INAUGURATION ’97: POMP AND INTIMACY

The second Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton was a bit more modest than his first. The crowds, estimated at a quarter-million, were about a third the size of last time. The celebrations seemed a trifle more subdued. (Why not? We’re all a little older now.) Yet it was no less a day befitting what Clinton called, in his 22-minute Inaugural Address, “the world’s indispensable nation”–dignified when it needed to be but otherwise at ease. Inauguration Day can be the most public of public occasions. The President squares his shoulders, raises his right hand and self-consciously poses for history. But there are moments between ceremonies that are blessedly unceremonious, when the First Family is just a family and there’s nobody playing Hail to the Chief. We offer a small, exclusive album of moments like those.