The Presidency: Puritan in the Cabinet Room

With his flinty stare, red hair, high collar and striped trousers, Calvin Coolidge is now an established presence in the Cabinet Room, a quiet patron of supply-side economics. He is on the wall in oils, along with Lincoln and Eisenhower. When Coolidge appeared on the morning of Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, some of the staff members were startled. "There's been an error," suggested one aide, believing a workman had mistaken the Vermonter for Jefferson or maybe McKinley. No, the report came back, the President wants Coolidge, the cutter of taxes and debt, the man...