Inaugural confusion still has some, including his undertaker, claiming this man was president for a day.
Last week (and several prior) I focused on the politics of politics. With the legislative session having just kicked off in Olympia, I will no doubt return to that realm in coming weeks. Wherever your political sentiments lie, I think we all need a breather this week.
So, let’s focus on the foibles of politics. Specifically—and aptly, given recent events—we explore some of the more notable imbroglios that have beset several of our nation’s quadrennial occasions.
The lesson? Well, I am not sure there is one. Except perhaps a variation of Murphy’s Law: repeat an action enough times and everything that can go wrong will, eventually, go wrong.
It is impossible not to lead with the inauguration that cost its protagonist his life—or so the legend goes. Enter William Henry Harrison, stage left—albeit for a mere cameo in our national story, from March 4 to April 4, 1841 (in fairness, he was already a national war hero). An incorrigible sesquipedalian, Harrison delivered the longest inauguration speech then or since—in the March cold without an overcoat. He opened thanking the “almighty power which has hitherto protected me and enabled me to bring to favorable issues other important but still greatly inferior trusts heretofore confided in me by my country.” God, apparently, did not take the shoutout well, as Harrison—then the oldest president to date at 68 (a mere bambino in today’s gerontocracy)—died exactly a month later, having all but ignored weeks of chills and coughing fits.
Let’s rewind a bit to the raucous 1829 inauguration of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s election itself was shock enough for some before the hero of the Battle of New Orleans opened the White House to all comers, who proceeded to trash the place, with broken china strewn everywhere and a frat-like kegger on the front lawn. It was, in the words of then-Justice Joseph Story, “the reign of King Mob . . . triumphant.”
Fast slightly forward to President Zachary Taylor’s inauguration in 1849. Like Harrison, Taylor was a war hero and on the older side (65). And like Harrison’s, Taylor’s presidency would prove quite short, with “Old Rough and Ready” kicking it just over a year later. While his inauguration did not contribute to his (un)timely demise, it certainly was an aberration. Taylor, a deeply religious man, declined to be sworn in on Sunday, March 4—then the presidency’s constitutionally prescribed start date (the 1937 ratification of the Twentieth Amendment moved it to January 20). While history books (and the National Archives and Records Administration) list his first day as the fourth, the 24-hour delay has some—charitably—oddball “historians” claiming that the Senate’s president pro tempore, David Rice Atchison of Missouri, was officially the president during that briefest of interregnums. (Spoiler alert: He wasn’t.)
Fast way forward to 1973—President Richard Nixon’s second inaugural. Not so much for its foibles, but for the remarkable slew of national events surrounding it. Two days into Nixon’s second term, former President Lyndon Johnson died, leaving the American people no living erstwhile president for the first time since 1933. Johnson’s death came just two months after the much older former President Harry Truman’s. Nixon’s own scandals would soon make short work of this hiatus, as he lasted just eighteen months before resigning in disgrace. But with the slew of presidential deaths in the preceding decade—five dead between November 22, 1963 and January 22, 1973—Americans were still very much on edge. It was practically a scandal in itself when at his 1977 inauguration President Jimmy Carter walked the mile-plus, sans Pope Mobile, from his swearing in at the Capitol to Pennsylvania Avenue.
There are other stories, of course. Some of hilarious incompetence others of outright perfidy. In 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts bungled the oath and so President Barack Obama had to be sworn-in “again” out of a certainly exaggerated abundance of caution two days later. After all, then-Vice President Johnson was sworn in as second-in-command despite forgetting his words halfway through and replacing a chunk of the oath with “. . . or whatever.” Yes, that actually happened. In 2017, former President George W. Bush spent much of the rainy ceremony fighting valiantly with a plastic poncho. Nothing went quite wrong this time around—though, due to below-freezing temperatures “many people are saying” it felt a little subdued. That’s January in D.C. for you!! The bigger question is . . . why not administer the oath in Honolulu? I checked; there are zero constitutional barriers to a luau-auguration.
Alki and Aloha,
Sam Spiegelman