Coolidge (43 page)

Accompanied by Chief Justice Taft, a man Coolidge was coming to respect, and other members of the cabinet, the Coolidges traveled out to Ohio for Harding’s funeral. In the sweltering Marion heat, Attorney General Daugherty fainted. Mrs. Coolidge stood by Mrs. Harding and Coolidge by Taft. “She is very nice,” Taft wrote to his wife of Mrs. Coolidge, underscoring the words. There were other formalities, including one at which he hesitated. Daugherty, the attorney general, insisted that Coolidge take a second oath of office. John Coolidge’s notary status was not enough to swear a president in, Daugherty said; the man who swore Coolidge in needed also to be a government official. Coolidge took the oath a second time. But he did not advertise the fact. It was that first oath that had mattered.

Meticulous continuity was also Coolidge’s aim when it came to personnel. From the first hours he made it clear that he would retain Harding’s cabinet. A clean sweep was tempting, but to Coolidge continuity seemed more important. His decision, for continuity, was one of the most difficult of a lifetime.
The Washington Post
owner Ned McLean, an emblem of the Harding crowd, pressed for a visit in those early days. On August 21, Coolidge wrote to McLean to explain his position: “I was sorry not to have you call before you went away, and trust you will come in at once on your return. What I am anxious to accomplish is the support for the policies of the administration that will carry them on to perfection. In fact, that is the only thing to which I want to give any consideration.” He kept Hoover at Commerce and John Weeks at the War Department, even though his Massachusetts crowd was not the same as Coolidge’s. Henry Wallace, a progressive, kept the Agriculture post. Daugherty, the attorney general, would stay, and so would Edwin Denby, the navy secretary. Hughes agreed to stay, and that was a relief. Mellon arrived in the third week of August with a resignation letter in his pocket, but he and Coolidge talked, and Mellon forgot to take the letter out. As he left, Mellon remembered and pulled out the letter. “Forget it,” Coolidge said.

Even when it came to the smaller choices, Coolidge punctiliously opted to keep things as they were. The Coolidges asked Harding’s doctor from Ohio, C. E. Sawyer, to stay on, despite wide rumors that the doctor would leave with Mrs. Harding, the patient who had brought him to Washington in the first place. Boone, the navy man who served as Sawyer’s deputy, would stay with them in service on the
Mayflower
. The White House housekeeper, Mrs. Jaffray, would keep her post. With each employee, the Coolidges underscored the need for as little change as possible. “I would like, Mrs. Jaffray, for everything to go on just as it has in the past,” Grace told the housekeeper.

At 6:15 on one of those early mornings at the Willard, Coolidge walked out to discover Edmund Starling, Harding’s Secret Service man, who was reporting for service. Starling had taken only a single day to recover from his president’s death and the ride on the funeral train. “Good Morning, Colonel Starling, I’ve been wanting to see you,” Coolidge said. “I want you to stay with me during my administration.” Then the pair took their first walk together, down F Street, toward the Washington Hotel. The photographers were already there—that was one distinction between the presidency and the vice presidency, the unceasing attentions—but after posing, the pair went to the Martha Washington candy shop, which Grace favored. Only once did Coolidge slip up, and only slightly, with his continuity message. The White House usher, Irwin Hoover, had served decades, as Mrs. Jaffray had; he was known universally as “Ike.” Just as he had told the others, Coolidge told Hoover, “I want you yourself to keep right on as you are.” But then, after describing the family desire to keep the public from the second floor, where they had crowded in with the Hardings, Coolidge had added something else: “I want things as they used to be, before.” And Ike, looking at Coolidge, knew that by “before,” Coolidge meant as in Wilson’s day, not Harding’s.

