LIKE AN IDIOT, I once took a break from the journalism business and spent a year writing presidential speeches. I wrote talking points for the annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Pardon, a couple of commencement addresses, and long, meaty disquisitions on fiscal policy, regulatory reform, the health care system, and several other matters about which I know zero. I never got to write an inaugural address, though. Inaugurals are the Super Bowl of speeches, the Olympics of speeches, the World Series of Poker of speeches. Every speechwriter wants to write an inaugural address, almost as much as every politician wants to give one.
You can see why. Inaugural speeches are destined to last–or at least to last longer than dishwater comments offered up at a Head Start ceremony. Centuries after delivery they’re still easy for the curious to lay hands on. My speechwriting days came before the Internet, but there used to be a folder in the library of the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, that contained every inaugural address. It was prominently displayed and lavishly printed up, poised for casual reference or ready inspiration.
Sitting in the library with the folder open before me, I used to gobble up the inaugurals. It was hard to stop reading. Inaugural addresses are wonderfully revealing, with the immediacy you get only from the most resonant historical artifacts. In Woodrow Wilson’s second inaugural, the messianism that proved his undoing stands naked to the world–more appealing than Woodrow Wilson standing naked to the world, but not by much. The supposedly rustic and untutored Andrew Jackson, in his second inaugural, draws a balance between states’ rights and the moral necessity of the federal Union with the skill of a great essayist, a performance made all the more moving by the premonitory rumbles you hear of the terrible conflagration still 30 years away. Even the periphrasis typical of 18th-and 19th-century oratory, so gummy to the contemporary ear, fails to obscure what’s really going on in an inaugural address.
“All I dare hope,” Washington said in his first inaugural, “is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated.” Translated to contemporary English this means, roughly, “If I mess up, I hope you cut me some slack.” It’s a declaration of personal modesty characteristic of Washington and also false, since few men in history had less to be modest about. Washington knew it and so did his listeners.
In a pleasing coincidence, the longest inaugural speech came from the man with the shortest presidency. William Henry Harrison served for only 31 days, several of them having been spent reciting his inaugural. By rough count it runs to over 8,000 words, even after a ruthless edit from Daniel Webster, but it’s still a pleasure to read for its thoughtfulness and surprises, including, believe it or not, an argument for term limits. There are revelations too in the inaugural Ulysses S. Grant delivered at the beginning of his second, doomed term. Anyone who’s read his autobiography knows how pacific the general was, but his inaugural shows a streak of unexpected self-pity. After mentioning his hard crawl up the ranks during the Civil War–“without asking promotion or command”–he announces that “throughout the war, and from my candidacy for my present office in 1868 to the close of the last presidential campaign, I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history.”
Apparently he had already forgotten his former commander in chief, dead only eight years. Lincoln’s second inaugural (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”) is not only everyone’s favorite but also, I suppose, the greatest presidential utterance. Good as the other speeches are, you read through them and then you turn the page and find Lincoln’s, and you catch your breath as though you’d happened upon a beautiful painting or suddenly heard a sublime phrase of music moving through the air. “The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.” And you think, “They don’t make speechwriters like that anymore.”
— Andrew Ferguson
