The Speech.(Presidents of the United States inaugural addresses)

Barack Obama has been studying up, reading Abraham Lincoln's speeches, raising everyone's expectations for what just might be the most eagerly awaited Inaugural Address ever. Presidential eloquence doesn't get much better than the argument of Lincoln's first inaugural, "Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy"; the poetry of his second, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away"; and its parting grace, "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."

Reading Lincoln left James Garfield nearly speechless. After Garfield was elected, in 1880, he, like most of our more bookish Chief Executives, or at least their speechwriters, undertook to read the Inaugural Addresses of every President who preceded him. "Those of the past except Lincoln's, are dreary reading," Garfield confided to his diary. "I have half a mind to make none." Lincoln's are surpassingly fine; most of the rest are utterly unlovely. The longest are, unsurprisingly, the most vacuous; it usually takes a while to say so prodigiously little. "Make it the shortest since T.R.," John F. Kennedy urged Ted Sorensen, who, on finishing his own reading, reported, "Lincoln never used a two- or three-syllable word where a one-syllable word would do." Sorensen and Kennedy applied that rule to the writing of Kennedy's inaugural, not just the "Ask not" but also the "call to": "Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are--but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle."

Economy isn't everything. "Only the short ones are remembered," Richard Nixon concluded, after reading all the inaugurals, an opinion that led him to say things briefly but didn't save him from saying them badly: "The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep." Even when Presidential inaugurals make more sense than that, they are not, on the whole, gripping. "The platitude quotient tends to be high, the rhetoric stately and self-serving, the ritual obsessive, and the surprises few," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed in 1965, and that's still true. A bad Inaugural Address doesn't always augur a bad Presidency. It sinks your spirit, though. In 1857, James Buchanan berated abolitionists for making such a fuss about slavery: "Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance." Ulysses S. Grant groused, "I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history." Dwight D. Eisenhower went for a numbered list. George H. W. Bush compared freedom to a kite. For meaninglessness, my money's on Jimmy Carter: "It is that unique self-definition which has given us an exceptional appeal, but it also imposes on us a special obligation to take on those moral duties which, when assumed, seem invariably to be in our own best interests." But, for monotony, it's difficult to outdrone Warren G. Harding ("It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it," H. L. Mencken admitted): "I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities, for sympathetic concern for all agricultural problems, for the omission of unnecessary interference of . . ." I ellipse, lest I nod off. The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.

When Garfield was elected, there were fewer inaugurals to plow through, but they were harder to come by. Obama might not be allowed to e-mail, but he can still Google. Sorensen, who mimeographed, had merely to walk over to the Library of Congress. Garfield's staff had to hunt down every inaugural, and any copying they did they did by hand. The inaugurals weren't regularly compiled and printed as a set until 1840, in "The True American," and, six years later, in "The Statesman's Manual," but by 1880 no edition remained in print, and Garfield's men had to cobble them together all over again. Since 1893, a complete set of texts has been reissued every few decades or so, including, this past year, in "Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses" (Penguin; $16), edited, with an introduction and commentaries, by Robert V. Remini and Terry Golway.

Inaugural Addresses were written to be read as much as heard. Arguably, they still are. The first thirty-three of our country's Inaugural Addresses survive only as written words. Before 1921, when Warren Harding used an amplifier, even the crowd couldn't make out what the President was saying, and before Calvin Coolidge's speech was broadcast over the radio, in 1925, the inaugurals were, basically, only read, usually in the newspaper. Since Truman's, in 1949, inaugurals have been televised, and since Bill Clinton's second, in 1997, they have been streamed online. Obama's inaugural, the fifty-sixth in American history, will be the first to be YouTubed. "Our Founders saw themselves in the light of posterity," Clinton said. "We can do no less." Inaugurals are written for the future, but they look, mostly, to the past ("We are the heirs of the ages," T.R. said), which, when you think about it, might help explain why so many prove so unsatisfying in the present. ("Achieve timelessness! " is, as a piece of writing advice, probably not the most helpful.) On January 20th, most of us will watch and listen. Delivery counts. But, for now at least, speaking to posterity still means writing for readers. Bedside reading old inaugurals are not. But they do offer some hints about what will be at stake when Barack Obama raises his hands, quiets the crowd, and clears his throat.

"Made the first actual study for inaugural by commencing to read those of my predecessors," Garfield wrote in his diary on December 20, 1880, when he still had plenty of time. (New Presidents used to be sworn in on March 4th. In 1933, the Twentieth Amendment changed the date to January 20th, to shorten the awkward interregnum between election and Inauguration.) He started with George Washington's first (the oldest) and second (at a hundred and thirty-five words, the shortest). The next day, he read John Adams's overworked and forgettable one and only: "His next to the last sentence contains more than 700 words. Strong but too cumbrous." (Actually, Garfield was wrong; it's the third-to-last sentence. But it is cumbrous. Also, indefinite: nineteen of those seven hundred words are "if.") That afternoon, Garfield listened as a friend read aloud Thomas Jefferson's first, probably more forcefully than had Jefferson, who was, famously, a mumbler. "Stronger than Washington's, more ornate than Adams' " was the President-elect's verdict on the address, widely considered nearly as transcendent as Lincoln's two, for these lines: "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." But it's the next, if admittedly more ornate, sentence that steals my breath: "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

On December 22nd, Garfield trudged through a few more lesser addresses: "Curious tone of self-depreciation runs through them all--which I cannot quite believe was genuine. Madison's speeches were not quite up to my expectations. Monroe's first was rather above." And then, what with Christmas, trips to the dentist, and choosing a Cabinet, Garfield found his interest in reading inaugurals flagging. Instead, he devoured a novel, hot off the presses--Disraeli's three-volume, autobiographical "Endymion." He finished it on New Year's Eve, just weeks after he started it, and concluded in his diary, twenty minutes before midnight, "It shows adroitness, great reserve on dangerous questions, with enough frankness on other questions to make a show of boldness." Even that much he could not say for the inaugurals stretching from John Quincy Adams (who wore pants instead of knee breeches) to Buchanan (a man Kennedy once aptly described as "cringing in the White House, afraid to move," while the nation teetered on the brink of civil war). By mid-January, Garfield's staff had entered summaries of the inaugurals into a book for him to read. But, abridged or unabridged, they were a slog. Did he really have to write one? He wasn't so sure: "I am quite seriously discussing the propriety of omitting it."