Continuity required patience. George Christian, Harding’s secretary, had pushed Coolidge to move over to the executive office, and on August 13, Coolidge sat down at the big mahogany desk. But Mrs. Harding stayed in the White House residence even after the funeral in Marion. Rather than cause a fuss, Coolidge split his time, working when he could at the White House and staying with Grace at the Willard. As the days mounted, the head of the mail room at the White House perceived that the result of two presidential offices was that “in a few days complete chaos had been achieved both at the Willard and the White House executive office.” Yet even when pressed again, Coolidge would not relent. “We are going to get in as soon as we can,” Coolidge simply told the press at their August 21 conference with him. In this strange interregnum period, Coolidge found comfort, and even humor, in humility. One early morning in the Willard bedroom, a sound woke Coolidge. A strange young man had broken in and was going through his clothing. In the morning light, Coolidge could see that the burglar had taken a wallet, a chain, and a charm. “I wish you wouldn’t take that,” Coolidge said. “I don’t mean the watch and chain, only the charm. Read what is engraved on the back of it.” The burglar read the back: “Presented to Calvin Coolidge . . . by the Massachusetts General Court”—and stopped dead in shock. He was robbing the president. It emerged that the burglar was a hotel guest who had found himself short of cash to return home. Coolidge gave the burglar $32, what he called a “loan,” and helped him to navigate around the Secret Service as he departed.

When Mrs. Harding finally departed for the McLeans’ and the White House lay open, Grace, for the first time, lost her nerve. “Just now it occurred to me that I would begin my letter here in the only home I have now in Washington, take it with me as I go and finish it in that great White House on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Grace wrote her Pi Beta Phi friends on the day of the move. “There is so much that even I am bewildered.” The Hardings’ Airedale, Laddie Boy, still patrolled the premises. Someone had placed a black ribbon in his collar. Grace described herself as “Alice in Wonderland or Babe in the Woods.” It was all confusing: the White House in this period maintained a staff of eighteen to serve guests, whose entertainment was funded by the administration. But the feeding of the staff, many of whom lived in quarters in the White House, had to be covered by the salary of the president.

The Coolidges took one bedroom, but Grace also claimed a large room as a sitting room, bringing in Mary Lincoln’s famous rosewood bed carved with grapevines and birds. The twin beds that had been the first couple’s beds before were for Calvin and John, who, the hope was, might have more freedom than they had had at the Willard. Grace placed them in another large room that had once been Alice Roosevelt’s. There were tennis courts at the White House laid in by the Roosevelts, and the boys could play there. Just recently, the tennis champ Bill Tilden had played an exhibition game for the Hardings. Here, finally, was a place where the family could have pets and pianos. Laddie Boy would go to a caretaker whom Mrs. Harding had selected. Soon, Grace told herself, they would get a new puppy. Grace found her own comfort in the ability to place a time limit on her new service, writing her old friends of the White House, “which must now become home to me for a year and a half.”

In the office Coolidge found Harding’s chair was decorated with a black crepe ribbon to memorialize the absent chief; he received a new chair but changed the room little, keeping a steel engraving of Lincoln that Theodore Roosevelt had left behind. Stearns was his first caller, just as he had been at the State House in Boston. Coolidge, Starling quickly saw, “was not particularly proud of being president,” in the sense of being vain about it. Coolidge walked around quietly, touching things from time to time and smiling to himself; he still wore the suspenders of a Vermonter, and that made him a quaint sight in the great corridors. Nonetheless, Starling also saw, Coolidge was not afraid; he slid into the office naturally. After all, the pediments over the doors in the office were not so different from those at the governor’s office in Montpelier. The foyer of the Memorial Continental Hall, where the semiannual budget meetings were held, was clad in marble from his own Vermont. Coolidge came up with his own nicknames for the White House staff and cabinet: “Ol’ Colonel Starling,” “Ol’ Man Stearns,” “Ol’ Man Mellon.” He talked about “my navy secretary,” or “my car” or “my secretary of the Treasury,” Starling noted. The White House staff already had a nickname for him too, from vice presidential days, “the Little Fellow,” a reference to the fact that Coolidge was inches shorter than Harding and Starling, who stood six feet tall. But most of the time they referred to Coolidge more respectfully, as “the president.” Grace was always “Mrs. Coolidge,” or “the first lady.” The boys were simply “John” and “Calvin.”

On August 13, Coolidge had a second meeting with Lord; they were already falling into a rhythm. On August 14, the new president announced he was hiring an experienced former congressman, C. Bascom Slemp, as his secretary, the equivalent of chief of staff; Slemp was a southern Republican, a rarity, a Virginian who knew his way around the Hill. Now Coolidge was ready—more than ready—to launch his own policy campaign. He would take Harding more literally than even Harding had, to “perfection,” as he told McLean.

