President Johnson's inauguration, 1965 - 17 January 1965

Good evening, there are times when certain well-worn words in the language take on the nobility, instead of merely the weariness, of old age.

This weekend has been such a time; the word vigil has been written and spoken more than any other and nobody, not even the most desperate far-out satirist seeking the most tasteless possible theme has mocked it; even the most hack newspaper dispatches have seen to accommodate themselves to the grandeur of the man they were writing about.

The first word, was of course, the most dramatic and it made its way into ordinary occasions like going in a shop, catching an aeroplane, that resist usually all awareness of any news that is not a catastrophe. I first heard it after whisking along the freeway through a blizzard on the way to the Chicago airport. We had to wait fifteen minutes or so while the plane was being de-iced but when we were airborne, and the pilot greeted us on the intercom, and told us the route and the flying time, he came crackling on a minute or two later to announce and regret the news of Sir Winston’s stroke.

I don’t suppose there is another living man, save only the President to the United States who would cause a pilot to do this. There is no tradition of announcing news over airplane public address systems, so it’s not a question of a pilot looking over some startling event and wondering if its weighty or pressing enough to pass on.

This pilot got it on his radio from the control tower he happened to be in touch with, and I don’t suppose he hesitated for a moment. He didn’t have to ask himself about the unique position that Winston Churchill holds in the minds and affections of Americans, he knew it.

Americans very rarely, I have noticed, bring up an hereditary fact with which Sir Winston himself has had a lot of waggish fun, the fact of his being – as I think it was John Mason Brown called him – half American, and wholly British. He is, simply, Churchill, the lord and master of us all, the first and commanding citizen, of that Atlantic community that never really quite comes into being as a political family.

But whether the family is there, or not, its head is there, and that he was still there, with his frail back to the wall, after 48 hours against an enemy that topples the young and the middle aged, was somehow typical and quietly satisfying, a small but good note and sounded far from our northern snowstorms and far from the diamond brightness of New York today, where a bristling sun made the snow's reflection stab the eyeballs.

Down on the Pedernales River in the central Texan plain, President Johnson stood up before a press conference. Every president bends the institution of the press conference to suit his personality, and there are few things more dependable in Lyndon Johnson than the undependability of his news conferences.

These are men whose most constant pleasure is keeping the smartest people guessing. Nothing about the Democratic convention last year delighted him more than prodding Hubert Humphrey, literally poking him in the ribs, after the last minute of the last hour, and asking him if he thought he was going to be the choice, that's to say President Johnson’s choice, of a successor.

Saturday used to be the dullest, the emptiest, day around the White House and I mean the White House now, in the technical sense of the place wherever the president is. But in this administration the poor old White House press corps, though it might play hooky on some other day, is always on the jump on Saturdays.

Because after a light lunch, the president stretched and says, "Well how about a press conference". And if you are not within earshot you don’t make it in time. He did this yesterday, and in the middle of it a reporter said "Mr President, Prime Minister Churchill, as everyone knows, is gravely ill, and..." the president cut him off with "I am praying for his recovery, and hope very much that his condition will improve."

The reporter went on "erm, Mr President, in the event of his death..". The president frowned, and cut him off in a split second by saying, "I will stand on the statement I made, I can think of nothing crueller, than going into something in the event of...". The next question retreated fast and to south-east Asia.

Mr Johnson was down on his ranch resting up for the great day next Wednesday when he will have his first inauguration as president. Not to be morbid about it, it will, of course, be the second time that he has taken the oath. And we won’t dwell on the jarring contrast between next Wednesday’s splendour – Washington with its vastly wide avenues and files of soaring tree trunks is made for parades and processions – and the desperate moment in the plain of Dallas, standing between his wife and Mrs Kennedy in her stained dress, and holding up his hand and saying "So help me God".

In spite of the general troubles of the word around us, there is no particular horror that, so far, seems to stand in the way of a great state occasion next Wednesday, for the inauguration of a president is about as ceremonial an occasion as a republic allows itself. But since this is the oldest continuing republic, the inauguration has its traditions, if only traditions of change.

George Washington had a peculiar distaste which he shared, so far as I know, with only one other president, he had President Kennedy’s dislike of being touched, back-slapped and embraced. George Washington had it in an extreme form, he actually declined handshakes, and when he became president he rationalised it by saying that the president ought to stand apart from other men.

