First Ladies (36 page)

Grace was grief stricken—but her sorrow could not compare with her husband’s devastation. In my account of Mary Lincoln’s troubled White House tenure, I mentioned how the death of a child can mortally wound the morale of a President or a First Lady—or both. Probably the most grievous example is the case of the Franklin Pierces. Jane Means Pierce was strongly opposed to her husband running for President. In 1853, shortly before he was inaugurated, their only surviving son, Benjamin (they had lost two other boys to illness), was killed in a train wreck. Jane Pierce regarded the loss as the judgment of God on her husband’s presidency and spent the next years in her White House bedroom writing maudlin letters to her dead son. The equally distraught Pierce, to quote Harry Truman, “didn’t pay any more attention to business as President of the United States than the man in the moon.”

Calvin Coolidge did not undergo that sort of collapse. But there was a stark, dismaying contrast between the President who resumed his tasks after Calvin Jr.’s funeral and the energetic, decisive man who had taken charge of the executive office and masterminded the policies that enabled his party to retain the White House in spite of the Harding administration’s corruption. Coolidge told his father he would never run for public office again. Later he wrote that, when Calvin Jr. died, “the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him.”

The laconic, seemingly undemonstrative man had loved that power and glory during his first year in office. Ike Hoover recalled in his memoirs how Coolidge had positively exulted in being the center of attention, with news photographers’ flashbulbs exploding on all sides. He even liked the swarms of Secret Service agents around him—and riding alone in his limousine in motorcades while his aides followed him in less glamorous cars. Hoover said Coolidge had displayed “more egoism, self consciousness or whatever you call it” than any of the nine other presidents he had served.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this. The presidency is an office rich in ego satisfaction for a man who thinks he can do the job. But now this personal satisfaction returned to haunt Calvin Coolidge as guilt. He convinced himself that his vaulting ambition had been the cause of his beloved son’s death.

Even after he was elected by a handsome majority in 1924 Coolidge remained a deeply wounded man. He talked obsessively about Calvin Jr. “When I look out the window, I always see my boy playing tennis on that court out there,” he told one of his aides. He seemed particularly tormented by the incongruity of being President, with all the pomp and power of the office, yet having lacked the power to help his dying son. “When he was suffering, he begged me to help him, I could not,” he lamented to the journalist William Allen White.

From a President who was a strong believer in being the country’s “chief legislator,” Coolidge sank into an aimless passivity in his second term. His contact with key members of Congress became, in the words of one historian, “infrequent and perfunctory.” He let his cabinet members run their departments as if they were separate countries, snappishly telling them to make their own decisions when they came to him for advice or direction.

Calvin Coolidge also withdrew from the presidency in a less obvious way. He began to sleep—or at least stay in bed—eleven hours a night. Each afternoon he took a long nap. He was soon working only four and a half hours a day—and doing little or nothing while he was at his desk besides fret about his health. He grew so hypochondriacal, he often had an electrocardiogram taken twice in the same day.

Ironically, Grace’s long apprenticeship in obedience and resignation as Calvin Coolidge’s wife enabled her to accept Calvin Jr.’s death. She was immensely helped by a deep, almost mystical religious faith. Soon after the funeral, she wrote to her close friend, Mrs. R. B. Hills: “As we stood beside the grave, the sun was shining, throwing long slanting shadows and the birds were singing their sleepy songs. Truly it seemed to me God’s acre…. I came away comforted and full of courage.” That Christmas, in a note to Lou Henry Hoover, whose husband was Calvin Coolidge’s secretary of commerce, Grace said that she felt a “peace which passeth understanding” as they sang carols “thinking of our Calvin singing them in his heavenly house.”

Unfortunately, the peculiar configuration of the Coolidges’ marriage made it impossible for her to help her husband. Calvin Coolidge had dominated Grace so thoroughly that she—having abandoned all semblance of equality—was in no position to give him advice or comfort. The man who seldom spoke was also a man who never listened to his wife.

