I know that sounds like a stupid question, but I can’t remember, and I don’t have a dime to figure it out… dang it.
Any help here would be cool…
Franklin Roosevelt
It’s Roosevelt.
If it’s Woodrow Wilson, however, you have a passage to a Jack Finney universe in your hand. Please send it to me with the utmost alacrity. 
It was Truman who said “The buck stops here,” but it’s F. D. Roosevelt who stopped on the dime.
A friend of mine likes to ask people if they’d like to see a U.S. destroyer, & when they say yes, he shows them the front of a dime.
I actually knew for a fact (heh) since early childhood that it was Eisenhower-- I have no idea where that came from, but it stuck. And about a month ago a coin collecting friend corrected me and I was floored.
Re: the previous message, I’d like to say that the idea of Reagan on the penny (something that is in the works, apparently) horrifies me, but now I’ve got a joke set up for it. Thanks.
Eisenhower used to be on the “silver” dollar. Maybe that’s where you “remembered” Eisenhower from.
Zev Steinhardt
A conspiracy! I thought this for quite a while when I was younger also. I think one of my parents told it to me…
The profile looks sorta like FDR, but I’ve always had this “rectangular” mental image of his head, as opposed to the softer, rounded image seen on the dime. I think they took a little artistic license with the portrait.
There’s a movement in Congress to put Reagan on the $10 bill, not the penny. It’s a terrible idea, and a terrible way to remember a terrible administration.
There’s a movement in Congress to keep Reagan’s head alive in a jar forever, so Republicans can continue to worship him for his Astonishing Popularity. Or to carve him on Mount Rushmore, one or the other.
And I thought re-naming the airport in DC was bad enough. It’s all kind of icky, isn’t it?
Uke- as a Republican who admires Reagan, I agree. It’s icky and it’s way too early. Wait until enough time has passed that there can be a fair and unbiased opinion on his legacy, and work from there. Otherwise, you end up with Kennedy syndrome- immediately a martyr, later a putz, the real truth somewhere between (though I personally lean more towards the putz opinion).
And to try and keep this in GQ- the story I had heard was that FDR was memorialized on the dime as a reference to “The March Of Dimes”, the famous campaign to raise money to eradicate polio (which FDR suffered from).
On a related topic, I like to ask people how many acorns are on a U.S. dime? No one believes it, but there are two. If you look, you’ll see them on the reverse. You can win a fortune in dimes betting on this!
Likewise with the olives. . . .
They did it with Nixon, right?
Oh wait a second…
Hey, lay off Kennedy, man. If it wasn’t for Kennedy, you and I would be spending upwards of a hundred bucks a year on hats.
A related numismatic question:
Who was the first U.S. President to appear on our currency, what yeat did happen, and what was the denomination?
As an aside - I’d like to see ol’ Ronnie’s head (and his even more foggy brain) stuck on a pike, but that’s just my wishful thinking.
from:
http://www.cookcoin.com/trivia.htm
“When Lincoln appeared on the 1909 cent, it was the first time a U.S. President had been put on our regular issue coinage.”
urgh … a double post …
from the same website:
"That the 1900 Lafayette commemorative silver dollar was the first U.S. coin to bear the portrait of an American, and the first to bear the portrait of a President of the United States. Washington and Lafayette both appeared on the coin. "
So it seems that 1900 is the first time a commemorative coin showed a president, and then in 1909 we had regular issue cents showing Lincoln.