PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP
The 16th Second Inaugural
Expect Bush to sound like Woodrow Wilson.
BY MICHAEL BARONE
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 12:01 a.m.
Tomorrow George W. Bush will deliver his Second Inaugural speech, the 16th Second Inaugural delivered by an American president over the past 212 years. It will be the first time that one president has delivered a second inaugural just eight years after another since William McKinley in 1901. It can safely be predicted that Mr. Bush will not deliver the shortest Second Inaugural--George Washington's was only 135 words--nor the longest--James Monroe in 1821 went on for what must have been an hour. And we can be certain that he will not deliver the most sublime. Abraham Lincoln did that in 1865 in his Second Inaugural, surely the greatest speech ever delivered by an American president.
A second inaugural comes at the hinge point of what each of these presidents expected to be an eight-year administration. It is an opportunity to look back at the last four years and to look ahead to the next.
Our early 19th century presidents tended to look backward, to give an accounting of their service. Invariably it was favorable. Thomas Jefferson in 1805: "On taking this station on a former occasion I declared the principles on which I believed it my duty to administer the affairs of our Commonwealth. My conscience tells me I have on every occasion acted up to that declaration according to its obvious import and to the understanding of every candid mind." Andrew Jackson in 1833: "The foreign policy adopted by our government soon after the formation of our present Constitution, and very generally pursued by successive administrations, has been crowned with almost complete success." Mr. Bush is not likely to confess to a syllabus of errors as his liberal critics would like. But he surely will not sound this smug.
Second Inaugurals also can try to place where Americans stand in history. The Founders lived in a world where republics were scarce and knew they had embarked on an experiment. Monroe gave a discourse on ancient republics. Jackson, a general turned president, warned of "military leaders at the head of their victorious legions becoming our lawgivers and judges."
Ulysses Grant took a more optimistic view. "The civilized world is tending toward republicanism," he said in 1873, three years after France ousted its last monarch and established its Third Republic. "I do believe that our Great Maker is preparing the world, in His own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and navies will no longer be required."
The vision Mr. Bush is likely to present seems more in line with Woodrow Wilson's. Speaking in March 1917, as World War I raged, and one month before the United States entered the conflict, Wilson said, "The tragic events of the 30 months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back." He set forth his goals--a world in which all nations were "equally interested in the peace of the world and the stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for their maintenance"--a clear preview of his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations. There is something in common here with Mr. Bush's vision of an America spreading freedom and democracy to new corners of the world.
Similarly, Dwight Eisenhower after a decade of Cold War insisted, "Our world is where our destiny lies--with men, of all people, and all nations, who are or would be free." Richard Nixon, after ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sounded a note of retreat. "The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own. . . . Let us build a structure of peace in the world in which the weak are as safe as the strong--in which each respects the right of the other to live by a different system."
Twelve years later Ronald Reagan echoed Eisenhower's denunciation of Communism and sounded a more optimistic note. "Human freedom is on the march." The Cold War over, Bill Clinton in 1997 promised safety against remaining threats. "We will maintain . . . a strong defense against terror and destruction. Our children will sleep free from the threat of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons." Expect to hear more on this from Mr. Bush.
The subject of some Second Inaugurals has been war. James Madison's Second Inaugural was a defensive account of the War of 1812. Lincoln's was a masterfully brief summing up of the Civil War and a call for reconciliation. Other presidents concentrated almost exclusively on domestic issues. Jackson delivered a sophisticated argument for both preserving states' rights and maintaining the power of "the union of these States." Grant presented a domestic platform for his second term--"restoration of good feeling between the different sections of the country," a return to the gold standard, encouragement of "cheap routes of transit" and manufacturing. Jefferson, Grant and Cleveland had much to say about the assimilation of Indians into the larger society; Madison, before the era of political incorrectness, denounced the "savages" fighting alongside the British against the United States.
In his Second Inaugural in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt tried to link the interventionist government of the New Deal with the ideals of the Founding Fathers. "As intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them must increase," he said. He saw a "need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization." The targets for action he identified pithily. "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." This was the high-water mark, among Second Inaugurals, of the case for the welfare state.
Richard Nixon struck a different note in 1973. Problems were still there. "Because the range of our needs is so great--because the reach of our opportunities is so great--let us be bold in our determination to meet those needs in new ways." But "I offer no promise of a purely governmental solution for every problem." Ronald Reagan in 1985 was blunter. "We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women, by sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated Federal Establishment." Bill Clinton wove FDR and RR together: "Government is not the problem, and government is not the solution. We--the American people--are the solution." He called for balanced budgets and for "the reforms necessary" for Social Security and Medicare. We can expect to hear more along that last line from George W. Bush.
In Second Inaugurals over the years the ornate Augustan prose of Washington, Jefferson and Madison yields to the terse Biblical echoes of Lincoln and the punchy prose of the Civil War soldiers Grant and McKinley. Grant notes that the former slaves are "not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is wrong, and should be corrected." McKinley, looking back on the great issue of his first campaign proclaims, "When we assembled here on the fourth of March, 1897, there was great anxiety with regard to our currency and credit. None exists now."
In the 20th century we get the fluency of Wilson and Roosevelt, the shorter paragraphs of Eisenhower and Nixon, the flowing prose of Reagan and Clinton. From George W. Bush we can expect to hear the short sentences and crystalline phrases of his best set speeches.
What not to expect? Querulous complaints about the people or the press. Grover Cleveland, who loved to veto appropriations, decried "certain conditions and tendencies among our people which seem to menace the integrity and usefulness of their Government. . . . The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned." Thomas Jefferson noted, "During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare." He went on in this vein for three paragraphs. Ulysses Grant ended his Second Inaugural thus: "I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history, which today I feel that I can afford to disregard in view of your verdict, which I gratefully accept as my vindication." Mr. Bush had his fun with the New York Times in his acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden and probably won't raise the issue again.
George W. Bush has been criticized for his religious references. But he has only been following tradition. Every Second Inaugural since Washington's brief statement has included some reference to God, from Jefferson's "that Being," Madison's "Heaven" and Monroe's "Supreme Author of All Good" to Reagan's "God bless you" and Clinton's "May God strengthen our hands for the good work ahead--and always, always bless our America." Four years ago Mr. Bush referred, in Founder's language, to the "author" of "our nation's grand story." Expect something similar from him tomorrow.
Mr. Barone, a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and a contributor to the Fox News Channel, is a co-editor of The Almanac of American Politics and author of "Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future," (Crown, 2004).
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