preserve & protect & defend
I noticed that Joe Biden took the presidential oath of office at about 11:45am Eastern on January 20, ten to fifteen minutes before his term actually started. It seems this was the result of unexpected efficiency: the inaugural ceremony ran not just on time, but ahead of schedule. It didn’t make him president for those fifteen minutes—by law, the outgoing president’s term doesn’t end until noon—but that just makes me wonder: what is the oath for? What exactly are these words?
One thing they’re not: magic words. You don’t become president just by saying them in the right order. And, perhaps more importantly, you don’t not become president just because you said them wrong. The Constitution requires that—
Before he enter on the execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
U.S. Constitution II.1
You could take “before” here in a conditional sense, as in do this or else you can’t take office, or in a temporal sense, as in do this before noon on the twentieth, but technically your term will start even if you don’t. For obvious practical reasons, we take the temporal view. The Office of President is never vacant—the king is dead; long live the king. Power transfers from predecessor to successor, or down the line of succession, without pause.
This is good when a president dies while in office, as it can be hours before time and a federal judge can be found amid the chaos to administer the oath to the once–vp–now–potus. And it’s good when presidents-elect flub the words, which they do, apparently, a lot. Enter the delightfully named Wikipedia subsection, “Oath mishaps,” a list of all the times we know of that presidents screwed up when taking their oaths.
Some of my favorites from this trove—
- 2009: Chief Justice John Roberts tried to administer the oath to Barack Obama from memory. It was just a whole hot mess, and they had a do–over the next day at the White House. Roberts has used notes for every inauguration since.
- 1953 & 1957: “Dwight D. Eisenhower read the line ‘the office of President of the United States’ as ’the office of the President of the United States,’ even as Chief Justices Fred Vinson (in 1953) and Earl Warren (in 1957) said the line correctly.” Maybe I’m assuming too much, but I get a certain gruff “I’m General Eisenhower, I don’t take nonsense, and if it doesn’t sound right to me I’m gonna make it sound right” vibe here, especially because he made the same mistake twice. Or maybe his brain just added the the instinctually. Brains do that, as Nixon’s added an extra and into the series “preserve and protect and defend” (1973).
All of the “mishaps” listed seem like reasonable, if embarrassingly public, mistakes. All except one, which is just inexplicable—
- 1945: Chief Justice Harlan Stone, uh, invented a middle name for Harry S. Truman? Not knowing (as, to be fair, I didn’t know until reading this) that the S. didn’t stand for anything, Stone prompted Truman to say “I, Harry Shipp Truman…” I have so many questions! Why did the Chief not know about the bare initial? Or ask about it? Why did he think it stood for Shipp? How does Wikipedia know that Shipp, this not–real–middle–name, was spelled with two ps??? Truman, with presidential grace and perhaps a bit of extra emphasis, corrected the mistake by repeating “I, Harry S. Truman do solemnly swear…”