If Trump is lost for graceful words, this long line of presidents could guide him

When Donald Trump is sworn in once again next Monday, he will become the first US president to deliver non-consecutive inaugural addresses since Grover Cleveland in 1893. Cleveland was elected in 1884, lost after one term as did Trump, then was elected again in 1892. Trump and Cleveland are the only two men to have achieved that most remarkable comeback.

Trump’s first inaugural – as a president with no experience whatsoever of government, and perhaps himself surprised to have won – was confused and inelegant. (“Weird shit” was how George W. Bush unkindly described it.) This time, coming from a seasoned politician with a big victory and the experience of a presidential term already behind him, Trump will speak with authority and purpose.

In a manner of speaking, Donald Trump could take some pointers from his predecessors (clockwise from top left) Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Franklin D. Roosevelt.Credit: Graphic: Marija Ercegovac

The inaugural address is, along with the State of the Union, one of two great set-piece occasions on the American political calendar. It is not specifically required by the Constitution, but every president since George Washington has delivered one. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only president to have given the speech more than twice – in fact, four times.

As with many grand ceremonial occasions, the inauguration has grown in symbolic importance over the centuries, particularly since the advent of television. A single well-honed phrase can come to define an age – such as FDR’s “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” in his first address in 1933.

Every inaugural is important – as a statement of values, a declaration of intent, an appraisal of America’s challenges, sometimes (as with Trump in 2017) a critique of the status quo – though it is not always the speech that defines a presidency.

Both of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugurals, delivered to a nation torn asunder by the Civil War, contained passages of glorious oratory, in particular the peroration of his second: “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.” Yet it is for the 272 words of the Gettysburg address that Lincoln will be best remembered.

Ronald Reagan’s inaugural addresses, too, were fine examples of his sometimes folksy oratory. However, six words from his address at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987 – “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – will always define his heroic presidency. Reagan’s great declamation was one of those history-changing speeches. It helped to bring down the Berlin Wall – and with it, the literal and metaphorical barrier between the free world and the enslaved.

John F Kennedy, speaking from the very same place in 1963, delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.” Kennedy’s Berlin Wall speech did not change the world, as Reagan’s did. But the boundless self-confidence of his inaugural two years earlier marked the zenith of American hubris – “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival of liberty” – and became the tragic soundtrack of the 1960s.

Kennedy’s inaugural is widely regarded as a textbook example of speech-making technique, notably his extensive use of the rhetorical device of contrastive pairs: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”; “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

It was drafted by Kennedy’s young aide, Theodore Sorensen. Thurston Clarke, in his 2004 book Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, traces the formulation of the speech through successive drafts. He also gives us a revealing anecdote.

On his flight to Washington three days before the inauguration, Kennedy invited the Time magazine journalist Hugh Sidey into his private cabin. He showed Sidey a draft of the speech, in Kennedy’s own handwriting, and invited his comments. Clarke’s archival research shows that Sorensen had already largely written the speech; Kennedy had evidently copied out the draft in manuscript and contrived the charade with Sidey to leave the impression that he, not a speechwriter, was the author. Clarke speculates that Kennedy was still bruised by innuendos that his Pulitzer Prize-winning (and reputation-building) 1940 book about Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, Why England Slept, had been ghostwritten. (It had not.)

Richard Nixon’s inaugural eight years later, though lacking Kennedy’s soaring cadences, was actually a better speech in substance: more humility, less hubris. It certainly gave fewer hostages to fortune. Yet it never received the recognition it deserved. Kennedy was young, rich and glamorous; Nixon shopsoiled, square and middlebrow. Among the fashionable Georgetown set – of which leading journalists like Sidey were the opinion-shapers – Nixon was as reviled as Kennedy had been adored.

The Athenians were the first to identify rhetoric as one of the chief accomplishments of the statesman. The deeds of presidents can change the world for years, for decades, even for centuries. But – at least for those whose statecraft is graced by eloquence – it is their words that last forever.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.

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