned the papers on the spot.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Man.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
So, yeah, there's no the good evidence has gone unfortunately.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Boy do we know that timeframe between when the breakup
happens and when this something happens to get him back
into this apartment?
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, it's roughly three weeks. So Smith said, okay, I'll
go out to Ohio. He spent some time with Roxy Stintson.
Eventually Harry Doherty came back out west to Ohio again,
and for a time it seemed like they had made up,
even if Smith wasn't going to be welcomed back to Washington.
While they were in Ohio together, they seemed to fall
into their old habits. In fact, Smith was writing even
(28:33):
though again he had no job on the government payroll.
He was writing letters on Justice Department stationary, and I've
seen those letters in the Library of Congress. But then
they had a blow up. There was a shack, they
actually called it the Shack. It was like a hunting
lodge that they shared a place called Deer Creek, Ohio.
Harry Doherty was taking a nap. Somebody came up on
what he said urgent business with Harry Doherty, and jess
(28:55):
Smith woke them up, and Harry Doherty just threw a
fit through a tantrum. First, Jessmith, probably with every word
in the book, told Jessmith that he would have to
walk the twenty miles back to Washington Courthouse on his own.
Speaker 4 (29:08):
They never really made up after that.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Smith asked Doherty for permission to go back to Washington,
just collect his papers, wrap up his affairs before returning
to Ohio. So that's how he ended up back in Washington.
They were not spending time together in Washington. In fact,
Hardy knew what was going on obviously and invited Doherty
to stay in the White House in a guest room
of the White House while Smith was in the apartment
that they shared, and that's why Doherty wasn't there that night.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
So Roxy said all of this to the.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Committee, she told all that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well, okay, so everyone is horrified both at the corruption
of the Attorney General's office and within the administration. And
then on top of that, just how terrible Harry Doherty
had have been to this man he was supposed to
be close to, and now the man's dead. How does
Wheeler tie all of this together? There's so many pieces
(29:57):
that can lead headlines in the newspaper. What is the
narrative that he has put together to present to the
Hurst papers and everybody else.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Well, unfortunately, he never really does write that narrative. He
in fact, his committee never issues a formal report. The
hearings drag on for several months, but it's really the
it's the newspapers that are doing the work there. Wheeler's
witnesses were all over the place. His next star witness
was this really shady detective who worked in the Bureau
(30:28):
of Investigation, a man who had spied for Germany during
World War One against his own country, but who nonetheless
found his way into the Bureau of Investigation under Harry Doherty.
You know, Wheeler was basically going after anything he wanted.
I know that for Wheeler himself, it must have been
particularly disturbing to see the links that Harry Doherty would
go to. This was a man capable of anything. I mean,
(30:49):
Harry Doherty fought back against roxy Stinson's testimony by deploying
some blackmail that he'd been holding over her. He'd basically
been telling her not to testify because he had pretty
good evidence that she had been carrying on an affair
with a married man in Cleveland, Ohio. And a few
days after she testified, he actually his lawyers. He and
(31:11):
his lawyers, in a formal letter to the Senate, deployed
that blackmail openly accused her of having an affair. So
Wheeler saw this and realized that this man was capable
of anything, and so he probably wasn't very surprised when
a few days later, maybe a week or so later,
he found that he himself, Wheeler himself was in the
legal crosshairs of the Justice Department.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Okay, what I was wondering, is Wheeler, who just seems
like someone who is a holier than now? And do
we find any skeletons in his closet? Or does Dougherty.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Well, so, Wheeler was generally an upstanding, upstanding politician.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
He was a man of principle. It was hard.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
There were Justice Department agents, Bureau of Investigation agents crawling
over Montana for weeks, and they really, for the longest
time struggled to find any dirt on Wheeler. There was
a long standing rumor that he had been carrying on
an affair with a married woman and they had gotten
into an automobile accident together. They found that, but they
couldn't find anything to really substantiate it. Ultimately, they started
(32:11):
looking into his professional career because he was at the time,
even as he was a US senator, he was still working.
