Monday, September 05, 2011

Swearing in



On Saturday night’s Archive on 4 Helen O'Donnell introduced tapes that her father Kenneth O'Donnell made with Sander Vanocur, White House correspondent for NBC News in the 1960s. O'Donnell had been best friend to Bobby Kennedy from Harvard, & was John F Kennedy’s Special Assistant in the White House, with responsibility, among other things, for the President’s security.

Not a man to seek the limelight, but the tapes gave us a very good idea of what it is like to be a dedicated assistant in the hard graft of politics.

I was particularly struck by the story of the ‘escape’ from Dallas in aftermath of Kennedy assassination – O’Donell considered it vital to get away to Washington with Jackie & the body even though this was illegal & Dallas police could stop them removing the body if they found out in time.

LBJ was also on Air Force1 & for some reason considered it vital to be sworn in before the plane took off.

O’Donnell was upset by the delay, which he thought completely unnecessary since LBJ was President whether sworn or not. He was even more upset that LBJ wanted Jackie to be by his side in such emotionally fraught circumstances & by the ratcheting up of anxiety over the Dallas police.

The idea that LBJ, sworn or unsworn, was indubitably President makes an interesting contrast with the anxiety which was caused by Obama’s slight fluffing of his lines, & the later re-swearing in private.

It is strange that we still have this semi-mystical attachment to the swearing of oaths. In the C19th Judge John Mellor was preoccupied with this, the subject of his maiden speech in parliament (when the issue was the admission of Jews), & of a pamphlet which he wrote near the end of his life when the issue was whether an atheist could be an MP. The question of the usefulness, or otherwise, of oaths sworn in a court of especially perplexed him after the Tichborne trial. Even earlier, as a relatively junior barrister in Leicester, he had come to the defence of a juror who, having refused to take the oath on scriptural grounds, had been imprisoned overnight.

And yet there will still be disappointment whenever government fails to respond to calls for judge-led public enquiries where witnesses will be under oath, & we live in an age where many think that a ‘piece of paper’ & the public vows of commitment are unnecessary for proper lifelong commitment to a partner, while others, not eligible to be married under our laws, press for that right & yet others think it unfair that they are denied the half-way house of civil partnership.



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