President Carter inaugurated

Well, mercifully, the sub-zero cold and the Arctic snows that have blanketed two-thirds of this continent from Canada in the far west to halfway down the Florida peninsula in the east, took a pause. Perhaps a brief one, but enough to make the inauguration of the 38th president a brilliant and bearable ceremony.

It was hovering around freezing in Washington but that's the warmest day we've had this year and when, the other day, the temperature in New York went zooming up from minus one degrees, that's minus 25 Centigrade or Celsius as we now call it, when it went from one to 20, the New York Post came out with a banner headline, 'Spring's back again!' 

For the past week, the workmen who've been busy building the inauguration stands and so forth, were going around with ear muffs and, after a couple of them froze their noses, with nose muffs. Washington was expecting the worst because these winter storms, like the summer infernos, travel on the prevailing wind from west to east and when we hear that Chicago and the mid-west are petrified with cold or drenching with heat, we know that we're going to get the same thing, usually 24 hours later. 

On Tuesday, the omens were grim. Chicago had the coldest day since 1888, 19 below zero – Fahrenheit again. Cincinnati had 28 below zero and the Department of Health had announcements over the radio and television and vans out on the streets with loudspeakers telling everybody to stay indoors unless they absolutely had to be out, which is something to tell a population of half a million people who, presumably, work for a living. And down in Florida, 300 miles south of its border, snow fell in Miami for the first time in recorded history. And in Gainesville, Florida, which had never heard of the stuff, they had four inches. 

Floridians – in fact most places from the Carolinas south – don't have heating for their houses. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they don't need it. And when perishing citizens called the mayor's office begging to know what to do, he told them to go to bed. 

To save and preserve the old president and the new, their wives and all the bigwigs who would have to stand on the inauguration platform, the government decided a month or so ago to install a solar heating system. It cost only $20,000, the rig was provided free by manufacturers and it would, incidentally, be a useful bit of propaganda for the incoming Carter administration, showing that they are alert to new ideas and a promising new form of heat. 

But on the four nights before the inauguration, Washington had an unprecedented three nights of zero temperatures, one of 15 degrees on top of a bitter cold the week before, so the energy taken in by four water storage tanks oozed away during the cold and the insulation on the tanks wasn't thick enough to stop the energy of the remaining hot water inside from breezing out into the cold. So, the system didn't work. They fell back on good old electricity which had been installed as a backup. President Carter, himself, had asked for the solar system, he said that it would be 'an expression of my belief in an energy programme.' So the first new Carter policy was a bust, but the Republicans were sporting enough not to shout the news from the house tops. 

Well, we had, as you know, a cloudless day. It was possible for the principals to stand out there, bravely, without topcoats, in business suits with waistcoats – which are the new fashion note, having been hidden or never made for the past 30 years. I assume that most of you, along with an estimated 400 million others around the globe, saw a good deal of the inauguration and there would be no point in describing it as we used to have to do, before television, to a blind audience, so to speak. 

I believe the first inauguration the BBC ever broadcast was Franklin Roosevelt's second go in 1937. Until then, the interregnum, the interval between the election in November and the swearing in of the new man, was four months long, from the first Tuesday in November – the election – until the fourth day of the following March. What put an end to that was the severity of the Great Depression and the anxiety it bred around the world. Franklin Roosevelt had been elected in November 1932 and the country was lapsing into despair and starvation. But we still had to wait four months for the new president to be able to do anything about it. The first thing he did, by the way, was to close all the banks, a wild and weird situation I shall never forget. 

We still had four months in which to listen to the discredited lame duck, President Hoover, make speeches and promises he no longer could fulfil. So the Congress passed, and the states ratified, a new amendment to the constitution which said that from then on the new man would take office on 20 January. And so it has been ever since. 

