THE MEETINGS TOOK PLACE once a week. He scheduled them at 9:30 A.M. on Fridays, before the session with the full cabinet at eleven. That was not really enough time, especially when the cabinet meetings began at 10:30 instead of eleven. He and the budget director actually needed more minutes, not fewer, to prepare if they were going to fend off the cabinet. But for now, Coolidge kept the appointment at 9:30. Together, the new president and his budget director cut, and then cut again. The cutting differed only in scale from the cutting John Coolidge had labored over so long by kerosene lamp, trying to match outlays with meager revenues from the school tax or the snow tax. Coolidge and Herbert Mayhew Lord, the director, were just two New Englanders, one from Plymouth, Vermont, the other from Rockland, Maine. Still, there was a sense of awe and duty to their meetings. In the president’s appointment diary beside one of their early sessions, someone had written in the word “necessary.”
