In 1999, when he was 93, I met John Coolidge. He was living with his daughter and her family in Plymouth Notch, having already lost his wife Florence and another daughter to cancer. The day we met, he was balding and bent, but his eyes shone. He was eager to meet my crew chief and me. His stories had been brimming for so many years that they spilled out before we had our camera set up.
He began to spill his most heartbreaking story almost as soon as we walked in the door, without looking up, the details tumbling out: In the summer of 1924, while his father was campaigning for a full term as President of the United States, he and his younger brother Cal played a game of tennis on the White House court. John, at 18, was the quieter of the two. Cal was 16 and exuberant.
It was 75 years later, but to John Coolidge that tennis game was yesterday. The memory of it seemed fresh and raw. Maybe he told it so quickly because he knew I’d ask him about it, and he wanted to get it out of the way. After all, that tennis game did not define a life that was long and full: a rich career, a loving family, and much to be happy about. But that day in 1924 ended in deep grief and pain, one that he was famously reluctant to ever discuss.
Perhaps at age 93, he finally wanted to remember, and to tell us.
That summer day, the brothers had to don their Sunday clothes to take a series of campaign photos with their parents. The year before, in August 1923, President Warren Harding had died suddenly on a train during a trip to the West Coast, and Calvin Coolidge had taken the oath of office from his father by candlelight at his home in Plymouth Notch. That tiny home remains frozen in time to 1923 and was just a stone’s throw from the home my colleague and I were speaking to John Coolidge in.
Once their father was officially president, Coolidge’s two sons went from obscurity to the White House spotlight overnight. In the summer of 1924, their father was running to keep the job he already held, and John and Cal had to look their best. The heat was stifling, and when the photo session was over, they couldn’t wait to shed their suits and jump into tennis togs to get outside to play. Cal Jr. didn’t bother to wear socks.
John and Cal, always competitive, played a quick but heated game of tennis. Cal developed a blood blister on his bare toe, and septicemia set in. Treated at Walter Reed Hospital, the blood poisoning caused agony and delirium. Penicillin would not be available for another 20 years. The doctors were helpless. After that tennis match, Cal lived only 10 days.
This story tumbled out of John Coolidge that fall day in 1999, before we had the camera rolling. I knew we were losing a rare chance to document him talking about this terrible memory.
Calvin Coolidge is not a president most Americans remember. If they do, they learn about his reticence and his stern or stoic face, the one that Alice Roosevelt Longworth said had been “weaned on a pickle.” Alice wasn’t one to be charitable or kind, and President Coolidge in the summer of 1924, after that tennis match, wasn’t one to smile. He was said to blame himself repeatedly for Cal’s death, sobbing in the Oval Office, unable to conduct meetings. History doesn’t cut President Coolidge any slack, or consider that he ran for president while experiencing intense grief. He had to face the cameras and answer questions on policy every day, even the ones he could barely to make it through.
A constant theme of our American Presidents series that year was the suffering by the families who occupied the Oval Office. So many children of presidents died, because so many children used to die. In the past generation or two, we have lost our memory of suffering – at least until the covid-19 pandemic, and even then, we willfully ignore the numbers. One reason our presidents series was successful, I think, was because we confronted in small and intimate ways the cost of human suffering and grief, and the effect these have on political decision-making.
The story of Cal Jr. made me reflect on the relentless nature of presidential campaigns. All presidents and their families have lived in fishbowls, no matter what era. John Coolidge and his parents never had room to privately grieve Cal Jr.’s loss; they had no place to go where they wouldn’t be seen. The president pushed through, and his wife held her head up. John began college that fall, now an only child.
Cal Jr. had been quoted widely the summer before, when his father became president. In 1923, the 15-year-old was working on a tobacco farm when word came that President Harding had died and his father was now President of the United States. One of his co-workers said to Cal, “If my father were president, I wouldn’t be working on a tobacco farm,” to which Cal replied, “If your father were my father, you would.”
So John wasn’t given any time to grieve his kid brother. His parents weren’t about to let him change his routine. Even before the election of 1924, John enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts, the state where his father had been governor before he was Vice President. John stayed in school through the election. His parents did allow him attend his father’s inauguration on the East Front of the US Capitol, but told him that the inaugural ball was out. He was to return to Amherst and continue his studies.
So shortly before Inauguration Day in March 1925, John took a train from Massachusetts to Washington, DC. When the train reached Hartford, they stopped for a bit. The conductor told John and his Secret Service agent that the train would take a few minutes to add the Connecticut governor’s car. John told me, ‘I knew the Connecticut governor, because my dad had been the governor of Massachusetts. So I thought I would go say hello.’ He and Woody, the agent, left their seats to greet the governor of Connecticut. John said he walked into the governor’s car like any old friend would, unannounced. “But there’d been an election!” John told me, laughing. He entered the car and right away had no idea who these people were. They, however, were delighted he walked into their private car – they recognized the president’s son immediately.
John told me he was embarrassed – until he caught sight of Governor Trumbull’s lovely daughter, Florence. At a moment when he was disciplining his grief over the loss of his brother and celebrating the inauguration of his father, John Coolidge met the love of his life.
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Plymouth Notch is a hamlet frozen in time, a historic site now, a tribute to the Coolidge family and their spare way of life. That fall of 1999, John and his daughter’s family lived just up the road from the main Notch crossroads, the place that attracts presidential tourists and autumn leaf gawkers. Visitors stop in at the general store for a bottle of Moxie or a small bag of penny candy before taking the carriage ride tour or walking up the street to the Vermont White House.
When our C-SPAN crew met him, most people had forgotten John Coolidge was still alive. He was talkative, both on camera and off. I wanted to be recording all the emotion tumbling out from the heart of a man who had lived at the top of American political life 75 years earlier. He was openly sharing his grief and his love, and we weren’t yet rolling!
He had not been back to the White House in 25 years, he said. He had been invited to a lunch there in 1974, during the Nixon administration, 50 years after his father had been elected president.
“I sat next to Julie Nixon,” he said, his eyes glowing. His memory of her was clear: She was lovely, vivacious, kind, and interested in him. His face lit up as he spoke of that memory, his usually quiet voice boomed in remembering the occasion. I exchanged glances with his daughter, who smiled back: John Coolidge was still enchanted by Julie Nixon Eisenhower, 25 years later.
After we left the Coolidges the day of our interview, I called a contact at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, and told her that John Coolidge was living in Plymouth Notch, and still pining for Julie Nixon Eisenhower. By the time I returned to my office at C-SPAN, I had an email in my inbox from Julie herself, asking for John’s address.
A few weeks later when we returned to Plymouth Notch for our live show in the presidents series, John met me, beaming: he’d had a letter from Julie. The circle was complete.
He died less than a year later.
Here’s my interview: https://www.c-span.org/video/?152269-1/president-calvin-coolidge
These Hinkypunks are fascinating. Thank you.
Sweet!