On the morning of Inauguration Day, a cold, clear, bright morning, Lyndon Johnson was up at 6:40, breakfasted with Lady Bird, and did some last-minute tinkering with his inaugural speech. Then the Johnsons drove to a special service at Washington's National City Christian Church. Clergymen of several denominations took part, among them Evangelist Billy Graham, who said:
"There is a spiritual dimension to leadership, which this Administration has already recognized." Recalling Lyndon Johnson's assumption of the presidency after John Kennedy's assassination, Graham quoted the prayer of King Solomon upon ascension to the throne of Israel after the death of his father.
King David: "Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?"
By coincidence, the President had chosen the same quotation from H Chronicles 1: 10 for the conclusion of his inaugural address. That was appropriate enough, because the speech was really a sermon.
The President's delivery was solemn, slow, almost doggedly prayerful and paternal. His main theme was essentially the familiar but enduring notion that the U.S. is not just another country in history, but that its founding was the work of special Providence. The early settlers, "the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened," came to America and "made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind." This view of the U.S. as God's country sometimes makes the rest of the world a little uncomfortable. But it is very different from militant nationalism, which substitutes the nation for God, or from messianic imperialism (for instance, the "Holy Russia" of the czarist era, perhaps not entirely dead in the atheistic Marxist present), which sees one nation as universal redeemer. The special American destiny, suggested President Johnson, is both a blessing and a burden. "We have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit. If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.
"If we succeed, it will not be because of what we have, but it will be because of what we are; not because of what we own, but rather because of what we believe. For we are a nation of believers. Underneath the clamor of building and the rush of our day's pursuits, we are believers in justice and liberty and union, and in our own Union. We believe that every man must some day be free. And we believe in ourselves."