President Reagan’s inauguration

The party’s over now, and the 40th President of the United States puts on a working suit, leaves his bedroom every morning and goes downstairs to work in the Oval Office below, just as he did when he went to work in his father’s grocery store, which was underneath his bedroom.

He could look back on the best-produced, the most word-perfect, the most elegant inaugural any of us can remember. And one which, in timing the taking of the presidential oath with the hostages' planes taking off from Tehran produced a dramatic coincidence beyond the most ingenious dreams of a Hollywood scriptwriter.

I think the last person we should forget amid the splendour of the scene – the ruffles and flourishes of the Marine Band and the explosion of champagne corks – is Jimmy Carter, who, after 14 months of a daily grind of frustration and at the end 48 hours without sleep, was denied the supreme satisfaction of announcing the hostages flight to freedom.

He was robbed of it by only 25 minutes, a waiting interval contrived either by ill-luck or by a final, malicious stroke of the Iranians. Nothing became his presidency like the leaving of it.

In the sad, the galling twilight of his administration one newspaper man, a man from the deep south, who had put up for four years with unceasing cracks about peanuts and hillbillies said, "Well, you all may have had a wonderful time kidding us about Dogpatch North, but I think you will come to look back on it, as preferable to Hollywood East".

This was said in response to the mention that the Regan inaugural – the big pre-inaugural concert, the firework display, the parties involved – was going to cost eight million dollars, though it was hastily added that the money had been privately subscribed.

It is true that many of us feared a riot of showbiz ostentation, beginning with the inauguration itself and going on to doing over the White House and unrepentant Democrats, anticipating the worst in the coming months, were sniggering about an old MGM production of the last supper on the Titanic.

I have to confess that I myself was caught in this shameful fear. I found myself the night before the inauguration looking up an old film review by the Dorothy Parker of film critics, one Cecelia Ager, an old lady now but once the cinema's recording angel.

Forty years or more ago she wrote a review of Constance Bennett as the star of a Hollywood version of Somerset Maugham’s Our Betters, and she had this to say, "Constance Bennett flings herself into the hoity-toity snobsy-wobsy elegance of Our Betters, like the prodigal hotfooting it home. Our Betters is terribly smart, violently upper class. Insistently, it shrieks toniness, graduation from Hollywood aristocracy. Its houses have not only drawings rooms and boudoirs they have libraries, with books in them too. Some of its rooms are Empire, some Georgian; it even has a Directoire foyer. Positively nothing is modernistic, that's how swell it is. Constance Bennett is presented at court, and tops anybody their majesties have ever seen. That's how utterly ornamental she is. Every detail is so painstakingly indisputable it sets up a positive nostalgia for the other side of the railroad tracks."

Well, after reading this again and cringing before the coming blare of money, and Hollywood high style, I was quite ready to write "My nostalgia takes the form of thinking back to the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson who scorned the dress uniforms and the military outriders of George Washington’s presidency, thinking them as tending toward the luxury of monarchies and away from republican simplicity.

And feeling strongly about this, Jefferson dispensed with all processions, rode his horse up to the Capitol, tied it to a post himself, went in, gave his inaugural address, came out, mounted his horse, rode back to his boarding house, and finding the other residents already in the best places, sat at the lower end of the table, and ate his supper.

Well, the opportunity to express this self-righteousness was strikingly denied. The inaugural didn’t turn out that way at all. First, somebody had had the inspiration to take the ceremony, for the first time, on the west wing of the capital. It has always been done on the east wing, which looks out along lines of streets relieved by a couple of leafy squares.

But standing on the handsome stage constructed for the inaugural, President Reagan looked down on the most beautiful and moving panorama in Washington towards the vast green lawn of the mall, to the piercing monolith of the Washington monument, and on, beyond the reflecting pool the white columns of the Lincoln memorial, and off to one side the white saucer-dome of the Jefferson memorial, and then the Potomac river and up, on the rising hill above the river, the thousands of white markers of the Arlington national cemetery and the flicker of John Kennedy’s perpetual flame. And on the horizon, where the sun was beginning to fall, the mansion which Robert E Lee was compelled to leave to become the general of the southern armies that fought the union. I doubt that any country can offer, in one unbroken view, such a visual memoir of its greatest days, and its saddest.

