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NEW YORK The White House messed up its history. That's the contention of critics who pointed to references recently appended to the biography pages of past presidents on the White House website.

Scholars of Calvin Coolidge, the president who is our focus, found an error. The Coolidge "Did You Know?" item says that "On Feb. 22, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people."

Alas, Coolidge was not the first, as a retired archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, Jerry L. Wallace, noted in an email to us. The first chief executive to deliver a radio address was Warren G. Harding, whose dedication of the Lincoln Memorial was carried over the airwaves on May 30, 1922.

What the Barack Obama White House did was introduce its own comments and facts to the extant biographies of the presidents on the White House pages. Some commentators such as Seth Mandel at Contentions, the Commentary magazine blog, interpret the effort to draw such parallels as an intrusion on past presidents.

Mandel sees the Obama administration comments as evidence that the president, like many of his young devotees, doesn't "have much memory of the political world before the arrival of The One." You can agree or disagree with this criticism.

The real story here is not the specific Coolidge error or whether you like the new White House comments. It is that accurate history is becoming much harder to deliver than it used to be.

The Internet and databases have raised the bar for all writing on history. Your authors, both students of Coolidge, discovered this firsthand in researching an iconic quote long attributed to Silent Cal.

Coolidge endured severe setbacks in life. Yet he persevered. The Coolidge quotation that captures that perseverance best was printed in a pamphlet in the 1930s by New York Life Insurance Co., where the 30th president served as a director:

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and will always solve the problem of the human race."

To say this quotation is loved is an understatement. Historians have routinely slammed anyone who dared suggest it was not uttered by Coolidge.

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Calvin Coolidge persisted in deed, if not in word