Presidential Inaugurations That Went Sideways:
The most prominent inaugural error in recent memory is, of course, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts leading Barack Obama astray during his oath of office in 2009. “What should have been a great moment,” observes author and expert on presidential inauguration history Jim Bendat in Democracy’s Big Day, “instead evolved into an embarrassing fiasco.”
But, as Bendat chronicles in his book, Roberts’ flub is hardly unique. Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson both screwed up the wording of their vice presidential oaths (in 1953 and 1961, respectively). And another chief justice, Howard Taft, mistakenly said “preserve, maintain and defend the Constitution” (using “maintain” instead of “protect”) while administering the oath to Herbert Hoover in 1929. The mistake was caught by Helen Terwilliger, 13, who was listening on the radio in Walden, New York, and informed the chief justice of the error in a letter.
Most Americans think of John F. Kennedy’s soaring eloquence in 1961 (“Ask not what your country …”), but Johnson’s misstatement was just one of many stumbles that year. As Cardinal Cushing prepared to give the invocation, smoke began rising from the lectern, which had caught fire. Cushing continued with his remarks as the Secret Service quickly fixed a smoldering wire from a heater placed inside the podium to warm speakers. Later, the eminent American poet Robert Frost was forced to abandon a new poem he had written expressly for the occasion (in favor of an old one he had memorized) because the glare from freshly fallen snow on a sunny day made reading the words too difficult.
