When the President Wept

By John T. Lambert

John T. Lambert was a prominent political reporter who got to know Calvin Coolidge in Boston. He went to Washington when Coolidge became president.

Lambert 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.

Here, Lambert recalls the death of Calvin Coolidge Jr., the sixteen-year-old son of President and Mrs. Coolidge. Calvin Jr. sustained a blister on his toe while playing tennis on the White House grounds. He developed sepsis and died on July 7, 1924.

The death of Calvin Coolidge Jr. was a great blow to his mother and his father. He was a manly, able, likable boy, full of fun.

His mother had said of him, “He is a Coolidge, with his mother’s disposition.”

I was at Madison Square Garden in New York at the time of young Calvin’s untimely death, and I feel now the shudder that passed over the Democratic National Convention when the late Senator Thomas J. Walsh made his sympathetic announcement of it. Upon my return to Washington, I visited Mr. Coolidge at the White House to express simply my sympathy for Mrs. Coolidge and himself in the bereavement that had come to them.

The President was in the Executive Offices. He was seated at the desk, across which he discussed the affairs of the nation and of the world with the officials of Government, the foreign diplomats, the financiers, industrialists, and statesmen.

“I am sorry,” I said to him. “Calvin was a good boy.”

He turned slowly until the back of his chair was against the desk. He faced the wide and beautiful expanse of the south lawn. Beyond it he could see the green eminence which the Washington Monument surmounts. He spoke slowly.

“You know,” he said, “I sit here thinking of it, and I just can’t believe it has happened.” His voice trembled. He repeated, “I can’t believe it has happened.”

His eyes were moist. Tears filled them. They ran down his cheeks. He was not the President of the United States. He was the father, overcome by grief and by love for his boy. He wept unafraid, unashamed. The brief moments seemed to bear the age of years.

Unwilling to leave his manifestation of grief as the recollection of my visit, I said to him:

“Calvin was a cub reporter for me once. Do you remember it?”

“I think so,” he answered slowly, his voice choked by emotion.

“You and Mrs. Coolidge and the boys were at the New Willard,” I reminded him. “It was the afternoon of your inauguration as Vice-President.

“I said to John: ‘You had a front seat at the inauguration. You saw Mr. Harding and your father, and all the diplomats with their gold braid. I want you to write just what you saw and how it impressed you.’

“John was just in the long-pants stage then, and he had other things on his mind. When I left the suite, Henry Long (he had been Mr. Coolidge’s secretary) caught up with me and said,

“‘Young Calvin heard what you said to John, and he asked me to tell you that he would like to do it if you would like him to.’”

At this point in my reminiscence Mr. Coolidge turned toward me. The traces of tears were leaving.

“So Calvin wrote the piece,” I said. “He described the gold-braided ambassadors and—”

“I remember it,” Mr. Coolidge interrupted. A smile had come where the tears had been. It was a smile of joy.

“And Calvin wrote,” I said, “that he had seen Mr. Wilson leaving the White House and he thought that was ‘too bad’ because he had heard that Mr. Wilson was ‘a fine President.’”

“He did write that?” the President asked. “That was fine. It was like him.”

The President smiled broadly, a happy smile, in contemplation of the intuitive, youthful generosity of the boy who had borne his name and the name of his father.

I know as he smiled that the memory of Calvin Coolidge Jr., the manly, able, likable, living boy, full of fun, was with him.

I later sent to the President a photostatic copy of young Calvin’s “piece” from the Boston Sunday Advertiser. His secretary told me that he read it eagerly. I have heard that the framed portrait of it was always in Mrs. Coolidge’s bedroom in the White House.

Calvin Coolidge Jr. wrote, “I think you are mistaken in calling me the first boy of the land, since I have done nothing.”

Mrs. Coolidge Comments

Grace Coolidge, President Coolidge’s widow, added her own remembrances to “The Real Calvin Coolidge.” Here she reflects on John T. Lambert’s contribution.

It seems to me that I have known Mr. Lambert from the beginning of Mr. Coolidge’s public service in the state of Massachusetts. He has been a correspondent on different papers during the intervening time, and the Washington representative of one of them when Mr. Coolidge was President.

In general my contacts with members of the press have been casual, as I have maintained a strict policy of giving no interviews; but I have known a few of them more intimately outside of their profession, and I should like to make the statement here that they were unfailing in loyalty. In no instance has one of them betrayed a confidence placed in him through personal friendship by turning it to reportorial account.

Perhaps I should say that I did not have a copy of the article written by young Calvin for Mr. Lambert’s paper hanging on the wall in my room. It may have been confused with a photostatic copy of a letter which Calvin wrote in answer to one that he received from a boy of his own age soon after his father became President. We did not know of this letter until after Calvin’s death. In part he wrote:

“I think you are mistaken in calling me the first boy of the land, since I have done nothing. It is my father who is President. Rather the first boy of the land would be some boy who had distinguished himself through his own actions.”

* * *

If I were asked to describe New England people in one word, I should choose “thrifty.” It is certain that Mr. Coolidge was a notable exponent of that quality, and he instilled it into his children. Calvin came by it naturally, but he disappointed his father once. We were on our way to Poland Springs, where the Governors of the New England states and their families were to be the guests of Governor Baxter of Maine. He had included us in the party, although Mr. Coolidge was then Vice-President.

On the way we spent a night with Mr. and Mrs. Stearns in Swampscott. Mr. Coolidge overheard Mr. Stearns asking Calvin if he had received a present of five dollars which he had sent him as a birthday gift. Boylike, Calvin had neglected to acknowledge it. All the way to Poland Springs the following day, Mr. Coolidge questioned Calvin about what he had done with the money. After we arrived and had been shown to our rooms young Calvin was seated at the desk, given a pencil and paper, and bidden to write down all the things he could remember for which he had spent his five dollars. At dinner time he had not made much headway.

The following day was Sunday, an uncomfortably hot one. We attended service in the chapel. The visiting minister had a long sermon. There was no air stirring. I do not believe that many who were in the congregation followed the discourse closely. After we had left the church and were walking back to the hotel, my husband turned to me and asked,

“Mammy, what was the sermon about?”

“Mercy,” I said, “don’t ask me!”

“John, what was the sermon about?”

“I don’t know,” was the answer.

Then it was Calvin’s turn. The question was repeated.

The boy squirmed uncomfortably, said he didn't know.

“Yes, you do, too,” his father told him, and kept at it until, with a shrug of the shoulders, his son murmured,

“Aw, spending money!”

To read more remembrances of Coolidge, see The Real Calvin Coolidge.