I have a confession to make. For the past several months I have been involved with a president of the United States--Calvin Coolidge. I think of him every day. I mull his words, considering whether I agree with them or not. White gloved, I open crumbling scrapbooks and study stiff, yellowed news clippings from the 1920s. Through them, I trace Coolidge's career through the Massachusetts state legislature, the governorship, the vice presidency, and when Warren G. Harding unexpectedly dies, the presidency. I unfold a vintage Rutland Herald and thrill to the stacked headlines describing his August 3d, 1923 inauguration: "Calvin Coolidge Takes Oath of Office by Pale Light of Kerosene Lamp. President Is Sworn in by His Father Who Is Notary Public at 2:47 O'clock in Morning: at 6 O'clock New Executive Shaves Himself at Sink in Kitchen as Natives look Through Window."

I gaze at his portrait painted by the English artist Frank O. Salisbury, who at the request of Mrs. Coolidge, softened the president's countenance ever so slightly, and wonder what is going on behind that enigmatic face? I stand quietly by his grave in Vermont and feel a special relationship with him.

How is it possible to have a relationship with a dead president? It's easy, as countless biographers and historians can attest. Indeed it's preferable to being involved with a live president--or is that stating the obvious. For one thing, a dead president is more constant. He's there when you need him.

All right, my friends in Cambridge say impatiently. But Calvin Coolidge? Wasn't he the one who Alice Roosevelt Longworth said was weaned on a pickle? Wasn't he the Babbitt who said "the business of America is business?" Wasn't he the assassin of organized labor? Wasn't he a ... REPUBLICAN?

Well, yes, not exactly, no, and, sure. Weaned on a pickle turned out to be one of the milder epithets. When told he was dead, Dorothy Parker asked, "How can you tell?" Some years later, one historian described Coolidge as a man who at "no time during his political rise ... ever betrayed any qualities of leadership or vision." Another said, "He came into the White House a pathological case: cruel, frigid, distrustful, sour, loathing people and human contact."

It turns out not only was he mis-characterized, he was misquoted. We now know that Coolidge did not say "the business of America is business." And his famous telegram to Samuel Gompers: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time," obscured both his advocacy for workers and his work for fair wages.

It is true, though, that he was a Republican, and certainly not my normal type. My type is more Thomas Jefferson, or at least it used to be. He was the first, and only other, president I've been really serious about. It lasted a long time with Thomas Jefferson. And why not? Being with Jefferson means lingering at Monticello as long as they will allow. It means following his steps through Paris, seeking, among other things, the exact spot where he broke his arm trying to impress Maria Cosway. It means, with heart pounding, holding folios of his actual letters in hushed libraries on both coasts. It means reading through yards of biographies, some with prose so purple you cannot imagine. It means, after a time, being able to conjure up this tall, elegant president in all sorts of circumstances--with his dying wife writing out painful farewell sentiments from Tristram Shandy, reading the great philosophers, puttering with his perpetual clock, and reclining in the surprisingly short, red-silk covered bed at Monticello, perhaps with Sally Hemings.

Several Jefferson biographers insist it never happened. We won't know for sure until someone exhumes bodies for DNA tests. But it was through Hemings that I really became acquainted with Jefferson. As a young newspaper reporter covering the civil rights movement, I got to know an executive with one of the major organizations--an African American man with striking green eyes. Eventually he told me that he was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Oh yes, he was quite sure. It had all been thoroughly researched. The "black" Jefferson descendants, he said, even had family reunions, but those who were "passing for white" usually didn't come.

So I worked backwards, starting with the complexities of the American heritage and arriving at the watershed. In my 20s and early 30s Jefferson was the perfect consort: all that declaring of independence from the family of origin, all that creating of new, more suitable, rules, all that pursuing of happiness.

Eventually, though, he broke my heart. For all of his intellect, he just couldn't seem to 'get it' about slavery. And it was frightening how he could delude himself about his reckless spending on his mansion, wine, travel, and all manner of hobbies. He left his devoted daughter, Martha, with more than $100,000 of his debts. He left 130 enslaved men, women, and children--whom he had vowed to protect as a father--on the auction block, where they were sold to the highest bidder. For a long time I wanted nothing to do with Thomas Jefferson. In those days I tended to reject people who were not what I wished them to be.