He saw had a private practice as a lawyer, which
wasn't uncommon at the time. Today that's very uncommon, but
at the time it was actually pretty usual for a
congressman or or senator to carry on private legal practice.
And they found what might be considered a conflict of
interest there, and they spun it up into something really
(32:33):
big and went after Wheeler With that.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
You would think that a senator not would be protected necessarily,
but with everything that's happening, you would think that Dougherty
would be backing off so that it doesn't look like
he is persecuting the person who is saying he just
wants to get down to the truth on behalf of
the American people. Does this not smack to everyone in
(32:59):
the government as vindictiveness and somebody who is now trying
to create a vendetta with the person who is really
shining a light on the corruption.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
No, Kate, you're onto something there. He was as a schemer,
as a manipulator behind the scenes, you know, at twisting Arms.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Dougherty was a master, right.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
He was the most ruthless, most cunning political fixer in
Washington at the time. Probably, but yeah, maybe his political
instincts weren't all that good, right, He probably would have
been better served to stay quiet, especially not just go
after the Wheeler's star witness, which there was a big
backlash to that, right, I mean, even at the time,
people thought it was just unseemly for an Attorney general
(33:41):
to attack a witness's personal character like that. And of
course that was gender too, right, especially you can't go
after a woman like Wheeler said.
Speaker 4 (33:49):
It was an unmanly thing to do, that is what
he said.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
So this did not this revelation that she was likely
having an affair with a married man in Ohio. This
did not seem really to credit Roxy in any way
as far as the committee went or the public, you.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
Know, it did not.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
And all that I can say, yeah, all that I
can see is maybe he thought that this was the
way he maintained his credibility because he operated largely by
collecting information on people and much like Jagger Hoover later on,
and holding it over them. And maybe he needed to
demonstrate that, hey, if I have this threatening, if I
have this compromising information and you know, cross my path,
(34:28):
I'm going to deploy it.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
And he had to do that.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
So the committee does nothing.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
You said by the end of this marathon long hearing
where you have people coming in, and you said it
dragged out for months. Did the newspapers lose interest at
some point? Or did the committee? Did the Senate lose interest?
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Ultimately, sure, things petered out, but not before Attorney General
Doherty was forced to resign.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Right so Wheeler Wheeler won.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He got his big victory, which partly explains why he
never issued a report. The other reason he never issued
a report is because Doherty and his brother Mal Doherty
dragged on the proceedings. So mal Doherty was the president
of what was called Midland National Bank, which is where
Harry Dougherty and just Smith did their banking. And so
when Wheeler was looking for hard evidence that they were
(35:16):
involved in shenanigans, he needed to see their bank ledgers,
and as the president of the bank, Malderty, Hardy's brother,
refused access, he defied a Senate subpoena. The Senate ended
up sending its sergeant at arms to Ohio to arrest
mal Doherty and bring him before the Senate.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
The federal court stepped in before that happened.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court,
and this is now nineteen twenty seven, so this is
about three and a half years after this is all happening.
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the Senate's right to issue
subpoenas and compel testimony, which was a huge victory for Congress,
right for Congression, for the power of congressional oversight. But
because that took so long, the investigation kind of petered out.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So Harry Doherty is gone, He resigns, and he's no
longer the Attorney General.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Where does he go, so.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
He begins a decade's long bitter quest to restore his legacy.
He's essentially banished from Washington. Nobody wants to deal with
him anymore. I don't think he holds any office ever. Again,
I don't think he even has an illegal practice. He
writes a self serving memoir with actually the co author
of The Klansman, the book that became birth of a nation.
(36:27):
That's an interesting choice for a co author, right, writ's
a self serving member trying to justify his actions and
gets a little bit into the Jess Smith story. But
that's essentially all that he does.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Do you think that the collective consciousness in the nineteen
twenties and maybe for decades going forward, however long the
story lasted, was that Harry Doherty murdered Jess Smith because
he knew too much.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
I know that that version of the story still survives
to this day. I mean I actually studiously avoided watching
it because I didn't want to nix up fact with
fiction at all. But I know that this storyline made
its way into Boardwalk Empire, the HBO series. Harry Doherty
and Jess Smith were a big part of Gorvidal's novel Hollywood,
(37:15):
which was set in the roaring twenties around this time. Again,
I avoided that, so I don't actually.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
Know the specifics of how the story's told there.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
But I know that people still wonder about what actually
went down.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
What did his family think?
