Coolidge: An American Enigma - Robert Sobel

Category: Adults, Autobiography & Biographies, Political
Language: English
Keywords: 1920's American President

Written by Robert Sobel
Read by Charles Bice
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Release date: 09-20-11
Length: 16 hrs and 53 mins
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

Robert Sobel was an American professor of history at Hofstra University, and a well-known and prolific writer of business histories. He was also a chess Master, who represented the United States at the 1957 and 1958 Student chess Olympiads; he defeated thirteen-year-old future World Champion Bobby Fischer at Montreal 1956.

Despite his prolific writings in business history, he is most famous for his single novel, For Want of a Nail, an alternate history of the United States.

In the first full-scale biography of Coolidge in a generation, Robert Sobel shatters the caricature of our thirtieth president as a silent, do-nothing leader.

Sobel instead exposes the real Coolidge, whose legacy as the most Jeffersonian of all twentieth-century presidents still reverberates today. Sobel delves into the record to show how Coolidge cut taxes four times, had a budget surplus every year in office, and cut the national debt by a third in a period of unprecedented economic growth.

Though his list of accomplishments is impressive, Calvin Coolidge was perhaps best known and most respected by his contemporaries for his character. Americans embraced Coolidge for his upstanding character, which came as a breath of fresh air after the scandal-ridden administration of Warren G. Harding. the sleaze that characterizes much of American political life today was absent in his administration.

In many respects Coolidge was of a bygone era. He was the last president who wrote his own speeches, who spent hours each day greeting White House visitors, who had only one secretary, and who didn’t even keep a telephone on his desk. Yet he remains as relevant today as he was three-quarters of a century ago. Little wonder, then, that Ronald Reagan so admired Coolidge, whose programs in the 1920s presaged the recent movement towards smaller government and reduced taxes. (It was Reagan who ordered Coolidge’s portrait to be placed in the White House Cabinet Room, next to Lincoln’s and Jefferson’s.)

Through research and analysis, Sobel reveals Coolidge’s clear record of political successes and delivers the message that Coolidge had for our time–a message that speaks directly to our most important political debates.

Coolidge remains an enigma to Americans because he was so unlike any other politician, past or present. Coolidge rose to the highest office in the land without the politician’s familiar trappings–the glad-handling, the glib tongue, the empty promises, the negative campaigning. He lacked charisma, presence, charm, or any of the qualities that would make a politician attractive to today’s media. Coolidge’s legacy is his deeds, not his words–which is exactly how he would have chosen to be remembered by history.

Coolidge: An American Enigma dispels the myths that have gathered around this underappreciated president and gives him the serious consideration he merits. With this timely and important biography, Sobel has surely challenged historians to reassess Calvin Coolidge.

This is not my rip. I thank the original uploaded for the hard work.