Coolidge (42 page)

By then there was regular telephone service in the day to Plymouth Notch, including long distance. But the phone lines shut down in the evening. From Plymouth, the boys were to be dispatched to summer activities—John to a military training session at Camp Devens in Middlesex County, a display by the Coolidge family of their continued fidelity to the idea of preparedness. They were sending their younger son, Calvin, to work again at a job he’d tried before, harvesting in the tobacco fields of Hatfield, outside Northampton. In that way, at least, they could help a local industry, and one that Coolidge, a great cigar smoker, was known to prize.

When their sons left, the Coolidges remained in Plymouth. Disconcerting details that suggested reason for worry about Harding kept popping up in the papers; bouquets of gladioli and asters stood outside the Hardings’ five-room suite on the eighth floor of the Palace Hotel. Canaries and lovebirds were brought in to comfort the Hardings, and Dr. Boone stayed in the third bedroom of the suite. Coolidge had not seen Harding since March. Coolidge saw it in the unusual attentiveness of the reporters, whose eyes now followed him like prison guards’. He was asked what he might do “if anything happened.” Nothing was going to happen, he told them. Harding was just plain exhausted, Coolidge told the papers, he had “worn himself down, very much as Mrs. Harding did, in the service of the American people.” “Coolidge Sure of Harding’s Recovery” was the headline he wanted, and the papers obliged. On August 2, the Harding story was still there in the papers, but Harding seemed to be improving. “Harding Gains,” read a
New York Times
headline that day. Coolidge undertook to operate with ax and mallet on an ailing maple that stood outside the sitting room of his father’s house; it was the tree under which his mother had sat with her needlework.

The night of August 2, the Coolidges retired early. They were sleeping when there was a knock; Colonel Coolidge, not Calvin, answered, and then called up to the sleeping vice president and his wife. When he heard his father calling, Coolidge knew that something had happened; there was a tremor in his father’s voice. From Bridgewater had come the news: Harding was dead.

The next moves came intuitively. Coolidge had spoken often about the country’s real life taking place on the most local level, and had taught this, as if teaching a class at Amherst. Now he would live it, with the humblest of ceremonies. A telephone line was being arranged so that Coolidge might speak with the secretary of state, Hughes. Congressman Porter Dale, who happened to be campaigning in the vicinity, arrived. Coolidge, for his part, opened the U.S. Constitution to survey what Article II, Section 1 said on the presidency. All that was there was: “In case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the vice president.” A few lines later was the oath of office a new president needed to take. That was all.

The special phone line was up by 2:30
A.M.
Coolidge prepared a statement of condolence and sorrow about Harding. He spoke with Hughes, who said the event must be witnessed by a notary. Unlike Justice White, who had not been able to swear Mellon into office in 1921, John Coolidge was still a notary.

The reality of the death had begun to reach the rest of the country hours earlier. A reporter rang Henry Cabot Lodge to get his reaction when the news came out late in the evening; the old senator was not pleased to be wakened. While the reporter was making his apologies, Lodge, having pieced it all together, suddenly cut through with his response: “My God! That means Coolidge is president!” The Morrows were seated at dinner with Robert Frost and others at their home in Englewood when a call came. Morrow took the call. When he returned to the table, Frost later recalled, Morrow’s eyes were unseeing. “What is it, Dwight?” the others asked. Silence, for a moment. Finally, Morrow spoke: “Calvin Coolidge is president of the United States.”

Coolidge may not have been the first to realize the impact of the news, but with the little inauguration ceremony, he was the first to attempt to give the transition from president to president meaning. By kerosene lamplight, before a small group that included his wife and Porter Dale, a congressman, in a small town far away from even the county seat or the state capital, a new U.S. president was sworn in by his father. With the emphasis on the Constitution, on the Bible on the table, on the notary’s authority, Coolidge was saying that this time, the presidency truly would be the kind that presided over the old contract between man and man, just as he had described it in his inaugural address of 1921.

