WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- Shortly after noon on Jan. 20, 2005, George W. Bush joins a select group of U.S. chief executives. The 43rd president of the United States, Bush is the 16th to have won the opportunity to deliver a second inaugural address.
It is an eclectic group, made up of great and near great presidents like Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan as well as a few whom historians view ignominiously. And, for good measure, it also includes Grover Cleveland, who is primarily remembered for being the only man in U.S. history to have won the White House in non-consecutive elections.
Election to a second term is no predictor of greatness nor is failure to achieve it necessarily indicative of failure. Richard Nixon, who in 1972 won a second term in a historic landslide, was driven from office less than two years later by the Watergate scandal. James K. Polk, whose policy of "Manifest Destiny" and war with Mexico forever changed the nation, served but a single term and died shortly after he returned home to Tennessee.
For those presidents who are unimpeachably considered great, the second inaugural has been used as a statement of vision, a call for the nation to realize its purpose. And, of all those, the greatest perhaps is Lincoln's, delivered at a time when the continued existence of the nation was much in doubt, the union having been torn asunder by the Civil War.
In was in that speech, given March 4, 1865, that Lincoln uttered the immortal words, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Lincoln used the speech to issue a call for reconciliation while the war raged between North and South, calling for a peace he himself would not live to see.
Washington, who did not speak nearly as long as Lincoln, was no less eloquent. "When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people," he said.
And, in affirmation of the integrity with which he conducted his entire public life, Washington prayed he "be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony" should he be found to "willingly or knowingly" violate his oath of office.
Thomas Jefferson's second inaugural took a form familiar to modern America, containing both a review of his first-term accomplishments and a statement of objectives for his second.
Jefferson's address, though not nearly as stirring as the Declaration of Independence, nevertheless included references to issues that bedevil the public life of the nation even today.
In a passage that should give pause to those who worship his use of the phrase "separation of church and state" in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson said, "In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the constitution independent of the powers of the general government. I have therefore undertaken, on no occasion, to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it."
Ulysses Grant made reference to the ways in which technological innovations had changed the nation in his second inaugural. "The theory of government changes with general progress. Now that the telegraph is made available for communicating thought, together with rapid transit by steam, all parts of a continent are made contiguous for all purposes of government, and communication between the extreme limits of the country made easier than it was throughout the old thirteen States at the beginning of our national existence."
Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned for a second term on the slogan, "He kept us out of war," alluded to that war as one the United States could no longer ignore. "We are provincials no longer," he said. "The tragic events of the 30 months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his second inaugural to proclaim the health of a democratic system imperiled by the economic deprivation of the Great Depression.
"Our tasks in the last four years did not force democracy to take a holiday," he said on March 4, 1937. "Nearly all of us recognize that as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase -- power to stop evil; power to do good. The essential democracy of our nation and the safety of our people depend not upon the absence of power, but upon lodging it with those whom the people can change or continue at stated intervals through an honest and free system of elections. The Constitution of 1787 did not make our democracy impotent. In fact, in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic."
It is not yet clear into which camp history will place Bush. Few could have predicted the changes that would take place on the world stage during his first term. He enters his second facing challenges few men in the history of the nation have been presented with, most of all the chance to make the world anew.
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(The Peter Principles explores issues in national and local politics, the U.S. culture and the media. It is written by Peter Roff, UPI political analyst and 20-year veteran of the Washington scene.)
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