The best (and worst) presidential addresses
Washington thrilled; Harrison rambled on
As Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office Friday as the nation’s 45th president, here’s a look back at the highlights — and lowlights — of previous inaugural addresses.
THE BEST ADDRESSES The first: George Washington, 1789
The nation’s first president, the hero of the American Revolution, explained and defended the new form of government created by the U.S. Constitution:
“By the article establishing the executive department, it is made the duty of the president ‘to recommend to your consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.’ ” Transfer of power: Thomas Jefferson, 1801
As politicians split into parties, Jefferson’s ascension after President John Adams represented the nation’s first peaceful transfer of power. Jefferson, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, reached out to Adams and the Federalist Party in an inaugural address focused in part on national unity:
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
Civil War: Abraham Lincoln, 1861, 1865
Lincoln delivered two classic inaugural addresses. In the first, in 1861, he sought unsuccessfully to head off the Civil War:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Four years later, in the waning days of the bloody conflict, the soon-to-be-assassinated Lincoln spoke of moving the nation forward:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Great Depression: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
Elected in the midst of the nation’s worst economic calamity, Roosevelt faced perhaps the biggest challenge of any president since Lincoln. FDR’s first task: to rally the nation’s confidence.
“This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Cold War: John F. Kennedy, 1961
At the height of the Cold War, a 43-year-old World War II combat veteran proclaimed a new generation of leadership and demonstrated the power of rhetoric in the television age:
“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 — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
A conservative comeback: Ronald Reagan, 1981
The former actor and California governor defined the conservative challenges to the growth of government throughout the New Deal and the Great Society. It is a debate that is ongoing.
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
THE WORST ADDRESSES The longest day: William Henry Harrison, 1841
Not only was Harrison’s address the longest in history, it was one of the most poorly written. The icy weather gave Harrison a cold, making him vulnerable to the pneumonia that killed him one month after taking office.
“Fellow citizens, being fully invested with that high office to which the partiality of my countrymen has called me, I now take an affectionate leave of you. You will bear with you to your homes the remembrance of the pledge I have this day given to discharge all the high duties of my exalted station according to the best of my ability, and I shall enter upon their performance with entire confidence in the support of a just and generous people.”
Dred Scott: James Buchanan, 1857
Acting in part on insider information, Buchanan said in his inaugural address that the Supreme Court would soon resolve the issue of slavery in emerging states of the Union. He couldn’t have been more wrong; Buchanan referred to the pro-slavery Dred Scott ruling that hastened the coming of the Civil War:
“It is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled.”
“With malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work.” President Lincoln’s 1965 address in waning days of Civil War