The Coolidges retired for a few short hours. At 7:20
A.M.
, the new president appeared on the porch in a blue serge suit, black tie, and white Panama hat to greet reporters. Before leaving Plymouth they asked the driver, Joe McInerney, to stop in the little graveyard so Calvin could visit for a moment the plain grave of his mother. It was a somber moment but also a quietly optimistic one; even the graves of Plymouth gave him strength. Florence Cilley, the proprietor of the general store, rang all the subscribers of the Southern Vermont Telephone Company on the line to Bridgewater so that they could turn out to wave the new president good-bye.

The driver headed down the steep hill to Plymouth Union, then sped up to twenty-five miles an hour, passing Lake Amherst, through the high hilly hamlets of Vermont and Belmont, whose steeple, people claimed, reached close to God. At Rutland, a crowd of two thousand waited; the chief superintendent wanted to supply a special train, but the Coolidges preferred to take the 9:35.

Soon, John at Camp Devens and Calvin at the Hatfield tobacco farm would know about the change as well. In the coming hours and days, resolve would form in the hearts of each of the members of the Coolidge family: resolve to offer service, as Coolidge had said in that Vermont speech, service above self-aggrandizement. “I want you all to love me and pray for me,” Grace wrote her sorority sisters, so that she might do good work as first lady. At Camp Devens, reporters converged on John. John told the reporters that he did not feel any different from the way he had felt when his father had been Harding’s vice president. John knew his father would do his best, and John hoped that, in time, that would be good enough.

Both boys, too, would receive fan mail. Calvin would receive a letter from an East Orange, New Jersey, boy congratulating him upon becoming First Boy of the Land. “I think you are mistaken in calling me the first boy of the land,” Calvin wrote back, “since I have done nothing.” The first boy of the land, Calvin wrote, “would be some boy who distinguished himself by his own actions.” A title, an office, had to be earned.

As the train rolled, Coolidge began to write his own plan to earn the office of the presidency. He had to finish what Harding had started, to prove that the war period had been an interlude, to take the country back to a time of smaller national government. The Senate monotony, the hours at the far end of Harding’s cabinet table, all made sense now, especially because his family was with him. The presidency was a job for which his whole life had prepared him. That was the message of confidence he needed to convey to a sorrowing country. As Coolidge left Vermont, he put it simply. “I believe I can swing it,” he said.

Ten
: The Budget

Washington, D.C.

THE MEETINGS TOOK PLACE
once a week. He scheduled them at 9:30
A.M.
on Fridays, before the session with the full cabinet at eleven. That was not really enough time, especially when the cabinet meetings began at 10:30 instead of eleven. He and the budget director actually needed more minutes, not fewer, to prepare if they were going to fend off the cabinet. But for now, Coolidge kept the appointment at 9:30.

Together, the new president and his budget director cut, and then cut again. The cutting differed only in scale from the cutting John Coolidge had labored over so long by kerosene lamp, trying to match outlays with meager revenues from the school tax or the snow tax. Coolidge and Herbert Mayhew Lord, the director, were just two New Englanders, one from Plymouth, Vermont, the other from Rockland, Maine. Still, there was a sense of awe and duty to their meetings. In the president’s appointment diary beside one of their early sessions, someone had written in the word “necessary.” They might be plain New Englanders, but here they were, hacking back the great corpus of the government of the United States. Over the pair hung the awareness of the federal debt; the payments on the debt were manageable now, but scheduled to explode in coming years. Coolidge and Lord, in counsel with Treasury staffers, set their targets: the debt had to come down to below $20 billion from $22.35 billion. The budget itself should come down from $3.2 billion to $3 billion. The ephemeral budget surplus must become permanent. Once they had truly checked the budget growth, they might lower tax rates. Coolidge added a second budget meeting whenever he could. Even when he and Lord thought they could not cut more, they still cut.

The budget cutting sessions were one way Coolidge sought to earn the office, to put the work in the terms his son Calvin had described in the tobacco field. To Coolidge, earning the presidency meant finishing what Harding and he had started years ago, achieving normalcy. But it also meant protecting the office itself, ensuring that the troubles that had dogged Harding did not permanently damage the authority of a president. “I am going to try to do what seems best for the country, and get what satisfaction I can out of that,” Coolidge told Frank Stearns, who with Mrs. Stearns early on was assigned a bedroom at the White House. “Most everything else will take care of itself.”

