Inauguration parade cancelled

Beautiful but dangerous. It's a phrase that's been used, I imagine, about every siren from Cleopatra to Ava Gardner. I doubt it has been used before as it was last Monday morning about Washington DC.

Thomas Jefferson was only one of the old colonials who was disgusted with the choice of Washington as a capital city. He called it 'that Indian place in the wilderness'. More often it was called a swamp or 'a notable hotbed of vapours and disease'. These nasty words objected to the fact that Washington is nowhere but a few hundred feet above sea level and, being on a river on the edge of the South, it has in summer such a humid stew of a climate that, for many years – and it may still be so – the British foreign office gave the ambassador to Washington and his staff a special tropical allowance, the idea being that they could retreat in summer to a hill station, which they did, to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Since the arrival of the jet airplane, however, they've tended to escape to the hill stations of the Cotswolds.

In winter, as all the books and the records will tell you, Washington has a mild, damp, shivering climate, much like London, somewhere in the high 30s, low 40s Fahrenheit, rarely getting very much below freezing, but last Monday, it went to 34 degrees below freezing, or two below zero, Fahrenheit. A high wind on Sunday evening and a whirl of snow flurries reduced the feel of the air, what we now call the wind chill factor, to about 15 below zero. It's no weather for man or beast and specially not for 5,000, half of them youngsters in uniformed jackets and mini skirts.

On the Sunday morning, one or two hardy detachments of these high school cheerleaders and bands had been out on the streets rehearsing for the great inauguration parade. They didn't stay there long. Some of them discovered that if you don't have ear muffs or a ski mask and something to cover the nose, it would take about five or six minutes for the first burning sensation that precedes frostbite. The valves on wind instruments froze up, the skin of several drums cracked, rifles jammed. An ensign had the unique experience of watching the standard he was bearing snap and break in mid-air.

So, on Sunday evening the president sadly called into the White House the senator for Maryland who was in charge of the presidential inaugural committee and they sat down with a doctor or two and the whole thing, the four-hour outdoor triumphal parade, was called off. The doctors were not thinking primarily of the president. He would be cosy in a heated reviewing stand behind a six-inch layer of bulletproof glass. They were thinking of the 5,000, the soldiery, the teenagers on floats, the marching delegations from most of the states, the need for fleets of ambulances and heaven knows how many people carried indoors for emergency treatment.

The only delegation that could be confidently certified as fit for public exposure was an Alaskan dog sled team and, of course, they were gung-ho and ready to go, but it would have been odd and pretty funny to have only the Alaskans mushing down the vast emptiness of Pennsylvania Avenue. So the word went out, only a little before midnight, that the huge festival which took three months to plan was off and that a makeshift demonstration of high school and other bands would be put on in a sports arena outside Washington.

One hundred and forty thousand spectators were instructed to turn in their tickets for a refund. Every one of them would have been required on Monday morning to pass through the sort of metal detectors that they have at airports. The loss of money from the intending spectators was figured at about $2 million. Anybody who's ever put together even a band concert in a town square can only guess at the hundreds of organisers who got no sleep on Sunday night and the most frantic of these insomniacs were the presidents, or more probably the executive vice presidents, in charge of sales of the television networks. In all, over a hundred sponsors had to be re-slotted or reimbursed.

The only consolation for thousands of people from the hinterland who'd flown into Washington over the weekend and were now comfortably marooned in their hotels was that they were not back home. For most of the continent including, freakishly, the Deep South all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, was assaulted by an atrocious storm – in the South, worse than anything this century.

The happiest refugees I talked to were from Chicago where it was 27 below zero Fahrenheit, the whole city cloaked in ice, even the fire engines and their gear petrified to look like huge, abstract sculptures from the Ice Age.