Grace Coolidge was able to resume her busy White House schedule within a few months of her son’s death. She continued to hug visitors, kiss babies, and shake thousands of hands, apparently with the same wonderful enthusiasm. She also tackled a task that may have been a covert attempt to cheer her depressed husband: she decided to redecorate the White House. Mrs. Taft and the first Mrs. Wilson had made a stab at battling the drab, virtually unfurnished state of the family quarters, which looked as if they belonged in a second-rate hotel rather than the First House of the land. Grace decided to start with these rooms.

The American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had opened on November 10, 1924, beginning a revival of interest in our national arts and artifacts. Grace Coolidge became the vanguard of a line of First Ladies who decided the White House should be a museum containing the best available examples of American design. Congress obligingly passed a resolution permitting the First Lady to accept gifts of furniture and artwork and astonished everyone, including themselves, by raising the appropriation given to each incoming
President for redecorating from twenty thousand to fifty thousand dollars. A delighted Grace Coolidge put together a committee of distinguished names from the art and museum world to accelerate the collection process.

Then came the uproar. As the Trumans can testify, any President or First Lady who tries to change anything in the White House is liable to get caught in a cross fire that resembles Armageddon. Grace’s committee issued a broadside about their goals for the White House which went far beyond her modest plans to redecorate the family quarters. They wanted to eliminate the supposedly European influences that had infiltrated the mansion when Theodore Roosevelt sponsored a major overhaul in 1902 in the then universally popular beaux arts style. The American Institute of Architects, who thought beaux arts was just as good in 1925 as it had been in 1902, called on the President to stop this desecration.

Newspaper stories blossomed while the Coolidges were on summer vacation in Massachusetts, picturing an artistic civil war raging at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Calvin Coolidge solved it in typical fashion—typical, I regret to say, of the depressed man who had lost interest in being President. He simply announced there would be no redecoration of the White House. Grace Coolidge’s ambitious plans came to an abrupt end. Nothing was done beyond some painting in the family rooms.

In the same sad year, 1925, the Coolidges were also harassed by the widespread rumor that Grace was pregnant. It was a tribute to her youthful good looks—but she was forty-six years old. No matter how often she denied it, Grace could not prevent a deluge of caps, blankets, pillows, socks, and afghans from pouring into the White House. It was another way for Americans to express their sympathy for Calvin Jr.’s death, but it must have only redoubled the pain of their loss for Grace and particularly for the stricken President.

Few if any Americans were aware that the presidency was on cruise control. The stock market was booming, the country was at the height of the frenzied prosperity that came to be called the Roaring Twenties. The United States did not seem to need a strong President. It did not even seem to need a government. The businessman was king, and
everyone seemed ready to shout Yes! when bandleader Ted Lewis asked his trademark question: “Is everybody happy?”

In 1927, while the White House was undergoing some badly needed renovation of the roof and the third floor, the Coolidges vacationed in the Black Hills of South Dakota. They stayed at a twenty-room state-owned game lodge, which was inevitably christened the summer White House. Grace loved the scenery, which reminded her of New England’s hills. She began taking long walks in the woods around the lodge. Coolidge insisted on a Secret Service agent for an escort.

One sunny day in June, she set out with a young, handsome agent named James Haley. City bred, he knew nothing about the woods, and he and the First Lady soon got lost. Back at the summer White House, the President grew more and more alarmed. When Grace and her escort did not appear for lunch, Coolidge became almost frantic. He was sure she had been bitten by a rattlesnake and was dying or dead. He was only minutes away from ordering the U.S. Army to conduct a search when Grace and Haley came strolling out of the woods, none the worse for wear.

Coolidge proceeded to tear the hide off the quivering agent, calling him an incompetent idiot and demanding to know what “you and my wife” had been doing for the better part of five hours. While reporters watched and Grace winced, the President made himself sound like a husband who suspected the worst possible scenario. He compounded this blunder by ordering Haley transferred immediately to a trivial job elsewhere in the government. He made matters even worse by refusing to speak to Grace for the better part of a week. Stories of jealous, not-so-silent Cal sprouted in newspapers across the nation.

