ABSTRACT
Warren G. Harding's rise to power and the election campaign of 1920 illustrates best of all the story of politics as conciliation. Harding's character fit the role he played when he followed frowning Wilson with a smile. Harding on the way to his rendezvous with destiny appeared twice with his peaceable palaver in Presidential politics at times out of sync with that theme. Those times illustrate precisely how a personality attuned to one of the phases of the Presidential story gets shunted aside when another phase is playing. At the national Republican convention of 1912, Harding rose to place in nomination for the President of the United States his fellow genius of geniality, William Howard Taft. The mellifluous music of Warren G. Harding played out over the airwaves on June 14, 1922, as he dedicated a memorial to the composer of the national anthem.
