The Inauguration of Barack Obama: A Photographic
Journal
By the Washington Post
(Triumph Books, 160 pages, $29.95)
I don’t want to speak for you, but this is the book I’ve been
waiting for. Lots and lots of pictures, easy-to-read captions,
hardly any other text. In short, a leisurely assignment for any
addled reviewer. And definitely less demanding than Obama: A
Historic Journey, the New York Times’s related
effort, would have been.
From all indications (I’ve only seen the ad for it), the
Times’s tome is less reliant on photographs and thus pads
its 240 pages with plentiful text, artwork, and documentary
evidence, not to mention original essays by six of its honchos and
selected columns from five of its top columnists (though apparently
not Bob Herbert, which raises questions about the $40 asking
price).
The Post skimps, offering only a brief foreword by
Sally Quinn’s husband Ben Bradlee (mainly about JFK’s
inauguration), an afterword by the paper’s current executive
editor, a reprint of Obama’s inaugural speech, and, as the
pièce de résistance, a game if overwritten profile by
Clinton biographer, the dour David Maraniss. Its tone is
established by paragraph three, where Maraniss notes that men like
Laurence Tribe at Harvard and federal judge Abner Mikva in Chicago
“were sufficiently impressed to proclaim that young Obama had the
wherewithal to become the first black president.” It would have
been nicer had they simply said he had the wherewithal to become
president.
This album confirms the Obama Inauguration was a four-day
affair. January 20, the day of the actual swearing-in and inaugural
balls (the Post seems to regard the latter as no less
momentous), isn’t covered until midway through. Our long weekend
begins on January 17, in Philadelphia, whence the Obama train sets
off on its whistle-stop ride to D.C., with stops along the way in
Wilmington to fetch the Bidens and Baltimore to address a crowd of
40,000. There are a few photos from the Wilmington station, but
none from Baltimore. A measly 40,000 at an Obama rally is evidently
considered an insult.
Happier is January 18, thanks to the afternoon concert at the
Lincoln Memorial. The turnout is huge (as a photo attests) and “rap
fans danced to country music” (no photo available). My favorite
shot features Sheryl Crow singing a Bob Marley song alongside
will.i.am. It is good to meet new talent. Several photos capture
people staying cozy-warm in the frigid weather, including two teen
girls literally wrapped in an American flag. For full patriotic
immersion, don’t miss aging communist Pete Seeger in the “celebrity
cast” singing “America the Beautiful” at concert’s end.
January 19, Martin Luther King Day, is devoted to volunteer
work—all very tasteful, except perhaps the photo of a casually
dressed Obama’s hand squeezing his wife’s waist at one “service”
stop, a metal bracelet honoring a soldier killed in Iraq (we’re
told) visible on his wrist. Finally, the big day. It remains frozen
in time, as if the arctic cold were merely setting the stage, much
like the bleachers along Pennsylvania Avenue shown here to be
ghostly empty as the inaugural parade continued into the dark late
afternoon, performing for no one.
Snippets from Obama’s rhetoric offer warning signs. “We are
going to need you, not just today, not just tomorrow, but this
year, for the next four years, and who knows after that, because
together we are going to change America,” he tells one of the
inaugural balls. At the Lincoln Memorial he praises not what our
country is but “what this country can be”— and he describes those
in the audience as Americans who “want to help us get there.” The
Post quips that the record 1.8 million who attended the
swearing-in “look like ants” when photographed from atop the
Washington Monument. But in the book’s beautiful two-page spread
taken from atop the west Capitol, this throng looks like something
else: like 1.8 million folks who’ve turned themselves in.
