One of the best Presidents in the past ( at least by my lights) had the charisma of a clam too -— CALVIN COOLIDGE.
They called him Silent Cal because he hardly spoke.
Yet, silent waters run deep, when he really spoke, you knew that he had SUBSTANCE.
A possibly apocryphal story has it that Dorothy Parker, seated next to him at a dinner, said to him, “Mr. Coolidge, I’ve made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you.” His famous reply: “You lose.”
It was also Parker who, upon learning that Coolidge had died, reportedly remarked, “How can they tell?”
Alice Roosevelt Longworth supposedly once commented that, “He looks as if he’d been weaned on a pickle.”
Coolidge often seemed uncomfortable among fashionable Washington society; when asked why he continued to attend so many of their dinner parties, he replied, “Got to eat somewhere.”
In what is a sad reflection on our society, Coolidge would never be elected today based solely on his appearance and demeanor. Coolidge ran in the days of radio, if anything, and people’s exposure to him was limited.