Finishing the work of normalcy or doing what was best for the country might not be easy, though. Lord was General Lord, just as Dawes had been General Dawes, the hope being that a budget director of high military rank would command respect. But by August 1923, the old sense of war emergency was gone, and citizens were as likely to laugh at officers as to heed them, especially after the betrayals at the Veterans Bureau. Voters wanted the federal government to spend, and lawmakers were ready to help. Each dollar Coolidge and Lord saved was a dollar Congress might disburse. Every government spending scandal that emerged eroded the administration’s case for economy. To convince the country that the federal government should live modestly, the administration’s personnel had to live modestly. Any hint of overspending at the White House would undermine the executive case that the federal budgets must be slashed; any further construction scandals at the Veterans Bureau would strengthen the case for bonus payments, which put cash in the hands of veterans rather than officials. A scant fifteen months stood between the White House and the election, when Democrats might gain yet more strength and lure Republican progressives over to vote with them and wipe out the Grand Old Party. If, say, tax legislation was to pass, it had to pass soon, in the spring.

To succeed, Coolidge reckoned, he must be like Lincoln, a master administrator, dealing with the “practical affairs of his day,” as he himself had once described the sixteenth president doing. Coolidge had to pick his battles carefully. Grace and his sons had to stand beside him. “I don’t know what I would do without her,” Coolidge had written to his father soon after arriving in Washington in 1921. If his family did stand with him, and if all else went well, then, Coolidge thought, he would indeed be able to “swing it.”

In those first days, though, it was Theodore Roosevelt, not Lincoln, whom everyone thought of first, and the way Roosevelt had protected the presidency through his exemplary management of the transition after McKinley’s assassination. Like Roosevelt, Coolidge needed to prevent any crises and keep the country calm until it had passed through bereavement and he was ready to launch policy. If he was concerned, he hid it. As Secretary Hughes said when he greeted Coolidge at Union Station, “There is nothing to do but close the ranks and go ahead.”

A stream of visitors greeted Coolidge and Grace when they woke at the Willard that first Saturday morning in Washington. The newsmen hung about the hall, accosting Stearns and anyone else they could collar to see if they could elicit a tidbit of news. All of the guests, officials or press, had to be assured, whether they liked it or not, that for the moment policy would not change. That fall, just as in Roosevelt’s time, a great coal strike threatened, and therefore Coolidge received Samuel Gompers for a brief meeting. Immigration was their topic, but it was the strike, of course, that was the real issue. The postmaster general, Harry New, was in for a visit even before Gompers; Coolidge told him to “continue right along in the same old way.” Roosevelt had managed his transition without a great disruption in the stock market; Coolidge needed to do the same, even though Treasury Secretary Mellon was absent in Europe. The new president promised Mellon’s emissary, Parker Gilbert, that not much would change, so that Gilbert was able to cable Mellon the same day that he had had “a good talk with the President” and that Coolidge was “absolutely sound” on “tax revision, soldiers’ bonus, and the agricultural situation.”

Other callers at the office included Jason Noble Pierce, the minister at the First Congregational Church—the church had invited Coolidge to join, and now, Coolidge announced, he would. Sometime that first day Coolidge had seen General Lord; he had also planned a second meeting, for a week later.

That morning at the Willard, Coolidge managed to shut out the mendicants for a moment and found time to do the most important thing: write out a declaration of a national day of mourning for Harding. The senators had loved Harding and had shown him that by refusing to override any of his five regular vetoes. Americans had loved Harding too. They did not know much about his past and did not care to. How he had died, from an aneurysm or a heart attack, did not matter. However Harding had transgressed, they now forgave him. “Betrayed by friendship is not a bad memorial to leave,” Will Rogers wrote in his column. The funeral train rolled east day and night from San Francisco to Washington, but the trainmen found that the darkness did not diminish the crowds: a total of 3 million people showed up at the stations. Thinking of Harding, Americans like Coolidge thought of Lincoln, McKinley, and Wilson, so quiet now in his house on S Street, and reflected that the presidency carried its own curse. Those who had known Harding’s good intentions, who had seen him shift, were the most distraught. Eulogizing Harding on the radio, Charles Dawes broke down at the thought of the death of his dear friend. The presidency truly was, as Pierce preached to his congregation on the first Sunday they returned, a “man-killing job.”