“Coolidge demands economy in budget,” blared a
New York Times
headline that appeared August 15, just so there was no doubt about what the policy might be. As one of their first steps, Lord and Coolidge sent around a stiff letter to all government departments, warning that they needed to remember to spend less—$300 million less in total—than they had asked for earlier in the year. Somehow or other, the budget estimates and spending had to drop yet further; the onus was on any department that veered in the opposite direction, and sought more, to submit a supplemental statement “showing the additional amount which you believe required, allocated to appropriate titles and setting forth the necessity therefor.” Within days, just to prove they meant it—Lord, like Dawes before him, was a ham—Lord issued a demand for a cut of $6.5 million, or about one-fifth, in the budget of the District of Columbia. Nor was the District of Columbia alone. To their shock, navy officials learned around the same time that the navy would lose 20 percent of what it had asked for; even naval aviation would be disappointed. The ships the navy expected under the freshly ratified naval treaty would not all be funded. Reconditioning of the old
Mount Vernon
had already been rejected by the Shipping Board as too costly; now it seemed impossible. It was one thing to cut after the war. It was another for a government to cut perpetually in peacetime. “President to Be Own Watchdog,” marveled the
Los Angeles Times
.

The extent to which the new administration would prioritize economy became clear at one of the first press conferences, one that Mellon, finally on U.S. soil, was able to attend. Coolidge, more relaxed than they had ever seen him, led his cabinet to a pose outdoors on the White House lawn before a crowd. As the cameras of Fox News and others rolled, Coolidge seated himself in the center chair, and Secretary Hughes placed himself to the president’s right, legs spread out wide. The seat to the new president’s left waited open for Mellon. But Mellon was seconds slow to arrive. In that moment, the camera caught Coolidge’s eagerness. The presidential eyes hunted for the Treasury secretary. The president’s arm motioned. The tap of the hand was swift but unmistakable, invitation and command:

You sit right here.

Mellon wanted more tax cuts, and Coolidge wanted to go along, so long as he could square such a move with Lord’s reports on the budgets. But even before Coolidge could strategize further with Mellon and Lord, he experienced firsthand the great challenge of the presidency: unexpected events. In the first half of September, disaster struck in Japan: an earthquake killed 250,000, and Coolidge appealed to Congress for relief. The Philippine Independence Commission was protesting actions of Governor General Wood, Coolidge’s old opponent in the presidential race. Anthracite coal men did strike, and Coolidge, while backing up Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania, did not intervene. In the end Pinchot made a settlement that included a wage increase. But the miners had not won the prize they had sought: owners’ agreement to a closed shop in which only union miners could work.

Still, in those first few weeks and months Coolidge and Lord sustained their budgeting rhythm. The Veterans Bureau under the corrupt Forbes had grown alarmingly, consuming a full $461 million, a seventh of the budget, in the fiscal year that had just ended. Lord and Coolidge saw that the bureau planned a cut of $25 million below the year earlier, but on September 15, Lord announced that the cut should be more like $40 million or even $50 million. In addition, the pair decided to resist the commissioners of the District of Columbia, who had protested the August cuts. General Lord told the District that all provisions for new public works as well as new school sites and buildings had to be omitted.

Meanwhile, Coolidge and Mellon began planning the tax law. Twice Coolidge received the chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Barnaby Madden of Illinois, and he also met with the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative William Green of Iowa. Green and Senator Reed Smoot of Utah agreed: there could be a tax cut, or there could be a bonus, but not both. Congress was not scheduled to meet until December, a great blessing as Mellon needed the time to structure spring tax legislation. The less time Congress was in session, too, the less time there was to demand new laws. Yet congressmen were after him to call a special session that very autumn. Allen Treadway was still in Congress; his erstwhile pupil from Massachusetts, Coolidge, had risen far above him. Treadway called on the new president to complain that Pinchot’s agreement had raised the price of coal by 70 cents a ton or more, which would make for a hard winter in New England; certainly Congress should meet to address this, and earlier than December, Treadway said. But on this Treadway found Coolidge intractable.