When Silent Cal Did All the Talking
Bernard Baruch (Wikimedia Commons)
By Bernard Baruch
Bernard Baruch (1870–1965) was a prominent financier to whom presidents turned for advice. Baruch closely advised President Woodrow Wilson before, during, and after the First World War. When the United States entered that conflict, Wilson appointed Baruch chair of the War Industries Board. Later, Baruch became a special adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War and President Harry Truman’s representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.
During the 1920s, Baruch got to know Calvin Coolidge and grew to admire the president. In 1932, Baruch and Coolidge served together on the National Transportation Committee, where President Herbert Hoover appointed them.
Baruch contributed the following piece to “The Real Calvin Coolidge,” a series of firsthand accounts of the president that Good Housekeeping magazine published after Coolidge’s death. The Coolidge Foundation republished these accounts as a series of booklets beginning in the 1980s.
Although I had heard my beloved friend, Dwight Morrow, speak frequently of Calvin Coolidge, he did not stand out from the vast number of people in Washington. So little did I know him at first, that at a luncheon given by Mr. and Mrs. Edwin McLean, I found myself at the same table with a very quiet little man, and asked the lady sitting between us who he was. She said,
“The Vice President.”
He appeared so much younger than his pictures. He was the type who would always look less than his years. He did not engage in the conversation, but he had a sly, amused look in his eyes that was in no way portrayed in his countenance.
The next time I saw him was in the White House, where I dined with him. Besides the President, Mrs. Coolidge and Mrs. Stearns were there. The President was much preoccupied, but became very companionable upon the appearance of a big collie. Addressing his remarks to the dog, he made many amusing comments on the political situation in the House and Senate.
After dinner, while I was talking to the two ladies, Mrs. Coolidge remarked that the President wanted me. I looked down the hall and saw him standing in front of the study door with a box of cigars under his arm, motioning with his head for me to join him. On entering the room, he lit the fire himself, opened his box of cigars, and asked me if I would have a “see-gar.” He pronounced it rather as a Southerner or Westerner would.
I remarked that the scene in the study was very familiar to me, and pointed to a little chair that I had occupied on the extreme end of the so-called Wilson War Cabinet. He said,
“You are just as welcome here now and in that chair as you were then.”
The immediate warmth and friendly spirit of the man was something which I had not expected to encounter.
Then, to my utter amazement at his directness, he said, “I want to talk to you about the railroad situation.”
And he did all the talking. From that topic he proceeded to the agricultural question, and the tariff, and the tax problem, which was under consideration in the Congress at the time. Although I can do my share of talking, I found that at the end of each dissertation I had to interrupt to say,
“Mr. President, in order that the record may be clear as to what I think, please let me say this.”
When I had stayed as long as I thought I should, I started to leave, but he wanted to talk on, and I was delighted to hear his views, and to see that he was so much more human and so much more a companion than I could have believed from the stories I had heard.
And then, as I was saying good-bye to him, he made a remark which perhaps explained why Mr. Coolidge had the reputation of being a silent man. He had asked me to take a certain position that I said he should reserve for some of his prima donnas who felt they should be recognized. He cackled, kind of—an evidence that he was boy and man like the rest. Evidently I had an amused look in my eyes, for he asked,
“What are you smiling at?”
I said: “Mr. President, you are so different from what people say you are. My smile indicates both amusement at that and interest—and, I hope, friendliness.”
He seemed to be very pleased. Then I added,
“Everybody said you never say anything.”
“Well, Baruch,” he replied, “many times I say only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to people. Even that is too much. It winds them up for twenty minutes more.”
The next time I saw him was on a Sunday morning when he asked me to stop over on one of my trips South. He met me in the large room just off the elevator on the second floor. There was a fire in the fireplace. After discussing the matter he had in mind, the subject of disarmament came up. In the course of his remarks he went into one of those well-known Coolidge silences. He looked into the fire, took a couple of puffs on his cigar, and finally said,
“If the people want to fight, they will fight with broomsticks if they can not find anything else.”