Many years later, at a different stage of life, I met Calvin Coolidge. I walked into the Old South Meeting House and there was "Calvin Coolidge" on the stage talking about his life and career. It was Coolidge in the person of Jim Cooke, an actor and expert on the 30th president, who, like him, was born in Vermont and migrated to Massachusetts. I knew, as a child of the New Deal, that I wasn't supposed to like Coolidge. Yet it intrigued me that Coolidge--as performed by Cooke using Coolidge's own words--seemed so different from his reputation.

Then, too, I wanted to understand my mother's time. Coolidge was in the White House from her 8th. to her 13th year. Like it or not, presidents are icons of our history and culture. "Coolidge," my mother says. "I don't remember very much about him." Not surprising. She was busy with other things, namely obliterating any sign of her family's immigrancy. Barely out the door, she pulled the earrings from her pierced ears, removed her heavy woolen stockings, and hurried to a friend's house to eat sandwiches made with white bread. How could she imagine that a child of European peasants had anything in common with a Yankee president? How could she know that, by a quirk of fate, he had been sworn into the presidency by his own father, in a village homestead so lacking in comfort it was lit by kerosene lamps and had a toilet even more primitive than the one she found so embarrassing in her family home. How could she guess that by crossing two state borders to enter college, the law, and the state legislature, the president escaped an American version of peasantry, although it wasn't called that.

"Coolidge," my mother says. "They say he didn't do very much." Exactly. Perhaps his chief asset, in fact. He was a relief for a nation sickened by war and corruption. He brought no grand gestures, no Louisiana Purchases, no soaring rhetoric. He cultivated the image of Silent Cal with brief witticisms.

"You lose," he replied when a matron told him she had bet she could get him to say more than two words.

"They say not," he responded when asked whether he was related to the Boston Coolidges.

Because Coolidge seemed to vanish into history, few know that he was a very popular president. No slouch at spin, he was one of the most communicative presidents we've had--holding tightly controlled press conferences twice a week, giving more speeches (which he wrote himself) than his 29 predecessors, and through the new medium of radio, becoming the first president whose voice was familiar to the American people.

With a firm clasp on his coin purse and on the national budget, there was no chance that he would run up the equivalent of millions of dollars of personal debt, as did Jefferson, or billions of federal debt, as Reagan did (even while sitting beneath Coolidge's portrait in the Cabinet room). Coolidge may never inspire the ardor that Jefferson did, but perhaps he is gaining a little more respect.

Actually I believe that Silent Cal and the American Sphinx had more in common than we thought beyond the fact that Jefferson's granddaughter, Ellen Randolph, married Joseph Coolidge (presumably of the "they-say-not" Coolidges) and moved to Boston. Both Jefferson and Coolidge were almost mystically American. Jefferson (like Adams) held on so he could die on the Fourth of July, exactly 50 years after signing the Declaration of Independence. Coolidge came into this world on the Fourth of July, 1872, the bearer of both Yankee and Native American heritage. Jefferson and Coolidge defined the American ethos as individual growth. One emphasized education, the other character, but both saw the common good as depending upon individual freedom and responsibility.

Both endured terrible grief. God, how they endured. Jefferson lost his father at age 14; his favorite sister in young adulthood; his wife when he was 39, and five of their six children. Coolidge lost his beloved mother when he was 12. At age 17 he saw his dear, only sister die of appendicitis. As President of the United States he watched powerless as his 16-year-old son died of septic poisoning from a blister on his toe.

We're tempted to think that because these people witnessed death more often than we do, they absorbed it better. In fact, Jefferson lay prostrate with migraine headaches. Coolidge took to sleeping 10 hours a night and napping in the afternoon. Some called it indolence. Today we call it clinical depression.

Both of these men concocted nostrums and aphorisms to keep them going. Coolidge's was: "Do the day's work." In my youth, I would have regarded that motto as an absurd reduction of the meaning of life. Now I know better. Now I understand that I do not control the fates which await my mother, my other loved ones, my friends, me. Now I am old enough to know that life's solace, salvation, and, yes, promise, lie in those four simple words: "Do the day's work."