Angie Alvarado
CNHI News Service
January 13, 2009 03:03 pm
—
PALESTINE, Texas -- Elizabeth S. Hutchinson sat in the audience in 1961 as a 43-year-old Senator from Massachusetts took the presidential oath. She heard John F. Kennedy admonish his fellow Americans to "ask not what you country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
Eight years later she watched at the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol when former Vice President Richard Nixon took the oath and described America's pursuit of peace as a "summons to greatness."
She heard Lyndon B. Johnson talk about the Great Society in 1965 and Ronald Reagan pledge to make government work in 1980. She witnessed the oaths sworn by Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush.
Despite recent cancer treatments, Hutchinson, 88, plans to witness Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20, when he becomes the country's 44th president and the first African-American to hold the office.
Fact is, she would be there even if November's election had gone the other way, sending Obama's opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain, to the White House.
"I didn't care who won," she said. "I just wanted to attend the inauguration. I don’t want to break my streak since 1952.”
That was the year Eisenhower, a Texan and five-star general who commanded the Allied forces in Europe, was elected to the White House as a Republican. Hutchinson was a Democrat. It didn't matter.
"All of us Democrats were for Eisenhower," she said. "We were Eisenhower Democrats."
The same year Texas elected Democrat Price Daniel to the U.S. Senate. Hutchinson's husband, Everett, had managed the campaign for Daniel, who would later be elected the state's governor.
So Hutchinson was at the inauguration in January 1953, when Eisenhower took the oath of office then told Americans, "We must be ready to dare all for our country, for history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." It was the most memorable of them all, she said.
Two years later, in 1955, the Hutchinsons moved to Washington after Eisenhower appointed her husband to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Everett Hutchinson later worked in Washington as a transportation lawyer. In 1967, after Congress established the Department of Transportation, President Johnson appointed him to its number-two position.
Hutchinson remembers all 13 inaugurals since that first one - Including the weather.
“I remember sitting out there in that cold weather,” she said. “During Reagan’s I think it was snowing.”
That was 1985, the year a snowstorm forced Reagan to give his second inaugural address inside the Capitol.
This time around Hutchinson will be watching the presidential oath with her daughter, Ann Hutchinson Slattery, of Bethesda, Md.
The 47-year-old Senator from Illinois taking the oath has a tough job ahead of him, Hutchinson said.
“He doesn’t want to let the American people down. He’s going to do everything he can to get this country back on track," she said. "I think the Republicans will help him. We’ve all got to help our country.”
Angie Alvarado writes for The Palestine (Texas) Herald.
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