No one has ever more successfully made a virtue out of doing little than Calvin Coolidge as president. He did nothing he didn’t absolutely have to do, but rather engaged in a “grim, determined, alert inactivity,” as the journalist Walter Lippmann put it. He declined even to endorse National Education Week in 1927 on the grounds that it wasn’t necessary for the president to do so. In recent years a revisionist view has emerged that Coolidge was in reality cannier and livelier than history has