Speaker 1 (37:27):
And well, I'm assuming Roxy thought that Harry Dougherty was
responsible for Jess's death.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Again, she claimed that he was morally responsible. She said
that given everything that she knew about how he had
been acting, how he had been putting his affairs in order,
you know, how he had actually gone to his Justice
Department office and gathered up all the compromising information and
burned those papers. Even if he felt betrayed and probably
anger despair at being betrayed, he wanted to do one
(37:54):
final favor to Harry Doherty. He still loved the man,
and he sacrificed himself. I mean, he burned the papers
and and he got rid of himself. You know, he
was of course, he knew that he was a witness
to all of Harry Doherty's crimes.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
And the legacy of the Harding administration is really such
a mixed one, is it not.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I Mean, I don't even know why I'd say mixed it.
It's a pretty bad legacy, they sure. I mean people
forget that Warren Harding helped push through the first International
Disarmament Agreement, So there's an accomplishment there.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
One of the first things he did after taking office
was he cut the federal income tax rates. I mean,
he accomplished things that some people that some people could celebrate.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
You know. This scandal in the Justice Department was just
one of many.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
There was. Of course, we hadn't even mentioned Teapot Dome,
which was in the Warren Harding administration, which was bribes
for oil rights scandal. There was another huge scandal within
the Veterans Bureau where people were taking advantage of you know,
America's veterans. There was all this corruption happening. So I
think history's judgment against the administration is pretty severe. There
(39:00):
have been attempts recently to revise history's judgment of Harding himself.
There is evidence that in his final days, Harding wanted
to expose the scandals, wanted to clean up his administration. Again,
there's no evidence that he was personally complicit. So recent biographers,
including very interestingly John Dean, who was the White House
counsel under President Nixon, who happened to come from the
(39:22):
same town in Ohio, Maryon, Ohio as Warren Harding. He
wrote a biography of Warren Harding, he more or less
absolves him of responsibility.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
What do you think the reaction was between Harding and
Doherty when this all came down, when he had to
resign when it was all said and done, this must
have been a massive embarrassment on every level for Harding
to see how many of these criminals, because really that's
(39:52):
what it comes down to. Whatever happened with Jess Smith,
it really was that Harry Doherty allowed people to not
be prosecuted who probably should have been in prison from
violent things and really bad things.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Well, for Harding, he was lucky in that he was
spared of the embarrassment of this because he died actually
the very first days of August twenty twenty three, when
we're coming up on the centennial of that, So he
died before any of these scandals emerged, So he did
not have to see his own reputation tarnished.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
He did not have to see his.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Friend and political mentor, Harry Doherty a force from office.
All of those problems fell on his successor Calvin Coolidge,
and this was the problem that Coolidge didn't want, especially
because this all happened during an election year.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
And I think, if I remember right, Coolidge was sort
of was he not like sort of a breath of
fresh air where it was very much like the country
just came off of all of these terrible corruptions and
there's prohibition happening and everything, and then Calvin Coolidge was
a little like the old grandfather who was going to
stabilize everything.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Yeah, he was a little slow, I think to certainly,
certainly was slow to force Dougherty from office.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
He did it for what he considered principal reasons.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
He thought Doherty was Warren Harding's choice for attorney general.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
He was his friend.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
If Harding was going to stand up for anybody, it
was gonna be Dougherty. So Harding was the man elected president,
not Coolidge. So Coolidge thought it was his responsibility to
stand by Doherty. So he stood by him for a
long time, to his political peril. Right, I mean, he
took a political hit for doing this. He thought it
was a principled stand. But yeah, Coolidge, especially with Teapot Dome,
he acquitted himself pretty honorably.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
He actually stepped in.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
When Harry Doherty refused to investigate the teapot dome scandal,
Coolidge stepped in, said.