The inaugural ceremony itself was as short as they ever come, a virtue rarely practised in political ceremonies in this country whether it’s a nominating convention or a fund-raising breakfast. Everybody appeared on cue, the weather was blessedly mild and bright after the ice age we have just come through, the chief justice briskly administered the oath to the new vice president then, no nonsense, "Put your right hand on the Bible," for the new president and he repeated the traditional, the only oath there has ever been.

We then moved from one foot to the other, and settled in for the usual 45 minutes of soaring or shouting or droning eloquence... not at all, Mr Reagan took 18 minutes, and unlike any president before him, talked in a conversational voice but with all the stresses right and forceful.

Some of the news men, the TV commentators, who have been brought up on bellowing rhetoric thought it was unimpressive as presidential oratory. That's because they think of a presidential inaugural as the one time when every new president, however grand, however humble, must attempt a stage performance in the hectoring, moving Victorian tradition.

Mr Reagan, it should not be forgotten, made – how many is it? – over 70 films. He’s a film actor; that's to say, a behaviourist. He was talking to the television audience, to two people sitting at home. And because he knows, as few senators and congressmen do, that a microphone is an electronic instrument for amplifying the smallest sound, every syllable, every phrase, was clear and telling.

The only jarring note to me was a wry discrepancy between the substance of it and the first theme of the parson's prayer of invocation. President Reagan told Americans yet again that they are a great and unique people destined to lead the free world. But the Reverend Moomaw, the pastor of Mr Reagan’s church in Los Angeles, started then at once with an apocalyptic warning, "Gracious God," he began, "we need you today perhaps more than we have needed you before, we have failed in our personal and our national lives; we have seen our world from our own selfish, parochial point of view, we have acted as though everything depended on us. We confess our sin, and seek your forgiveness."

Well at that moment I didn’t notice a wince on the faces of any of the new Cabinet officers, and it must have been a relief to their consciences that the Reverend Moomaw's brave and gutsy prayer was not printed next day in any paper they were likely to put their hands on.

Apart from President Reagan’s opening vow to attack the economic ills he promised to cure through the campaign, the main theme, which he appeared to believe with his heart and soul is that America can control its destiny, the belief was put in a nutshell years ago by Adlai Stevenson who once said, "America is a country that can gag on a net but swallow tigers whole."

I think Reagan passionately believes this. "It’s a time for us to realise," he said, "that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us, no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing."

It's vague and stirring stuff, as inaugural addresses usually are, but he could speak it with confident force in the knowledge of his landslide. It is, no doubt about it, what most Americans want to believe, and by Tuesday evening most of Americans, I should guess, were buoyed up by the splendid spectacle and in an understandable emotional ecstasy over the release of the hostages.

This unmixed joy was short lived. Next day came the ugly news of the brutal mistreatment of many of the hostages, and Mr Carter’s hoarse and angry condemnation of it. The very moving scenes we’ve watched on television of the families talking to their sons or husbands was soured by even more moving scenes of them wracked with anxiety over the fear that the men coming home to them would be bruised in body and twisted in mind.

This revelation had an instant and ominous effect on the general mood of benevolence in which most people had heard of the financial terms of the deal.

There was talk, responsible talk, of the new administration's looking into the provisions of the War Powers Act, and seeing if it mightn’t be invoked to justify reneging on the deal itself, and there was keen debate in the corridors of Capitol Hill about whether or not the United States was honour-bound to sanction an agreement made, it now appears, with a nation that had treated diplomatic hostages like the inmates of a concentration camp.

But former Vice President Mondale maintained that the deal was equitable and serves the best interests of the United States. "A bargain," he said. "Sure," said the cab driver who brought me to the studio, "human life is always a bargain."

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