President Warren Harding embarked on a journey to Alaska in June 1923, taking with him his secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover. “If you knew of a great scandal in our administration,” he asked Hoover, “would you, for the good of the country and the party, expose it publicly or would you bury it?” Hoover urged the president to reveal what would become known as the Teapot Dome scandal, but Harding feared the political fallout. He died of a heart attack in San Francisco two months later.