IT IS NO SECRET that presidents with pets attract television cameras like bees drawn to blossoms. What surprised me reading "The Pawprints of History" and visiting the Presidential Pet Museum in Maryland is that savvy presidents knew the PR value of pets long before TV was a gleam in an inventor's eye.

Take "Silent Cal" Coolidge, for instance. Here was a dour, starchy president if there ever was one. Yet Coolidge had a menagerie of animals the envy of a zookeeper-too many to list them all here. Not just cats and dogs, either, though he had a number of each.

Evenings, Coolidge, a Vermont vice president who rose to the presidency upon the death of Warren G. Harding in 1923, was known to walk his leash trained raccoons on the White House grounds. Few presidents have been pet-less. There are no records of four-legged residents during the administrations of Chester Arthur,Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce and Paul James K. Polk. But Sullivan even Johnson, the Tennessee maverick, apparently beriended a family of mice, feeding them during the dark days of his impeachment trial, in which he was finally acquitted by a single vote.

The fondness for animals by our leaders began with George Washington, who had many horses and dogs and whose wife, Martha, kept a parrot.

I had come across mention of Claire McLean and her museum of the pets of presidents in a mention by one of the news networks earlier this year, reporting the death of President Bill Clinton's beloved Labrador retriever, Buddy.

The museum is 10 minutes from the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary that I wrote about two weeks ago (see July 20 Armchair Adventures). It is a modest, somewhat homespun effort by McLean, a breeder and groomer who specializes in the bouvier des Flanders.

During the Reagan presidency, she got a call from the White House to groom the president's bouvier, Lucky. McLean was honored to groom the president's dog, and kept some of the clippings as a souvenir. And that explains the portrait of Lucky, made from his own fur, which bangs in the small museum beside her home, in Lothian, Md.

Lucky, by the way, proved to be too much for diminutive first lady Nancy Reagan and was eventually banished to the family's California ranch.

As any experienced pet owner knows, neither dogs nor cats nor any other variety of pet is always a model of behavior and decorum.

In his delightful book "The Pawprints of History," Canadian psychology professor Stanley Coren details dozens of intimate relationships of powerful and influential figures in history with their canine favorites. And, as he shows through remarkable research and skill, the story of mankind may have been influenced at many turns by the closeness of leaders and their dogs.

Coren's story goes well beyond the scope of American presidents and their pets to take in leaders as far back as Alexander the Great, who survived a charging elephant in a war with the Persians when his loyal greyhound, Peritas, diverted the beast's charge.

Corn makes a convincing case that historians have often overlooked the contributions of dogs to historical events, apparently assuming that they could not make a key difference.

My personal favorite among many deals with Abraham Lincoln, whose life may have been saved at an early age by the determined efforts of his dog, Honey. It seems Lincoln, then an 11-year-old living on the what was then the frontier country in Indiana, had discovered a series of caves several miles from the family home. One day he found an injured brownand-white dog there. Young Abe nursed it to health and then, fearful of his father's reaction, took the dog home and named her Honey.

Soon the future president developed a close bond with Honey. One day, the boy and his dog returned once more to the caves where he had found her and, exploring deeper within them, Lincoln fell into a deep under-ground hole. The torch he had been carrying fell and went out, leaving Lincoln alone, frightened and unable to make his calls for help heard.

"Above him," writes Coren, "Honey was becoming more excited. Her barking was turning into a broken howl," and the dog whose life he had saved "was now rushing out of the mouth of the cave and then returning to the edge of the abyss where she had seen her master fall. This cave was well off the beaten track, but a seldom-used wagon trail passed around a hundred yards from the opening.

"The person who could someday save the United States from dissolution and would free the blacks from their slavery, however," writes author Coren, "was lying in pain and confusion in a deep hole in the ground, and his only contact was a loving dog who was loudly sounding the alarm."

As it developed, a farmer and his sons came along on their wagon and, alerted by the frantic dog, investigated and discovered young Lincoln's plight. It took them an hour, using ropes and the farmer's mules, to rescue the boy and the rest, as they say, is history.

Abraham Lincoln, by the way, continued a close relationship with dogs throughout his life. As president, Lincoln apparently intended to take the family dog, Fido, to the White House as company for him and sons Tad and Willy. Lincoln's wife, Mary, however, put her foot down, and the hapless mutt was placed in the care of friends in their hometown of Springfield, 111.

Presidents, kings, princes, composers, scientists and many other key figures have had close relationships with dogs, as Coren so ably illustrates. For lovers of animals or history (or those who, like me, enjoy reading about both), "The Pawprints of History" provides much evidence for what we already know must be: that the lives of leaders and their dogs are often closely woven.