By far the most beautiful words of the day were spoken by Maya Angelou, a tall woman with a deep strong voice whom I had asked to write a poem for the occasion, the first poet to do so since Robert Frost spoke at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. I had followed Maya’s career since I’d read her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which recounts her early years as a traumatized mute girl in a poor black community in Stamps, Arkansas.
Maya’s poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” riveted the crowd. Built on powerful images of a rock to stand on, a river to rest by, and a tree with roots in all the cultures and kinds that make up the American mosaic, the poem issued a passionate plea in the form of a neighborly invitation: Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
Billy Graham ended our good morning with a brief benediction, and Hillary and I left the stage to accompany the Bushes down the back steps of the Capitol, where the presidential helicopter, Marine One, was waiting to take them on the first leg of their journey home. We went back inside for lunch with the Congressional Committee, then drove up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the viewing stand in front of the White House for the inaugural parade. With Chelsea, we got out of the car and walked the last few blocks of the route so that we could wave to the crowds packed several deep along the way. After the parade, we went into our new home for the first time, with only about two hours to greet the staff, rest, and get ready for the evening. Miraculously, the movers had gotten all our belongings in during the inaugural ceremonies and the parade.
At seven, we started our evening marathon with a dinner, followed by visits to all eleven inaugural balls. My brother sang for me at the MTV Youth Ball, and at another I played a tenor saxophone duet on
“Night Train” with Clarence Clemons. However, at most of the balls Hillary and I would first say a few words of thanks, then dance to a few bars of one of our favorite songs, “It Had to Be You,” showing off her beautiful purple gown. Meanwhile, Chelsea was off with friends from Arkansas at the Youth Ball, and Al and Tipper kept their own schedule. At the Tennessee ball, Paul Simon regaled them with his hit “You Can Call Me Al.” At the Arkansas Ball, I introduced Mother to Barbra Streisand and told them both I thought they’d get along. They did more than that. They became fast friends, and Barbra called my mother every week until she died. I still have a picture of them walking hand in hand on that inaugural evening.
When we got back to the White House, it was after 2 a.m. We had to be up the next morning for a public reception, but I was too excited to go right to bed. We had a full house: Hillary’s parents, Mother and Dick, our siblings, Chelsea’s friends from home, and our friends Jim and Diane Blair and Harry and Linda Thomason. Only our parents had retired.
I wanted to look around. We had been in the second-floor living quarters before, but this was different. It was beginning to sink in that we actually lived there and would have to make it a home. Most of the rooms had high ceilings and beautiful but comfortable furniture. The presidential bedroom and living room face the south, with a small room off the bedroom that would become Hillary’s sitting room. Chelsea had a bedroom and study across the hall, just beyond the formal dining room and the small kitchen. At the other end of the hall were the main guest bedrooms, one of which had been Lincoln’s office and has one of his handwritten copies of the Gettysburg Address. Next to the Lincoln Bedroom is the Treaty Room, so named because the treaty ending the SpanishAmerican War was signed there in 1898. For several years it had been the private office of the President, usually configured with multiple televisions so the Chief Executive could watch all the news programs at once. I believe President Bush had four TVs there. I decided I wanted it to be a quiet place where I could read, reflect, listen to music, and hold small meetings. The White House carpenters made me floorto-ceiling bookshelves, and the staff brought up the table on which the Spanish-American War treaty had been signed. In 1869, it had been Ulysses Grant’s cabinet table, with space for the President and his seven department heads to sit around it. Since 1898 it had been used for the signing of all treaties, including the temporary nuclear test ban under President Kennedy and the Camp David Accords under President Carter. Before the year was out, I would be using it too.
I filled out the room with a late-eighteenth-century Chippendale sofa, the oldest piece of furniture in the White House collection, and an antique table bought by Mary Todd Lincoln, on which we put the silver commemorative cup from the 1898 treaty. When I got my books and CDs in, and hung some of my old pictures, including an 1860 photo of Abraham Lincoln and Yousuf Karsh’s famous photograph of Churchill, the place had a comfortable, peaceful atmosphere in which I would spend countless hours in the years ahead.
On my first day as President, I started out by taking Mother down to the Rose Garden, to show her exactly where I had stood when I shook hands with President Kennedy almost thirty years ago. Then, in a departure from traditional practice, we opened the White House to the public, providing tickets to two thousand people who had been selected in a postcard lottery. Al, Tipper, Hillary, and I stood in line shaking hands with the ticket holders, then with others who waited in the cold rain for their time to walk through the lower south entrance into the Diplomatic Reception Room to say hello. One determined young man without a ticket had hitchhiked overnight to the White House with his sleeping bag. After six hours, we had to stop, so I went outside to speak to the rest of the crowd gathered on the South Lawn. That night, Hillary and I stood in line for another few hours, to greet our friends from Arkansas and classmates from Georgetown, Wellesley, and Yale.
A few months after the inauguration, a book was published filled with beautiful photographs that capture the excitement and meaning of the inaugural week, with an explanatory text written by Rebecca Buffum Taylor. In her epilogue to the book, Taylor writes:
A shift in political values takes time. Even if successful, its clarity must wait until months or years have passed, until the lens has been extended and recedes again, until far and middle distance merge with what can be seen today.
The words were penetrating, and probably correct. But I couldn’t wait years, months, or even days to see if the campaign and the inauguration had effected a shift in values, deepening the roots and broadening the reach of the American community. I had too much to do, and once again the work quickly turned from poetry to prose, not all of it pretty.
THIRTY-ONE
The next year involved an amazing combination of major legislative achievements, frustrations and successes in foreign policy, unforeseen events, personal tragedy, honest errors, and clumsy violations of the Washington culture, which, when combined with compulsive leaking by a few staffers, ensured press coverage that often resembled what I’d experienced during the New York primary. On January 22, we announced that Zoë Baird had withdrawn her name from consideration for attorney general. Since we had learned about her employment of illegal immigrant workers and her failure to pay Social Security taxes for them during the vetting process, I had to say that we had failed to evaluate the matter properly, and that I, not she, was responsible for the situation. Zoë had not misled us in any way. When the household workers were hired, she had just gotten a new job, and her husband had the summer off from teaching. Apparently, each assumed the other had handled the tax matter. I believed her and kept working for her nomination for three weeks after she first offered to withdraw it. Later, I appointed Zoë to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, where she made a real contribution to the work Admiral Crowe’s group did.