Comparing Obama to Previous Mourners in Chief

WASHINGTON (Nov. 11) -- When Barack Obama made his debut as consoler in chief during a service for shooting victims at Fort Hood, Texas, he joined a long line of presidents who have sought through words to salvage something, anything from the depths of national tragedy.

"Every evening that the sun sets on a tranquil town; every dawn that a flag is unfurled; every moment that an American enjoys life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- that is their legacy," Obama said in eloquent words that echoed the cadences of the migrant worker Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's classic "The Grapes of Wrath."

About a year into his presidency, Obama has had fortunately few tragedies that called for the kind of soaring rhetoric that helped get him elected. Other than his eulogy at Sen. Edward Kennedy's funeral this summer, his only other role as chief mourner was played in silence as he stood at attention in the predawn darkness of Dover Air Force Base to salute the flag-draped remains of 18 Americans who died in Afghanistan.


The Fort Hood speech "was the first time in which President Obama needed to act as national priest, as the person who would speak for the nation at a difficult time," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews on the speech were mixed.

The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog declared it "largely unemotional" and pointed out that the president did not touch on the stress of repeat deployments and the shortage of mental health workers that may have contributed to Nidal Hasan's shooting rampage.

John Dickerson of Slate called it "a small masterpiece" that focused on the 13 people who died and played up Obama's strength as a storyteller.

Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic pronounced it the "best speech Obama has given since ... maybe ever" and predicted it would some day be taught in rhetoric classes.

That, however, may be a bit premature. "This was not one that called for greatness," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution. "It wasn't a response to a great act but to a small-scale horror. There's a possibility of inappropriateness of going too high on the mountain rhetorically."

As troubling as the Fort Hood incident was, it pales next to other devastating tragedies that prompted elegiac oratory:

• Ronald Reagan words after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.' "

• Bill Clinton's sermon-like address after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995: "Today our nation joins with you in grief. We mourn with you. We share your hope against hope that some may still survive."

• George W. Bush rallying the nation with a bullhorn atop the rubble at ground zero in New York soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Earlier in the day, he spoke more quietly at a prayer service at Washington's National Cathedral: "We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation's sorrow."

"He was hardly an eloquent man but his speech at the National Cathedral was really quite superb," Hess said. Along with the rally at the World Trade Center and an address to Congress, Bush achieved "a trinity of events that made him so very effective for 9/11."

Bush would later want to forget his words after Hurricane Katrina.

Ironically, presidents weren't always expected to take center stage after major disasters.

As Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell write in "Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words," few expected speechifying from the nation's chief executive until relatively recently. Ulysses Grant did not make a major speech after the great Chicago fire of 1871. Theodore Roosevelt skipped the bully pulpit and instead sent a telegram to the governor of California when he heard about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

A different response was required in an era when the world watched the Challenger blow up in real time and the World Trade Center towers collapse. "When a death-dealing catastrophe occurs and is experienced almost simultaneously via television by the citizenry, the people turn to the president as the leader able to speak for and to them," write Jamieson and Campbell.

They also turn to the president for answers. Reagan's immortal words about the Challenger couldn't hide the fatal flaws in its design. Bush's rhetoric of comfort and determination couldn't erase questions about intelligence failures that might have allowed the 9/11 attack. And even as Obama spoke Tuesday, cable TV pundits speculated about emerging evidence that Hasan was linked to an Islamist militant and questioned the judgment of military leaders who may have looked the other way.

But the Fort Hood ceremony was neither the time nor place to raise such concerns, said Thomas Benson, who teaches rhetoric at Penn State University. While some "hovered in the wings, in the press asking did somebody make a mistake?" Obama spoke with "a kind of sternness" fitting for a commander-in-chief addressing his troops on the nation's largest military base.

"We didn't want a weepy president at that occasion," Benson said.

Indeed, Benson said Obama's closing words -- "So we say goodbye to those who now belong to eternity. We press ahead in pursuit of the peace that guided their service. May God bless the memory of those that we have lost. And may God bless the United States of America" -- may have taken a cue from an earlier president.

"There was a rule adopted by Dwight Eisenhower," Benson said. "The president always is required to be an optimist, even in the face of disaster."