Grace Goodhue Coolidge

The first major documentary about CALVIN COOLIDGE, the man Ronald Reagan called “one of our most underrated presidents." The year 1923 brought one of the most unusual presidential inaugurations in American history. Vice President Calvin Coolidge was asleep at his childhood home in rural Vermont when the news came in: President Warren Harding was dead. By candlelight, Coolidge’s own father, a notary public, administered the oath of office to the new president. A century later, Coolidge stands as perhaps America’s most misunderstood and unjustly neglected president. A landmark new documentary film changes that

The former President and his wife meet Santa Clause.

This is as slick a piece of campaign film as ever came out of Hollywood -- barring, of course, the anti-Upton Sinclair stuff turned out as newsreels in the 1930s during his campaign for governor of California. President Coolidge is presented as a simple man of the people who helps his cousin with the haying when he is in the neighborhood, works in the building he was born in and lives in the same house his father was born in: just another fellow like you and me. He runs the nation just about as well as we could.

Views of Calvin Coolidge in the months surrounding his re-election as Massachusetts Governor, autumn 1919. Close shot of Coolidge, his wife Grace, and their sons John and Calvin, Jr., on porch of their home at 21 Massasoit St., Northampton, Mass.; Coolidge casts his vote in the gubernatorial election on Nov. 3, 1919, possibly in Northampton in the presence of election officials; Coolidge receives from man identified by interior title as Major Beckmann the American Legion medal, while Legion members on steps cheer; quotation from Seattle post-intelligencer praising Coolidge for his law and order approach in the Boston police strike; close shot of Coolidge outdoors.