My name is Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library for the last twenty-two years. On behalf of the Library, it is my pleasure and honor to welcome you this morning to "Calvin Coolidge: Examining the Evidence."

Last month a friend, who is a local history professor, teased me by saying that we could never get a big crowd to come to a conference on Calvin Coolidge. I disagreed and suggested a small wager. Today I can say, in words which would resonate with Silent Cal, "You lose."

When I took my first elective history course in college, the professor insisted that Calvin Coolidge was the inspiration for Sinclair Lewis's character, George Babbitt. I dutifully wrote it down and believed it. Just last year, when a Boston-area professor learned of my interest in Coolidge, he laughed and said, "The only thing we use Coolidge for in teaching American history is comic relief " These remarks, separated by 35 years, suggest that the time has come for a serious and non-partisan discussion of Calvin Coolidge.

Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Donald, in the preface to his 1995 biography of Lincoln, relates a discussion he had in the White House with John F. Kennedy in 1962. Donald recalls that the president "was unhappy with historians" and .'voiced deep dissatisfaction with the glib way [they] had rated some of his predecessors as 'Below Average' and marked a few as 'Failures.' Thinking, no doubt of how his own administration would look in the backward glance of history, he resented the whole process. With real feeling he said, 'No one has a right to grade a President--not even poor James Buchanan--who has not sat in this chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.'"

Coolidge is the last American president not to have a presidential library. In the spirit of the Kennedy Library's ongoing commitment to improving the quality of history education, especially in secondary schools, and President Kennedy's insistence on examining the evidence, we are delighted to have the thirtieth president borrow the library of the thirty-fifth president for this event. A discussion of Coolidge at the Kennedy Library sends precisely the right educational message: this conference is largely about political history, but it is not a political conference. Our purpose is not to stage a Coolidge rally, but rather to level the historical playing field by exploring Calvin Coolidge's life, career and ideas accurately, fairly and in context.

The Coolidge stereotype, which 'I will discuss in detail later today, is omnipresent. At a local high school a few years ago, after I discussed the Coolidge orthodoxy, a student angrily asserted, "That can't be true." When I asked her why she felt that way, she responded, "Someone like that could never have been elected to anything." She was clearly on to something. There will be many surprises over the next two days.

I am confident that the speakers and the audience share a desire to recover the real Coolidge, the Cal we hardly knew, one of the most overlooked and misunderstood American presidents. Whether we agree with him or not is beside the point. The conference should demonstrate that in teaching and studying history, from the elementary schools through the graduate schools, examining the evidence should be the top priority