Shortly afterward he asked me to serve on the George Washington Bicentennial Commission. I went to the second meeting, a very large one, held in the Crystal Room. Numbers of people spoke about this thing and that thing. The President sat behind a little table facing the committee, which was seated in a great semicircle. After considerable time had been taken up by the speakers, and as he turned his head from one end of the semicircle to the other, he gave me an almost imperceptible wink. I was not quite certain of it at first, but each time his eyes passed mine I could see that innuendo-like wink, with just a crinkle in the corner of his eyes. I thought it was a physical defect, but found on inquiring that this was not so. I knew then that it was mischief or something akin to it. This was confirmed some time later—how much later I do not remember—when, referring to the occasion, he said,
“That meeting had some speakers, didn’t it?”
It was only later, after he had retired from the Presidency, when we both became members of the National Transportation Committee, that I saw developed and let loose the human qualities in him that had crept out on each occasion with me. During the committee meetings he handled everything with such rare good taste and judgment, and with so much consideration for everybody, that he won the real affection of us all.
One day Governor Al Smith said, “Mr. President, did you know that the rooms you are occupying now were once occupied by The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment?”
Without batting an eye the former President said, “Well, I guess we can fumigate them!”
The high regard in which he held Al Smith, and which Al Smith held for him, was very pleasant to the other three on the committee. Every meeting became an occasion we all remember. Many people thought this sweetness and great consideration, as shown in his latter days, were due to his approaching illness, but my contacts with him in other matters made me believe that he always was the human being—very shy, but always considerate of his associates.
I never heard him say anything about himself. He was entirely impersonal, never talking about his relationship with any one. Of course he did have ideas about thrift and the value of money, and what it meant to wrest a living from the hard hills where he was born. He knew that people there had to fight for an existence and store up for the future, as he and his forefathers had done for so many years.
After one of the committee meetings we were discussing current economic and social conditions in general when he said to me:
“You know, I don’t understand what all this means. It is very confusing to me.”
Then I said: “Well, it is confusing to a man like me, too, because as a boy I had to live through the Reconstruction period, when we had a very unkind Government over us. We had to fight our way out; and up in Vermont you had to fight your way from under very serious economic and social difficulties. It is pretty hard for men who had to do this to think that the Government should mother us too much.”
Before I knew him I had thought of him as a politician. As I got to know him better I commenced to think of him as Dwight Morrow had told me about him. He and Dwight Morrow had some similar characteristics. The main difference was that Morrow talked, and loved to talk, and was always charming in his conversation. You loved him immediately when you saw him. One admired his brilliancy, his great heart. Calvin Coolidge was shy, said nothing, but yet had all the human qualities Dwight had. That is undoubtedly the bond which held them most strongly.
It may be that my views regarding Calvin Coolidge were colored by the confidence he seemed to have in me, or perhaps it was the backing he gave to those with whom he was associated as Chairman of the Committee. Each letter to me made me feel I had to work harder. Here is a paragraph from a letter written in Northampton:
“It is hard for me to make decisions up here when I am out of touch with things. I thought we came to the conclusion that it was not wise for us to interpose in these emergency measures. One way is to approach this subject with entire candor and interpose wherever we think we have an opinion. Another way is to proceed more diplomatically, avoiding positions that would probably be ineffective, and looking to securing the largest result in the end.”
This was in reference to my desire to get upon the statute books a bankruptcy act facilitating the quick reorganization of the railroads. After I had advocated this at one of our meetings, he made a characteristic Coolidge remark in opposition, saying,
“In families where there has been a hanging, they do not like to have anybody around twirling a rope.”
As an evidence of his sense of humor, I quote the following from a letter written on October 27, 1932:
“I shall go to New York on the Tuesday afternoon of Election Day and could attend a meeting Wednesday morning from nine to eleven, or in the afternoon from two o’clock to nine o’clock. I mistrust that you and Governor Smith will be rather tired on Wednesday morning, at which time I shall be glad to extend to both of you my sincere sympathy.”
I quote another characteristic Coolidge viewpoint as to expenditures of the committee.
“It is necessary to watch people in Washington all the time to keep them from unnecessary expenditure of money. They have lived off the national Government so long in that city that they are inclined to regard any sort of employment as a Christmas tree, and if we are not careful, they will run up a big expense bill on us. I hope you are checking them up to see what results they are getting, either by personal contact or letter.”
To read more remembrances of Coolidge, see The Real Calvin Coolidge.