David Maraniss: In taking the oath of office as the first African American president in the nation’s nearly 233 years, one man reached a singular achievement. But at four minutes after noon yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama was inevitably transformed — no matter what happens during his administration — from an individual, a politician, to an icon and a symbol. Here was history at its most sweeping and yet intimate.
Wil Haygood: Eugene Allen, who worked for more than three decades as a White House butler — some of those years during an era of brutal segregation when he often had to use back doors despite his employer’s rarefied address — sat in the shadow of the Capitol dome yesterday and watched Barack Obama become the first African American president of the United States.
Henry Allen: Then President Barack Obama stepped to the lectern, surveyed the uncountable crowd, and delivered his Inaugural Address, his clear, insistent, youthful voice that somehow has the lifting quality of an airplane taking off, winging west toward the Lincoln Memorial and across the country.
Seen from the Mall, from bleachers, from a distant seat in a winter tree, he was just another in a long history of tiny humans up there, bustling around against the shoulder-y bulk of the Capitol.
Jumbo screens relayed his image to the crowd — images rule now, wisdom has it — and Obama once more had a smooth, cool, minimalist one. But people had come, in a way they haven’t come in a while, not just to see him but to hear him, to listen to his words, to compare his speech with the other speeches that have enthralled audiences since his campaign began.
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