Oath of Office pt 3

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Oath mishaps, (or, Close enough for Government Work).


In 1909, when President William Howard Taft was sworn in, Chief Justice Melville Fuller misquoted the oath, but the error was not publicized at the time.


The mistake was similar to the one Taft himself would make twenty years later when swearing in President Hoover. Recalling the incident, Taft wrote, "When I was sworn in as president by Chief Justice Fuller, he made a similar slip," and added, "but in those days when there was no radio, it was observed only in the Senate chamber where I took the oath."


In 1929, Taft, later the Chief Justice, garbled the oath when he swore in President Herbert Hoover using the words "preserve, maintain, and defend the Constitution", instead of "preserve, protect, and defend". The error was picked up by schoolgirl Helen Terwilliger on the radio. Taft eventually acknowledged his error, but did not think it was important, and Hoover did not retake the oath. In Taft's view, his departure from the text did not invalidate the oath.


In 1945, President Harry S. Truman's bare initial caused an unusual slip when he first became president and took the oath. At a meeting in the Cabinet Room, Chief Justice Harlan Stone, apparently mistaken about the meaning of Truman's middle initial (which is not an abbreviation but rather the whole middle name in itself), began reading the oath by saying "I, Harry Shipp Truman...", Truman responded: "I, Harry S Truman,..."


In both his 1953 and 1957 inaugurations, 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.
In 1965, Chief Justice Earl Warren prompted Lyndon Johnson to say, "the Office of the Presidency of the United States".


In 1973, President Richard Nixon added the word "and" between "preserve" and "protect", resulting in "preserve and protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Nixon had recited the line correctly during his first inauguration.


In 2009, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, while administering the oath to Barack Obama, incorrectly recited part of the oath. Roberts prompted, "That I will execute the Office of President to the United States faithfully." Obama stopped at "execute," and waited for Roberts to correct himself. Roberts, after a false start, then followed Obama's "execute" with "faithfully", which results in "execute faithfully," which is also incorrect. Obama then repeated Roberts' initial, incorrect prompt, with the word "faithfully" after "United States." The oath was re-administered the next day by Roberts at the White House.

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Since the office of President of the United States came into existence in 1789 there have been 58 public swearing-in ceremonies to mark the commencement of a new four-year presidential term, plus an additional nine marking the start of a partial presidential term following the intra-term death or resignation of an incumbent president.


With the 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump, the presidential oath has been taken 75 different times by 44 persons.

This numerical discrepancy results chiefly from two factors: a president must take the oath at the beginning of each term of office, and, because Inauguration Day has sometimes fallen on a Sunday, five presidents have taken the oath privately before the public inauguration ceremony.


In addition, three have repeated the oath as a precaution against potential later constitutional challenges

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