Calvin Coolidge--the first Teflon President?

“Harry Truman had a sign on his desk emblazoned with this motto: 'The buck stops here.' It has obviously been removed and Reagan's desk has been Teflon coated...”

-Representative Patricia Schroeder (D-Colorado), Congressional Record, August 2, 1983

Representative Schroeder was frustrated that Ronald Reagan seemed to sail through his presidency without being held responsible for anything. One day in 1983, while cooking eggs for her family, she looked down at her Teflon-coated pan and got an inspiration. Nothing seemed to stick to Reagan. And Reagan soon became known as the “Teflon President”--a label that did stick.

But Reagan was probably not the first Teflon president. The first seems to have preceded Teflon. Maurice Frink's, column, “The Office Window” in the August 27, 1927 Elkhart Truth includes a reference to an article in the August, 1927 Atlantic, “The President and Press,” by Willis Sharp:

...the principal point made by Mr. Sharp was that President [Calvin] Coolidge has tamed the papers to eat out of his hand. The president, as Mr. Sharp sees it, has been “spoiled” by the unified praise he has received from the press; he has, as a result, conceived the notion that the press should never speak of him otherwise than in praise, and he carries to such an extreme that he has practically forbade the newspapers even to disagree with his policies. Mr. Sharp thinks the papers have taken this lying down; he thinks there are only “a few great papers which still throb with sound journalistic souls.”

“Mr. Sharp may be right or wrong; we do not know,” Frink continues. “But we do have an opinion regarding a headline in a South Bend paper:

UNEVENTFUL WEEK-END PASSED IN MISHAWAKA

“Our journalistic soul throbs with the conviction that this was not news. An eventful week-end in Mishawaka would be something to shout about.”

More than 80 years later, Frink is still right.