Following Woodrow Wilson's stroke, in 1919, his wife, Edith, and the White House doctor, Cary Grayson, ran the government. The incapacitated Coolidge turned the reins over to his wife, his Cabinet, and Congress. Whereas previously, whether as mayor, Massachusetts senate president, governor, or President, he had not hesitated to use the powers of office, "After July 1924, he deferred to Congress, refused to assist members of his administration in making decisions, hid behind the separation of powers principle as a way of avoiding involvement with the independent regulatory commissions, shied away from foreign policy entanglements, and declined to use his powers as president to achieve his goals." Mrs. Coolidge "bore 85 per cent of the burdens of office."

So comprehensively had he answered questions at his first press conference that the White House reporters applauded. According to The Boston Globe, "the veterans, and there are correspondents here who have seen presidents come and go for a quarter of a century, declare that thus far President Coolidge is more communicative than any man, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, who ever sat in the White House." That was before. After, Coolidge earned the sobriquet "Silent Cal."

The Tortured President tortured his wife and surviving son, John, who reminded him of the better-loved Calvin Jr. He behaved sadistically toward the White House staff and the Secret Service. On one occasion he tried to catch a bodyguard's finger with a fishhook; on another, after being bitten by a mosquito, he asked an agent, "Why didn't you kill it?" When leaving his office for a walk, he would sometimes press the buzzer signaling White House employees that he was returning, throwing them into a panic of activity. He acted bizarrely. During a private dinner with Herbert Hoover, his Secretary of Commerce, he pointed to a nearby portrait of John Quincy Adams and asked, "Mr. Hoover, don't you think the light has been too shiny on Mr. Adams' head?" He had a servant get a stepladder, then "rubbed a rag with fireplace ashes and proceeded to blacken Mr. Adams' head."

The mention of Hoover raises a question: Did Coolidge's depression prevent him from addressing the speculative excesses that, seven months after he left office, in 1929, resulted in the Great Crash? His unlucky successor thought so. Coolidge, Hoover wrote in his Memoirs, believed that nine out of ten troubles "will run into the ditch before they reach you" so you could ignore them. "The trouble with this philosophy was that when the tenth trouble reached him it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster. The outstanding instance was the rising boom and orgy of mad speculation which began in 1927, in respect to which he sidestepped all our anxious urgings and warnings to take action." Gilbert shows that Coolidge had followed "economic conditions" throughout his career, and that, in his few months as a functioning chief executive, he had taken "a proactive stance in dealing with them." The implication is that Coolidge's incapacity helped produce the Crash. But this may ascribe to pathology inaction that arose from ideology. Coolidge was "a real conservative," in Hoover's words, who looked askance on government's regulatory role in the economy. The man he appointed to head the Federal Trade Commission, for example, called it "an instrument of oppression and disturbance and injury." Coolidge was staying true to his ideology in rejecting Hoover's pleas for policing Wall Street.