FINALLY, it was over. The apprenticeship in high places, the eight years of anxious exile in which he could only wonder if the chance would ever come again, the final months of combat, triumph and preparation anew—all that was behind Richard Milhous Nixon. Now, at 56, atop the citadel of power, he was ready to stand before the thousands in the Capitol Plaza and millions watching TV across the U.S. to take his oath of office as the nation's 37th President. In his inaugural address, he set out to sound clearly the tone of his Administration.
In keeping with his campaign promises and personal style, Nixon offered no new Utopias, delivered no exhortations to grandeur. Rather, he earnestly and soberly addressed himself to the immediate tasks of reunifying a divided nation and leading "the world at last out of the valley of turmoil. . . We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another," he said, "until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways—to the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices and the anxious voices and the voices that have despaired of being heard."
No One An Enemy. Nixon chose not to deliver a detailed catalogue of policies and programs. His underlying themes were conciliation and equity at home, the quest for peace abroad. "Those who have been left out," he said, "we will try to bring in. Those who have been left behind, we will help to catch up." To foreign friends and adversaries, he extended this hope: "Because the people of the world want peace and the leaders are afraid of war, the times are on the side of peace. Let us take as our goal: Where peace is unknown, to make it welcome. Where peace is fragile, to make it strong. Where peace is temporary, to make it permanent." Realistically, he added: "We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we can try to make no one our enemy."
Nixon appealed to Americans to join individually and actively in solving the nation's problems—a standard passage in presidential oratory—but he did it in personal, vivid terms: "We need the energies of our people, enlisted not only in grand enterprises, but more importantly in those small, splendid efforts that make headlines in the neighborhood newspaper instead of the national journal. With these, we today can build a great cathedral of the spirit, each of us raising it one stone at a time, as he reaches out to his neighbor, helping, caring, doing."
The address was very much of a piece with the more thoughtful of his campaign speeches. It was hopeful without being euphoric, avoided partisanship.
It was aimed squarely at the national constituency that Nixon must rally if he is to be able to govern effectively. It was yet another effort to recruit a coalition from among the sundered political and ideological factions of the country, an effort he is bound to continue.