The White House Week

P:The President and Mrs. Coolidge motored to Edgemoor, Washington suburb. There is the home of Harry S. New of Indiana, Postmaster General, whose dinner guests they were, and with them a dozen Hoosiers, including Author & Mrs. Booth Tarkington.

P:Grover Cleveland drank. Calvin Coolidge does not. In many another way the two-term Democrat and the two-term Republican differ. Cleveland is the first President whom Calvin Coolidge can remember. A word unites them. It is perhaps Calvin Coolidge's favorite: "character." He keynoted it in a recent speech (Armistice Day). He has used it in nearly every speech. Last week, regretting his inability to make a speech on the 90th anniversary of Grover Cleveland's birth, he used it: "Character . . . stability . . . efficiency."

P:The President shook hands with 1,220 citizens in 27 minutes. Some were Women's Christian Temperance Unionists; the rest, insurance-sellers.

P:Again, Republican Senators James E. Watson and Arthur R. Robinson personally besought the President to pardon onetime Indiana Governor Warren T. McCray, who is serving a ten-year term in Atlanta Penitentiary for using the mails to defraud (TIME, Apr. 5).

P:On Feb. 22, by tuning in on Station WEAF, WJZ, WEEI, WJAR, WTAG, WCSH, WTIC, WGY, WGR, WBZ, WLIT, WFI, WRC, KDKA, WCAE, WTAM, WWJ, WSAI, WLIB, WGN, KYW, KSD, WOC, WCCO, WDAF, WHAS, WSM, WSB, WMC, KOA, KPO, KGO, KFI, KGW, KOMO, KFOA or KHQ, radiophiles may hear the voice of the President. He will talk about President Washington from the rostrum of the House of Representatives, some Senators and Congressmen being seated before him.

P:Coatroom talk is occasionally significant. Last week significance was attached to unofficial opinions that so far as the President's equanimity may be disturbed, it has been disturbed. Cause: the Senate's refusal to confirm his appointment of Cyrus E. Woods of Pennsylvania to the Interstate Commerce Commission (TIME, Jan. 31). It was the second rejection by the 69th Congress. Previous one: Wallace McCamant, "original Coolidge man of Oregon," to be Federal Circuit Judge. Judge McCamant had once said of Theodore Roosevelt: "Theodore Roosevelt was not a good American."

P:The President sent to the House Appropriations Committee a supplemental request for $185,000 to install machinery for ventilating and dehumidizing the Senate Chamber.

P:Mrs. Coolidge-- received the graduating class of Public School No. 47 of New York City. They were deaf. She talked to them in sign-language which she had learned when she taught in a school for deaf-mutes at Northampton, Mass.

P:The President received Swami Yogananda, Indian lecturer.

P:President Coolidge has many times heard his Official Spokesman's unquotable voice thrashed by the eminently quotable voice of Senator James A. Reed of Missouri. Last week the thrashing was severe. Said Mr. Reed: "I have learned that the White House Spokesman is even a more authentic source of information as to the Presidential mind than the President himself, if such a thing is possible. . . . Let us have done with this sham and this miserable boyish, childish attitude of the White House!"