Nation: TOWARD THE NIXON INAUGURATION

THE formal transfer of power to a new President of the U.S. is always a solemn moment. It is also a moment of promise, a time for hopeful pledges rather than penitential litanies. Columbia Historian Henry Graff calls the act of transition “America’s stirring rite of political renewal.” The mood of Inauguration 1969 is neither the bleak desperation of 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt succeeded Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression, nor the partisan exhilaration of 1965, after Lyndon Johnson had been elected in his own right. The U.S. is in grave crisis, yet the President-elect has revealed little of his design; he has remained immured in his Manhattan headquarters, working long hours but making few public statements. Washington waits this week with quiet anticipation for the installation of Richard Nixon, uncertain about the tone and thrust of his presidency, but looking happily forward to the fun and fanfare of the celebration.

It will not be the exuberant, swinging blowout that began the Kennedy years, with a seemingly endless inaugural parade and partying through the night. For four days, the capital will whirl sedately with genteel Republican merrymaking, beginning with an All-American Gala in the District of Columbia Armory, produced by Ed McMahon of the Tonight Show (see TELEVISION). For $10 to $100 a ticket, the guests will get Ed and his boss Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore, Lionel Hampton, James Brown, Marguerite Piazza, Tony Bennett, Hugh O’Brian and Hines, Hines & Dad. The night before Inauguration, Salt Lake City’s 350-strong Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Soprano Anna Moffo and Pianist Andre Watts will hold forth at a concert honoring the President-elect and his Vice President in Constitution Hall; the house is already nearly sold out, at prices ranging from $5 for a terrace seat to $500 for a five-seat box. Orchestra seats are $35.

Horses and Dukes. Unseasonably balmy weather is predicted for Inauguration Day itself, in happy contrast to the eight inches of snow that buried Washington just before the Kennedy Inauguration eight years ago. After Nixon takes the oath from Chief Justice Earl Warren at noon on the Capitol steps and delivers his inaugural address, the two-hour parade—shortest in memory, timed to end while there is still enough light for color-television cameras—will get under way up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Nixon, Vice President Agnew and their families will watch from a heated presidential box enclosed in bulletproof glass; lesser spectators will look on from bleachers pounded together out of hundreds of miles of top-grade Douglas fir. The paraders will include 56 bands—among them the group from Nixon’s old high school in Whittier, Calif.—cadets and midshipmen from the service academies, 13-year-old Vicki Cole of Deshler, Ohio, carrying her “Bring Us Together” poster on one of the 39 floats, three Lipizzaner horses, and the French Dukes drill team from Ann Arbor, Mich.

Afterward, for $70 a couple up to $1,000 for a box seating eight, some 30,000 of the faithful will dance at six inaugural balls, one of them at the Smithsonian Institution; the twelve members of Nixon’s Cabinet have been carefully parceled out, two per celebration. The Nixons, of course, will drop in on all six. White tie is preferred, but black tie is permitted; in a concession to the times, turtleneck shirts will be permissible for the men and pants suits for the women. Badgered by fashion writers last week, Inaugural Ball Co-Chairman Mark Evans, a broadcasting executive, conceded: “Women will be admitted in their formal drawers.”

Crumpets and Tea. Meyer Davis orchestras and 30 combos will tootle for tripping Republican toes. It will be the ninth inaugural ball for Davis, 70, and he has composed a song for the occasion. In part, it goes:

Julie, pass the crumpets.

Tricia, serve the tea.

David, entertain our friends

With news of Ike and Mamie.

Dick, won’t you play the piano so

we can sing

For the nicest family we know?

Because we know where we’re at

With Richard Nixon and Pat,

Mister President and our First Lady.

The inaugural ball committee ran a contest for the official inaugural song, which was won by Bring Us Together—Go Forward Together, lyrics by Hal Hackaday. The committee turned down dozens of requests to perform from would-be entertainers all over the land, including an acrobatic group, an Illinois woman who claimed to be a coloratura soprano, and a lady from Texas who said she had shouted “Amen!” during a Nixon campaign speech. “A lot of people get the idea that this is some sort of variety show,” says Assistant Ball Chairman Henry Berliner Jr. “It isn’t. It is a ball, a dance, and just that.” (In 1965, President Johnson’s inaugural committee turned down a California man who offered to whistle Dixie, America and Put On Your Old Grey Bonnet while smoking half a dozen cigars, all simultaneously.)

There were some other difficulties. Inaugural Chairman J. Willard Marriott pleaded with Washington hotelmen not to raise rates during the festivities; unknown to him, his own Marriott Motor Hotels had hiked the price of a double room by 20%, to $30 a night.

As his inaugural planners wrestled with last-minute snags, the President-elect journeyed by Air Force Convair to Northampton, Mass., to celebrate his birthday with Daughter Julie and her new husband, David Eisenhower. The birthday dinner was a chicken casserole with broccoli and cheese, followed by a store-bought chocolate cake with 56 candles. Pat gave him a pair of cuff links —”All his cuff links were torn off in the campaign,” she explained. There were ties, socks and handkerchiefs from Tricia, and from his staff a small bronze statue of an Irish setter in token of the dog they plan to buy him. The Nixon White House menagerie will also include Blanco, a dog left by the Johnsons because it does not like Texas, a Yorkshire terrier called Pasha, and Vicky, a French poodle.

Somber and Unsure. Nixon’s main preoccupation was drafting his inaugural address, which he is writing out on lined yellow legal pads. At week’s end his Cabinet members assembled in New York at the Pierre hotel headquarters for two days of briefings with the heads of 21 task forces that have been studying the problems facing the incoming Administration. Henry Loomis, director of the policy task force, let it be known that there would be no sudden departures. “Don’t expect dramatic shifts or changes,” said Loomis. “Maybe Nixon will be able to slow down or alter the direction of 3% to 5% of existing programs in his first year, maybe 8% to 10% in his second and third years. Add it up: that’s change of enormous impact and significance. But it’s gradual.”

The U.S. is briefly quiescent after the shocks and divisions of 1968. But it is also somber and unsure; the vexing dilemmas of Viet Nam, racial tension and urban disintegration all remain unresolved. There is a vacuum in the nation’s leadership, and once Richard Milhous Nixon takes the oath of office next week to become the 37th President of the U.S., there will not be much time before he must act to fill it. Still, like most of his predecessors, he starts his term with the good will and high expectations of his fellow citizens. A Louis Harris poll released last week revealed that fully 88% believe that he will unite rather than further divide the U.S.