AN AMERICAN CORONATION

By Robin Abcarian

Jan. 18, 2009 12 AM PT

The 41st president made it sound so simple. In his agenda on the day he became president in 1989, George H.W. Bush wrote in longhand: “6 a.m. -- catch 3 news shows. Drink Coffee -- Play with grand kids -- Pray -- Go to WHouse -- Go to Cap Hill -- Get Sworn in.”

President-elect Barack Obama’s inaugural celebration, on the other hand, is going to go on for days. On Saturday, echoing George Washington’s ride from Mount Vernon to New York (where the capital was then located), Obama and his family boarded a train in Philadelphia, stopping in Wilmington, Del., to pick up Vice President-elect Joe Biden and his family. The train was to stop in Baltimore before arriving in Washington.

This afternoon, the Obamas and Bidens are to appear on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, welcoming the public to a free concert featuring Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen and other top music acts.

On Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, they will engage in an as-yet unspecified act of public service and encourage others to do the same.

On Tuesday morning, a record crowd numbering perhaps in the millions is expected to spill across the National Mall as Obama takes his oath on the west steps of the Capitol. Later, at 10 official balls, there will be dancing.

But first there will be joyful weeping, lots of it. And plenty of self-congratulation.

After all, we Americans love to amaze ourselves -- and show the world how amazing we are. What could be more amazing than watching Barack Hussein Obama, our first African American president, swear to faithfully execute his office while resting his hand on the compact Bible used by Abraham Lincoln, who hastened the end of slavery?

“When Obama puts his hand on Lincoln’s Bible and swears the same oath that Lincoln swore in an age when full equal opportunity didn’t exist, that has to be considered a transcendent historical and emotional moment for the country,” said historian Harold Holzer, who co-chairs the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of the 16th president’s birth in 1809.

But the layers of meaning will go even deeper. At the new president’s side will be his wife, Michelle Robinson Obama (holding the Bible, if she follows a custom begun by Lady Bird Johnson in 1965), whose great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, was a slave in South Carolina.

“We have just never experienced anything like this,” said Kenneth Stevens, a history professor at Texas Christian University and an expert on the American presidency. “This was a milestone election, and that feeling is going into the inauguration as well.”

We may not have experienced anything exactly like this, but other Americans in other times have had their own transcendent inaugural moments.

According to Jim Bendat’s book “Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President 1789-2009,” at James A. Garfield’s inauguration in 1881, enfranchised former slaves in the crowd wept when the new president said, “The elevation of the Negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787.”

The Constitution itself is brief on the transfer of presidential power and says nothing about the weeping. When it comes to the inauguration of a president, only one thing is required: The incoming chief executive must take a 35-word oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The rest -- the inaugural address, the prayer, the poem, the parade, the emotion -- are all embellishments that fulfill our need for ritual, for pageantry, for national reconciliation and catharsis.

“Although it happens every four years,” Holzer said, “it’s the closest we get to the rituals of a royal coronation or a papal investiture. There is always a special fascination when it’s a brand-new president, one who has not served as vice president or is being reelected. At these moments, there is a kind of zing to the pageantry.”

This time around, zing is surely an understatement.

Most inaugural addresses are deeply forgettable rhetorical exercises, and many presage less-than-memorable presidencies.

But phrases from a few addresses, often delivered at a moment of national peril or crisis, have practically embedded themselves in our national DNA -- Lincoln’s appeal to our better angels on the eve of the Civil War; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s admonition about fear in the depths of the Depression; John F. Kennedy’s great call to put country above self.

Those lines, instant classics, had a profound effect on their audiences as well, and helped set the tone of the administrations that followed. Unfortunately, Lincoln could not stop the Civil War, but by his second inaugural speech in 1865, his words -- “with malice toward none” -- would set a much-needed tone of reconciliation for a war-torn nation.

For Obama, who will take office at a time when the economy has crashed, unemployment is climbing and a long, unpopular war in Iraq continues to claim American lives, expectations are high.

“What I’d like to see is a really stirring inaugural address,” Stevens said. “I think Obama has the potential to do that. He knows how to give a good speech. There’s that sense of crisis in the country today, and he has the possibility of really doing something to turn it around, to restore the faith of the American people. It has the potential to be one of the best.”

robin.abcarian@latimes.com

BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX

INAUGURAL WISDOM

GEORGE WASHINGTON

First inaugural, April 30, 1789

“There is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”

ANDREW JACKSON

March 4, 1829

“Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country, the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

March 4, 1861

“Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?”

ULYSSES S. GRANT

March 4, 1869

“Laws are to govern all alike -- those opposed as well as those who favor them. I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”

HARRY S. TRUMAN

Jan. 20, 1949

“The peoples of the Earth face the future with grave uncertainty, composed almost equally of great hopes and great fears. In this time of doubt, they look to the United States as never before for goodwill, strength and wise leadership.”

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

Jan. 20, 1953

“The promise of this life is imperiled by the very genius that has made it possible. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create -- and turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities. Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.”

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

Jan. 20, 1965

“Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, ‘His color is not mine,’ or ‘His beliefs are strange and different,’ in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.”

RICHARD NIXON

Jan. 20, 1969

“America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another -- until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

JIMMY CARTER

Jan. 20, 1977

“The world is still engaged in a massive armaments race designed to ensure continuing equivalent strength among potential adversaries. We pledge perseverance and wisdom in our efforts to limit the world’s armaments to those necessary for each nation’s own domestic safety. And we will move this year a step toward ultimate goal -- the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.”

RONALD REAGAN

Jan. 20, 1981

“You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?”

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About the cover

Artist Ed Lam depicts the sweep of presidential history and the grandeur of the inaugural ceremony, incorporating all of the nation’s presidents and elements from different parts of the Capitol. The drapery and windows are from the West Front, where inaugurations have been conducted since Ronald Reagan’s first term in 1981. The railing and presidential seal are from the East Portico, where most previous inaugurations were staged. Obama’s presidency will be the nation’s 44th, but because Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms, only 43 men are pictured.

1. Franklin Pierce, 1853-1857

2. James Madison, 1809-1817

3. Andrew Johnson, 1865-1869

4. Gerald R. Ford, 1974-1977

5. James K. Polk, 1845-1849

6. William McKinley, 1897-1901

7. Richard Nixon, 1969-1974

8. James A. Garfield, 1881

9. George H.W. Bush, 1989-1993

10. John Tyler, 1841-1845

11. James Monroe, 1817-1825

12. Calvin Coolidge, 1923-1929