17. Warren G. Harding enjoyed golf and poker, as well as womanizing
Long before he became president, Warren G. Harding discovered the game of golf, and played it often, including among his partners the Undersecretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had not yet been stricken with polio. Harding also enjoyed poker, and played frequently with friends at the White House, including several of his cronies who were involved in the many scandals which wracked his administration. Those friends became known in the press as his “Poker Cabinet”. Not reported in the press was that the games were frequently accompanied with whiskey, despite Prohibition being the law of the land.
Harding played poker so often that a rumor emerged that he wagered a set of White House china from the 19th century on a hand, which he lost. According to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a long-time Washington socialite, the set had been obtained during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison. Mrs. Longworth described the poker games as being littered with “every imaginable brand of whiskey”. One frequent player, Charles Forbes, was later convicted for allowing drugs and alcohol meant for Veterans Hospitals to be diverted to bootleggers.