One can only wonder if this imbroglio had anything to do with an extraordinary announcement the President made on August 2. Early that morning, Calvin Coolidge casually remarked to Grace that the date meant he had been President for “four years [as of] today.” Later in the morning, he summoned reporters to his temporary office in nearby Rapid City and handed out slips of paper on which was written a single sentence:
I do not choose to run for president in 1928
.

At lunch, Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas was one of the guests. He expected Grace Coolidge to say something about her husband’s startling decision. She never mentioned it, and neither did the President. Coolidge went off to take a nap and Capper said: “Quite a surprise the President gave us this morning.”

Grace, settled with her knitting in a leather chair before a great stone fireplace, gave Capper a blank look. The senator described the pandemonium among the reporters when they saw the announcement. “Isn’t that just like the man!” Grace said. “He never gave me the slightest intimation of his intention. I had no idea.”

Later the head of the Secret Service detail, Edward Starling, asked her what she thought of the President’s decision. “I have such faith in Mr. Coolidge’s judgment,” Grace said, “if he told me I would die tomorrow morning at ten o’clock I would believe him.”

When you put the extravagance of that statement in the context of the lack of judgment Coolidge displayed in the Haley incident, one can only surmise that Grace’s serenity was under severe strain. She was talking to herself as much as to Starling. I would not be surprised if she resorted to her knitting a great deal during these troubled weeks, hoping her needles would keep her on course.

The Haley incident started an even more disturbing rumor that Grace planned to divorce Calvin Coolidge the minute she left the White House. The gossip became so serious that some of Coolidge’s aides urged the couple to make more public appearances together. But these performances, to which the President grudgingly assented, did little good because Coolidge was as incapable as Richard Nixon of expressing affection in public. Nor would he tolerate the idea of letting Grace kiss him or hug him.

The depressed President vetoed personal appearances by Grace alone. In the fall of 1927, a friend invited her to the Army-Navy game. “Of course, if I went I should have to go with ‘bells on’ and there’s no fun in that,” she wrote, meaning that her fame as First Lady would attract too much attention. “Couldn’t get permission anyhow,” she added. “I guess nobody but you knows how shut in and hemmed about I feel.”

In her later White House years, Grace retreated to a room which she had suggested adding to the White House when the government renovated the third floor, the Sky Parlor. This glassed-in sunroom on the roof of the South Portico had a magnificent view of the Washington Monument and the Mall. It contained a couch, a writing table, porch furniture, a phonograph and portable radio. Only the President and her closest friends visited her there.

Grace’s restriction to the White House renewed her interest in leaving some sort of mark on the mansion. She persuaded her husband to allow her to form another committee of experts and antiquarians, who operated with more stealth and political smarts than the previous group. Even more helpful was Lieutenant Colonel Ulysses Grant III, grandson of the President, who had been in charge of the renovation of the third floor and roof. He not only handed over the surplus cash from that operation but helped locate lost Lincoln treasures at the Soldiers’ Home. Under his supervision, they transformed the Green Room from a beaux arts extravaganza to a chaste colonial parlor, featuring a reproduction of a settee owned by George Washington, delicate Hepplewhite tables and chairs, and a striking portrait of Thomas Jefferson.

Grace Coolidge left the White House proud of this contribution, her smiling serenity intact. But she was never able to share her inner peace with her wounded, brooding husband. He could not find a good word to say for his successor, Herbert Hoover, beyond a bitter epithet: “the wonder boy.” Workmen erecting the reviewing stand before the White House for Hoover’s inauguration thought Coolidge acted like a prisoner watching “the building of a scaffold for his [own] execution.”

Back home in Northampton, Calvin Coolidge continued to be a depressed, unhappy man, tormented by constant bouts of indigestion, allergies, and asthmatic attacks. In his autobiography, he again lamented his son’s death and linked it to his ambition for the presidency. He wrote almost the same tormented words he had spoken to William Allen White: “In his suffering he was asking me to help him and I could not.”