First Inaugural Address

Summary

Richard Nixon was sworn in on 20 January 1969, after a year of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots in many cities, and a divided Democratic convention in Chicago. He had narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey, who sat on the platform with Lyndon Johnson. Less than a month earlier the crew of Apollo 8 had read Genesis on Christmas Eve while orbiting the moon. Both the war and the moon shape the address. Nixon begins with "the orderly transfer of power" as a celebration of "the unity that keeps us free," then names the honor he seeks: "The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker." The country's crisis, he says, is the reverse of the one FDR faced in 1933; Americans are "rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth." A crisis of the spirit needs an answer of the spirit, and he borrows Lincoln's "better angels of our nature." The most quoted passage asks for quieter speech. America has "suffered from a fever of words," from inflated, angry, and bombastic rhetoric, and "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another." Government promises to listen to "the voices of quiet anguish." Nixon then marks a limit: "we are approaching the limits of what government alone can do," and progress must come from citizens building "a great cathedral of the spirit," one stone at a time. Abroad, "After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation," and he wants "an open world" in which no people live "in angry isolation." He closes with the view of the earth from Apollo 8, quoting Archibald MacLeish on "riders on the earth together," and seeks a peace "with healing in its wings," words from Malachi. The war continued for four more years and Nixon resigned in 1974, but the speech still poses its own measure for judging him and his successors.

Top Lessons

• A fever of words

  Nixon diagnoses inflated, angry, and bombastic rhetoric as a national illness and asks Americans to lower their voices so their words "can be heard as well as our voices." The lesson asks whether civil speech is a precondition of self-government, and what it costs a leader to ask for it.

• Peacemaker as the highest title

  Nixon redefines national honor in terms of peacemaking rather than victory, seeking a peace that is "not victory over any other people." He spoke while more than half a million American troops were in Vietnam, and the war continued until 1973. Students can weigh the promise against the record without dismissing the ideal.

• The limits of government alone

  After listing the programs of the previous third of a century, Nixon says "we are approaching the limits of what government alone can do" and calls for citizens building "a great cathedral of the spirit." He asks for "small, splendid efforts" reported in neighborhood newspapers rather than national journals.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Presidential inaugurals concern constitutional politics and national crisis; they have no medical content for this library's lens.