WITH MALICE TOWARD CLINTON

For many days leading up to its actual delivery, the White House staff took pains to keep a waiting nation informed of the president’s preparations for his second inaugural address. The president, we were told, was drafting and re-drafting, night after sleepless night, greeting the dawn. He read poetry — Seamus Heaney, guys like that — to refine his sense of cadence. He pored over William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears, an eccentric collection of speeches that places Pericles and Pitt the Younger alongside Daniel Schorr and Eric Sevareid. He immersed himself in the second inaugural addresses of other presidents (he judged Lincoln’s good).