Good morning. It's snowing in Washington, D.C., as I write these words -- just as it was 63 years ago when John Fitzgerald Kennedy prepared to take the oath of office as the 35th U.S. president. Inauguration addresses are on my mind this morning: One year from today, God willing, we shall hear another one.
Americans were already enthralled with John F. Kennedy by Jan. 19, 1961. Although he'd won by the narrowest of margins in 1960 (and Richard Nixon did not direct a mob to pressure Congress to delay certification of the vote), by the time of his inauguration the glamorous 43-year-old senator from Massachusetts and his young family had captured the public imagination.
The day after JFK arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, it began snowing. The city was snarled. Some 10,000 cars were stranded in the streets. Herbert Hoover, with his customary bad luck, was flying from Miami, but was turned back. Thirty of President Dwight Eisenhower's aides were stuck overnight in the White House.
At the inaugural ceremony the next day, a space heater on the podium short-circuited, nearly starting a fire. The sun came out, making the U.S. Capitol a lovely study in blue-over-white, but it was so bright that 86-year-old Robert Frost couldn't read the poem he'd written in the glare and recited one from memory instead.
Then came Jack Kennedy, handsome as a movie star, hatless even in that biting cold. Particular about his appearance, Kennedy didn't want to wear the silk top hat he'd picked out, which turned into a significant sartorial decision. But if most men would never really wear formal hats again in this country, the stirring words of Kennedy's inaugural address would ring in Americans' ears for decades afterward.
"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty," Kennedy vowed in his 1961 inaugural address, lines that built to the speech's dramatic climax:
"And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
With those words, John F. Kennedy helped launch the modern American presidency. Presidential communications had always been a component of the job and inaugural addresses are the best forum they'll ever have. Our most revered chief executives -- Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt come to mind -- certainly understood this.
Television forever altered the dynamics of being communicator-in-chief, however, and John F. Kennedy was the man for the moment. Two decades later, Ronald Reagan would become known as the Great Communicator, but to be successful all presidents must master the art of explaining where they want to go, and why the American people should follow them.
This is easier said than done. Except for Donald Trump, who inexplicably gave a campaign speech instead of a traditional inaugural address, most inaugural addresses are quickly forgotten. What sound in real-time like eloquent calls for unity dissipate under the weight of the partisan politics that follow. Or worse: Sweeping oratory and evocative policy ideas can simply run aground on the rocky shoals of political realism.
"We are led, by events and common sense," George W. Bush said in his second inaugural address, "to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
This struck many liberals, and some conservatives -- not all of them pacifists -- as ominous overreach.
Some of the Bush criticism was over the top, and for Democrats who still revered the Kennedy name, evidence of selective amnesia ("pay any price" JFK said, "bear any burden").
Yet here's the thing. Inaugural addresses are written for a contemporaneous audience, and they are meant to be heard aloud. In this way, they are a throwback to the days of Lincoln or, at least, FDR, whose speeches were absorbed via radio.
But they are also transcribed, and we can read them at our leisure many years after the fact. With the perspective of hindsight, both Kennedy and Bush may have overestimated what is possible in the world, at least militarily.
Six decades, later, for instance, most presidential scholars now consider President Eisenhower's farewell address, delivered three days before Kennedy's inaugural, to be more substantive than Kennedy's evocative speech. This is not a new insight.
"With 50 years' perspective and with countless wars and mindless governmental spending to look back upon, Ike's words serve us better than JFK's," Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a seminar at the Newseum 13 years ago.
I was present at that 2011 session and recall how panelist James Fallows agreed. "Kennedy's speech will always be exciting to listen to, Eisenhower's is very important to read," Fallows told me afterward.
"Of course, both of these were memorable and very effective speeches, but in different ways," Fallows added. "Kennedy's was mainly inspiration and memorable for its tone and certain ringing phrases -- starting with ‘Ask not ...' But as an assessment of long-term challenges in American life, Eisenhower's is the more memorable document."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette executive editor David M. Shribman, writing about those addresses that same week, was struck by how they challenge modern stereotypes about the two presidents.
"[F]rom the distance of a half century the two speeches … make us question our historical memories, which often paint Eisenhower as the steely pragmatist and Kennedy as the dreamy romantic," Shribman wrote. "Instead, it was Eisenhower who said he was praying for a world where ‘in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love,' and it was Kennedy who argued that ‘only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.'"
"Today the two speeches look more like two sides of a fateful argument," Shribman added.
One can argue -- and I'm about to do so -- that the same tension existed within a single president: George W. Bush. The bookmark to Dubya's second inauguration was his first.
"We have a place, all of us, in a long story, a story we continue but whose end we will not see," Bush said in his first inaugural address. "It is a story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old; the story of a slaveholding society that became a servant of freedom; the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer.
"It is the American story, a story of flawed and fallible people united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born."
Now this was top-level presidential rhetoric. And the sentiment behind it quite moving. New Yorker magazine correspondent Hendrik Hertzberg was among those impressed.
"George W. Bush's first week as president of the United States began with a speech that, taken as a whole and judged purely as a piece of writing, was shockingly good," Hertzberg wrote. "It was by far the best Inaugural Address in 40 years; indeed, it was better than all but a tiny handful of all the inaugurals of all the presidents since the Republic was founded."
This was unexpected praise, especially considering that the liberal Hertzberg helped draft Jimmy Carter's 1997 inaugural speech.
The passage from Bush's 2001 inaugural address that I found most stirring was this one:
"America at its best is compassionate. In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