Well, I must say, speaking as a tucked-up viewer in a warm room overlooking the ice of the Central Park reservoir, that the effect of taking the inauguration ceremony indoors, inside the Rotunda of the Capitol, was to give this usual circus an unintended dignity. Only about 800 people could be got in there and the sequence of events – a prayer, a hymn, the swearing-in first of the vice president and then of the president, his speech, the Lord's Prayer, a benediction – I think it's one of the very few inaugurals, perhaps the only one of modern times to which old Thomas Jefferson would have given his blessing.

Jefferson, the third President of the United States, but a young man very much in on the founding of the republic – he did the final draft of the Declaration of Independence – Jefferson had very firm ideas about the limits of ceremony and public display that were proper for a republic. George Washington, the first president, arrived for his first inaugural in full dress military uniform. He had a coach flanked by outriders. It was a small, smart, military ceremony but, by our lights, not much more elaborate than a performance by an amateur dramatics society.

Nevertheless, it was too much for Jefferson. And when, soon after, Washington started to hold levees and make a formal speech to the Congress and enjoy watching the procession of Congress in a body come to reply to it, Jefferson was so upset by what he took to be 'symptoms of a change of principle' that he wrote to the president saying that 'these things are not at all in character with the simplicity of republican governments', looking as if wistfully to the practices of European courts. When the time came for Jefferson's own inauguration, he renounced all such pomp. He got on his horse, he rode up to the Capitol, tethered his nag, went inside, made his speech – almost inaudibly – went out, mounted his horse and rode off back to his boarding house where, finding the places at the head of the dinner table taken, he sat down below the salt.

I suppose the last glimpse we've had of anything like such republican simplicity was the memorable scene at the inauguration of Jimmy Carter, when he got out of his gleaming limousine and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue hand in hand with his wife – a gesture that would not possibly be allowed today, when two or three millions of those inauguration dollars went on electronic and weapons security, the like of which there has never been before, but which there will certainly be again.

When it was all over the television commentators, deprived of the parade and the Cadillacs and the chinchillas and the crowds and the clothes and uniforms and bands and general glitz, these poor professionals found that the cameras, stationed all over town, could show nothing but the enormous wide avenues in the sunlight, empty of all humans, as if the bomb had dropped. They checked in from time to time with their own roving commentators on the streets. There they were, muffled to the eyebrows, lonely, steaming sentinels. 'Anything happening out there?' one anchorman cried hopefully and the man came back, 'Nothing out here but us electronic chickens!'

It was sad and comical. All these millions gone to erect miles of stands nobody would sit in, the grandeur of a block-long reviewing stand with nobody there to review, except just for a quick, darting moment, I noticed, one slightly puzzled sparrow. So the commentators had to fall back on talking about the, mostly invisible, hero of it all – Ronald Reagan. The enormity of his landslide. How come that this B-movie actor had swept the country twice? Old liberals who'd spent four years scorning or pitying Reagan now thought again.

The most interesting of the rafts of big men brought in to meditate was the old former governor of California whom Reagan had trounced 17 years ago, Edmund Pat Brown. 'We Democrats in California,' he said, 'made the mistake that the whole Democratic party made a dozen years later, we mightily underrated him as a politician, as a leader.'

And now that the party's over, the most beetle-browed writers and commentators are looking at inflation down to an 18-year low, unemployment holding steady, employment up at about 350,000 a month, the promise, at least, of talks with the Russians, but, mostly, the old pros and the old pols look at him and listen to him and have come to envy his effortless gift for being like no other living politician, as natural and easy and affable in public as in private, before a crowd, or before two or three.

So that when they hear him say, looking all of us straight in the eyes, that his own vision of America is of a country 'hopeful, big hearted, idealistic, daring, decent and fair' – well, we forget much of the dubious shenanigans of some of his Cabinet and the CIA and we see Ronald Reagan standing in for Jefferson and Lincoln and Gary Cooper as the marshal and Robert Redford as a fearless reporter, and we say, as an ageing Washington friend of mine said, 'I hunger to believe or hope it's so.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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