That first time, 20 January 1937, was, as I've said, the first BBC broadcast of an inauguration. The BBC then had a staff in the United States of two: a director and a secretary. Nobody in Washington or anywhere else. So, the director turned himself into a broadcaster, a commentator. It was a big day for him and it was a nightmare. The weather was atrocious, rain coming down in an avalanche of stair rods, a wind hurling in from the west and everybody was half an hour late. And in that intervening half hour, the BBC's man had a frightful time – how to ad lib? What to say? – as millions on the receiving end in Britain said, 'Yes, yes. So what now?' I don't need a tape or a disc to remember the way he kept saying, 'And now the members of the Congress and the court – the Supreme Court that is – and the diplomatic corps are on the stands now, waiting, waiting... And the rain! Oh! The rain is coming down in torrents. I see an ocean of umbrellas and everybody is very wet, very wet indeed. Ah, there seems to be something stirring now. No. We're huddled here meanwhile in the wind and the rain... and the rain.' 

Well, this time, it was a good deal slicker than that and we had pictures to show it, and there were one or two innovations. Blessedly, Mr Carter's inaugural speech was short. They have gone on for as long as 90 minutes, as thousands yawned. The inaugural is always full of high, moral thoughts. It always promises a new era. It dedicates the United States to peace around the world, and compassion and justice at home. It is quickly forgotten except for stray phrases that pass into the history books. Lincoln, I suppose, said more memorable things than anybody in his two inaugurals, mainly because Lincoln had a knack, never matched by any succeeding president, for talking and writing the English language in the most sinewy and graceful form. 

I suppose the inaugural speech that most people alive today remember, above all others, was John Kennedy's, delivered on an icy day in 1961. It was vivid at the time for its soaring phrases and youthful defiance, most of them the product of Mr Theodore Sorensen, the old Kennedy Man Friday who was going to be turned down by the Senate for the directorship of the CIA and so, the other day, saved the president and the Democrats embarrassment by withdrawing his nomination. 

The most alarmingly eloquent of all the Kennedy or Sorensen sentences was this, '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.' Well, that was worthy of Lincoln as rhetoric but it cost us Vietnam. A lot of nations believed it, though in fact Americans were not going to bear 'any burden' to support 'any friend' – they wouldn't have put up (say) with a civil war and I'm not sure we'd have willingly gone without food or heat or even an automobile– but that is the way of inaugural rhetoric. Kennedy's was simply headier than usual. 

I should guess that the one sentence that will be long remembered in President Carter's speech was the first. It was a moment of magnanimity that is very rare coming from the new man to the old. Remember, he said, 'For myself, and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.' It was a shock to Mr Ford and plainly touched him deeply. He, certainly, will never forget it. 

There's been a lot of easy nonsense written about President Ford's doom and resentment at having lost the election. I have it on absolutely dependable authority that he was cast down on election night, naturally, and a little incredulous for a day or two, but he's not the sort to harbour grudges. He has a generous nature and 25 years in the House of Representative inures any man to defeat and disappointment. He recovered quickly and the shots of him and his family greeting the Carters and all the pals, both Democrats and Republicans, around him was a warming sight. He went off to California and was to be on television again at the weekend playing with the old hero, Arnold Palmer, in the Bing Crosby golf tournament. 

I ought to mention for aficionados that Mr Ford plays to, or off, a handicap of 18, which I hasten to say to any tut-tutting Britons would be, in their country, a handicap of about ten or 11, since the American handicapping system is infinitely more tough than the British system. 

On other grounds, we have no reason to pity Mr Ford. He is, as they kept saying, now a private citizen, like you and me. Unlike you and me, he will have a staff of 24, he will be protected for life by the Secret Service, he will get one million dollars to take care of his presidential papers and clerking and otherwise cleaning up the presidential chores, $100,000 a year for ten years. He will also be paid for life a $40,000 a year pension for his quarter-century's service in the house and another $63,000 a year for life by way of his presidential pension. So if he loses any golf balls in the Pacific Ocean this weekend, he won't feel under any thrifty compulsion to go wading for them.

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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