‘American Carnage’: The Trump Era Begins
For my sins, I have read every U.S. presidential inaugural address ever given, and played a small part in writing one of them—Jimmy Carter’s, delivered 40 years ago today.
The first one I remember hearing, John F. Kennedy’s in 1961, I saw on a fuzzy black-and-white TV from my 7th-grade American history classroom in California. The arctic conditions that day in Washington practically radiated through the TV screen. I remember seeing the revered 87-year-old poet Robert Frost hunch against the wind and squint in the low-sun glare as he tried to read the special inaugural ode he had composed. Then Richard Nixon, just defeated by Kennedy in a hair’s-breadth race, reached across to block the glare with his top hat. Frost waved him off and began reciting from memory one of his best-known poems, “The Gift Outright.” [Update: Other images suggest it could have been VP Lyndon Johnson who was offering Frost the hat. I didn’t really notice at the time; whoever it was, the lasting image was of Frost’s struggling with his script and then beginning to recite.]
That moment was apart from Kennedy’s own speech, with “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And “let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” Hearing lines like these and others in the same speech—now so familiar, at the time falling fresh on the world’s ears—left even an 11-year-old aware that something worth focusing on was underway. Since then I have wondered what it would have been like to hear, for the first time, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” from FDR, or “mystic chords of memory” or “better angels of our nature” or other instantly immortal phrases from Lincoln. Would you have known, as soon as you heard them, that these were words for the ages?
In person, outdoors in what was usually the bitter cold of late-January D.C., I heard Carter’s only inaugural address in 1977, then both of Ronald Reagan’s, and every one that followed except the elder George Bush’s in 1989, when we were living in Japan. (I came back from China to hear Obama’s 20 years later.)
I can remember scenes from nearly all of these events, and lines from a few. But from all of them without exception, despite the obvious differences in policies and public-personalities among presidents number 39 through 44 (Carter through Obama), I remember the sense of specialness. Of earnestness. Of hope for a new start. Of sobered awareness of both the new possibilities and the new obligations that come with this uniquely powerful office.