So, at his inauguration, he rode apart in a state carriage with outriders as his visible protectors. And when he took the oath he bowed and moved away from his advisors and brother officers. This caused one choleric New Yorker to fear, as he put it, "that we have exchanged George the third for George the first." But any suggestion that the United States had got itself simply an elected monarch was dissipated by Washington's succeeding wisdom and modesty.

I suppose that modesty enjoyed its finest hour with the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, who though he enjoyed chamber concerts and stately dances and elegant surroundings, felt that the minuet should be restricted to the ballroom. A man of the simplest tastes, he got to complain of the rigours of presidential protocol, especially the regularity with which ambassadors and congressmen interrupted his reading of Locke and Rousseau and his playing of the fiddle.

He solved this irritation by simply appearing in whatever he happened to be wearing when they arrived, usually a wigless head and carpet slippers. The inauguration of Jefferson is still the model, or perhaps the sentimental prototype, of the classic presidential inauguration. No visible splendour: he abolished the state carriage, the parade and the outriders, he could not of course, deny other officials their flourish of trumpets, a parade of artillery, and riflemen appeared after breakfast at the new president's boarding house and let off a couple of cannons.

At noon Jefferson came out, dressed as simply as ever and walked alongside the secretaries of the navy and the treasury and a small, ragged company of ordinary people and went up to the Capitol. It must have been no more formal than Mr Truman’s morning walks along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Maryland artillery, the only people in uniform, dragged those cannon along to the north wing of the Capitol building which was the only part completed in March 1801. They fired the cannon again and Jefferson went inside and took out his notes and said what he had to say in a flat, squeaky, inaudible voice – quite unlike that of Charlton Heston, who has been called on (all six feet four of him), to represent in the movies the whispy, small redhead known to history as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson then went back again, on foot, to his boarding house, where in the evening he came into a full dining room. Nobody bothered to get up, except a lady who now shimmers in immortality in the history of Kentucky.

She was the wife of Senator John Brown of that gallant state, and she rose to ask the new president to take her place, which was the central one, and close to the fire. He declined with a small bow, and went down to his usual seat at the end of the room.

Well, as Duke Ellington said, there have been some changes made. President Johnson is a pretty simple man too. He has abolished the top hat that his predecessor wore, but he would thought to be out of his mind, if he wanted to walk to the Capitol, to the huge reviewing stand and its thousands of flanking seats outside. If he attempted it scores of secret service men would stop him.

He is now not only the prisoner of his protective detail, he is the star of a television spectacular that would be seen by about 60 or 70 or more millions and which, therefore, the networks believe should be a showy and magnificent as if they had written the script. After all, if we announce the birth of a new cigarette with a burst of trumpets, what can we bring by way of showmanship to a presidential inauguration? The development of TV and its use as an impressive public medium has turned the inauguration from a Washington ceremony into a restrained national circus.

When an administration changes hands the outgoing president receives the incoming man on the steps of the White House – after the record blizzard of 19 January 1961, President Eisenhower took Mr and Mrs. Kennedy aside and give them soup and hot coffee – and then the two men get into the first open car and drive at the head of a motorcade to the Capitol.

The niceties of precedence now take up volumes in the books of the office of the chief of protocol, having to do with what order in the procession and what seniority of seating at the site shall be assigned to the Cabinet, or Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, the military, the governors, the senators, the congressmen and all their ladies.

The automobiles these days are long and sleek, the crowds are huge and well roped in. The parade after the inaugural address in the open air takes hours and hours and goes into the twilight and the night, and includes floats from every state that applauds the election of the new president and every state that hopes to cash in on his regime.

It includes also batteries from the army, navy, air force, marine corps and always something particularly touching to the president standing there this time inside a bullet-proof glass enclosure. Last time, it was the survivors of the PT-109 – Lieutenant John F Kennedy’s boat that was rammed and sliced by a Japanese destroyer. This time no doubt, it will be something large and gaudy and good natured from, where else, but the great state of Texas.

It will be a happy time for all, except for the Republicans who know better than our daily historians that Lyndon B Johnson did not serve as much as two years of his predecessor's term and so is constitutionally eligible not only for this first independent term, but for another one. There could be eight more years of LBJ.

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