The Teapot Dome Scandal

How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House

By: Laton McCartney

Narrated by: William Hughes

The Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s was all about oil - hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of petroleum. When the scandal finally broke, the consequences were tremendous. President Harding's legacy was forever tarnished, while "Oil Cabinet" member Albert Fall was forced to resign and was imprisoned for a year. Others implicated in the affair suffered prison terms, commitment to mental hospitals, suicide, and even murder. The Republican Party and the oil-company CEOs scrambled to cover their tracks and were mostly successful. Key documents mysteriously disappeared; important witnesses suffered sudden losses of memory. Though a special investigation was authorized, the scope of the wrongdoing was contained by administration stonewalling. But newly surfaced information indicates that the scandal was even bigger than originally thought.©2008 Laton McCartney (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

The Other Oil Scandal - Before the BP Disaster

You Couldn't make this stuff up. This beats the shenanigans of JR Ewing from the Dallas TV show fame.

Oil companies controlling the government and profiting from govn't largesse? Nah! Never could happen!

A great listen

brings you right into the 1920s

This book is both well-narrated & well-written. A fine slice-of-history piece that makes you feel as if you are living in the teens & 20s (I mean 1910-1925 or so), puts you into the political game of the time (where corruption was a much more accepted part of politics, frankly, than is the case today), and uses the Teapot Dome affair & the Harding presidency as the crux of the story. I would recommend this to anyone interested in American history, not just those after knowledge about long-ago scandals.

While the book is very detailed, it is not overly so. It needs this detail to tell the story, and it is the detail that moves the story along.

Friendly language, intimately presented

Excellent and detailed recount of an event you learn about but don't understand while in elementary school.

Wow

This is a great book, before starting it I thought had I idea what Teapot was, but I had no idea it was this big. Forget the last 30 years of scandal / corruption, these guys knew how to cheat the people. It is almost funny what these men almost pulled off.

great book!

Entertaining and enlightening. We are reliving this history with the Trump administration. Highly recommend this book.

Harding's return to normalcy: corruption

We can complain a lot about present day government corruption, but until you read this book you have no idea how bad it can get. The story almost sounds like a novel - except it's true. And if you thought OJ's trial had a strange result (not guilty in the criminal trial, liable in the civil), Teapot Dome easily tops that. The Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, was convicted of taking a bribe from an oil man who, in a separate trial, was acquitted of bribing Fall. Fall really was a fall guy. (I'm not giving anything away here -- the characters make the story here, not the legal verdicts).
The narration is very good. The only quibble I have is that the narrator sometimes sounded as if he were going a bit too fast. A great listen.

Interesting for history buffs.

Nice read if yoy are looking to improve your knowledge of how govt and business conducted themselves during the early 20th century.

Dense but well written & complete

This book might have been better in written form or with prior knowledge of the principals. I had to backtrack several times & research the case to keep the pieces together. Not bad for someone with no prior knowledge about the scandal. Otherwise great.

Plain-spoken, well-told, stunning

Fans of history of political and business fraud, corruption and scandal are well rewarded here. It blows my mind that this was the way things were run in top echelons of USA government so recently. There is a rich history here, as well, of the development of the west (and foreign affairs with Mexico) as regards commercial development of mineral resources. We would do well to keep an eye on the disposition of our publicly-owned land and mineral assets in this country: the huge payouts make it a natural breeding ground for political corruption.

William Hughes is a great narrator

Awesome story of pure, unadulterated greed. We all have it in us, and to pretend to hold public figures up to a higher standard is simple folly. Nothing has changed in our corporate and political system since the 20s except for the fact that the players have gotten better at tricking us! Excellent writing, very enjoyable.