Speaker 4 (41:36):
Doherty, you're no longer responsible for this.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
He appointed special counsel a Democrat and a Republican to investigate,
and actually called the Republican into the White House and said,
however it shakes out, you got to follow follow the
leads wherever they go. It doesn't matter if the Interior
Secretary who's responsible is a Republican.
Speaker 4 (41:52):
Just go after the wrong doers.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
So Coolidge acquitted himself pretty well.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
I think if.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Jess Smith had not died, either by suicide or murder,
whatever happened to him, do you think any of this
would have come out? Do you think Harry Dougherty would
have just retired at some point and faded into the
would work with money that he had with you, the
power that he had, or do you think at some
point this had to have been revealed.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
I think it was more likely to come out if
he'd survived. It was hard for Wheeler to prove anything
conclusively because Jess Smith was the one firsthand witness to
a lot of these transactions.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
Right Roxy Stintson.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Was recounting things that she'd heard secondhand, so it would
probably would have come out quicker. In fact, I think
the plan was to hold Jess Smith up as this scapegoat.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Wow. Okay, what is the lasting message that you wanted
people to take away from the book? About government? About corruption,
about interpersonal relationships where people are supposed to trust one
another and someone is betrayed.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
What I hope people take away from it is that
is the importance of a free per and congressional oversight
in reinging in an out of control presidency or administration.
Sometimes bad political actors truly do operate above the law.
Right Doherty never spent a single day in jail for
any of his crimes. He avoided jail time because he
(43:17):
was a shrewd lawyer. He was, really, but also because
of his high political office right as Attorney General, he
was kind of shielded from that. But Senator Wheeler kind
of shrewdly recognized that and said, well, even if he
can't be convicted in a court of law, we can
convict in him in the court of public opinion.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
And he did right.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
His investigation shocked Americans into caring about what the Attorney
General was doing what was happening in the Bureau of Investigation,
what was happening in the Justice Department, and he relegated
Harry Doherty to the ash bin of history. That's a
lesson that we can have for today when we're worried
about maybe we can never send this bad political actor
to jail, but we can at least discredit him in
(43:56):
history's judgment.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
What ends up with Wheeler? What does he do?
Speaker 2 (44:00):
So Wheeler has an interesting story after all of this happens.
You know, he started out as this fierce progressive and
then kind of wound up as a cranky conservative. He
opposed the New Deal, He opposed FDR's court packing scheme.
He most infamously opposed American intervention in World War Two.
He was aligned with the America First Movement, was friends
with Charles Lindberg. That led, of course, to charges of
(44:22):
Nazi sympathy. His reputation really suffered over the decades despite
this real triumph early in his career. What maybe a
lot of your listeners might be from Earth is a
direct consequence of this story. A movie called Mister Smith
Goes to Washington. It was loosely patterned after the story
here right, it was. In fact, the original screenplay was
titled A Gentleman from Montana, which was Wheeler's home state.
(44:44):
It's about, you know, this young, naive politician arriving in
the Senate and having the tables turned on him when
he tries to take on a corrupt older politician.
Speaker 4 (44:52):
That's exactly what happened to Wheeler.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
And when Frank Kappra premiered the movie in Washington in
nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 4 (44:58):
He shared a box with Wheeler. They watched the movie together.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
You know, really going back to the victim here and
ending with the victim Jess Smith, there is a blind
devotion there that just seems so sad, whether or not
it is a physically intimate relationship he had with Doherty
or just you know, emotional. To put that much trust
in someone then to be betrayed must have been just
(45:24):
the final moments of his life. Whatever caused his death
must have been so painful for this man who it
just seemed like, even though he probably was complicit and
a lot of the corruption here, really seemed devoted to
someone who it doesn't sound like really deserved his devotion.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
No, he truly didn't deserve the devotion, and that's something
I wonder I've wondered about whether Smith realized that it's
a tragedy.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amrosi. Our associate
producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(46:24):
produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more and if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at Tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(46:45):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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