Inauguration: Part I - TWW S4E14

 

Original airdate: February 5, 2003

Teleplay by: Aaron Sorkin (76)
Story by: Michael Oates Palmer (2) & William Sind (2)

Directed by: Christopher Misiano (12)

Synopsis

• With Inauguration Day looming, a looming genocide in Africa spurs debate on a massive change in American foreign policy, as well as conflict between the President and the Secretary of Defense. That leads to repercussions for Donna and Jack Reese. 

"Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?"

"I don't know, sir, but it is."

So we're doing this again.

Remember Season 1, when Aaron Sorkin's scripts kept telling us the Bartlet administration was adrift, directionless, unable to get traction on their issues with poll ratings stuck in the mediocre range (despite the fact we saw the White House get major wins on gun control, banking regulation, conservation, the census, etc., etc.)? Remember Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, when the staff and the President joined forces to pay less attention to political/poll considerations and do bold things, decide on what's right and pursue that in the face of cold political calculations?

Yeah, well, Sorkin has gone back to that well several times in the past three years, with the administration seeming to yo-yo from "we can't do that, it's going to cost us votes" to "we've got to step out and lead, even if it costs us votes." Remember 18th And Potomac, when Leo told the staff they'd continue to push their issues in the face of congressional investigations into the President's health? 

Leo: "We're not gonna stop, soften, detour, postpone, circumvent, obfuscate, or trade a single one of our goals to allow for whatever extracurricular nonsense is coming our way in the next few days, weeks, and months."

Remember The Two Bartlets and Hartsfield's Landing, when Toby and the President fought over being safe and folksy in the campaign instead of using his experience and intelligence as a positive? I could go on (in fact, I have gone on about this in past blog posts), but you get the point. Sorkin likes to fall back on the trope of the President being weak, unfocused, unable to move the needle on public approval - only to have an in-depth heart-to-heart over a specific issue or two that turns the tide and energizes the entire administration to forge ahead bravely and boldly, damn the polls. And then a few months later the cycle repeats itself.

So ... here we are. Let me add my opinion here: I think this shows Sorkin is starting to run out of gas. Sure, he's gone to this type of well before, but I just don't see any vigor or inspiration in this storyline. This stretch of episodes is, well, kind of lifeless - again, in my opinion. It's hard to blame Sorkin for this - he's written more than 75 episodes of this show (and counting) over four years, who'd be surprised to see him running out of inspiration - but as I mentioned last time, I believe we're seeing evidence of why he's going to leave the series at the end of this season. He does, in my view, pick up considerable steam to finish out Season 4 in a real run of high-quality, gripping episodes, but we have to slog through some of these to get there.

Enough of my point of view. As Toby and Will work on the President's second inaugural address, nobody is thrilled about the language on foreign policy (with good reason: "America cannot be the world's policeman. America cannot enforce its own values, its own standards across the world" is hardly a stirring call to patriotism and leadership). But, that language has been cleared by the State Department, and changing it will take plenty of coordination. Will is directed to meet with a public affairs bigwig from State to discuss it, which doesn't seem like a great idea to Will:

Toby: "Will, you're going to meet with my counterpart, the State Department Communications Director. He likes to have input into foreign policy language."

Will: "Isn't he going to be insulted that he's meeting with someone he's never heard of, who isn't a White House staffer?"

Toby: "I would really think so."

That meeting doesn't go well ("Apparently, I'm not done with the Baileys"). 

Meanwhile, Will has asked to pull together basically everything President Bartlet has ever said publicly, in order to find the President's "voice" as he writes his part of the inaugural address. Toby is less than thrilled, as the Communications Office fills up with boxes full of documents, but Sorkin plays a nice trick of taking an obvious cliche by Toby and making it happen right in front of him:

Toby: "Will - the idea isn't going to walk in here, announce itself as being important and take a place on the top of the pile."

Will: "I understand."

Staffer (knocks): "Excuse me, Will?" 

Will: "Yeah?"

Staffer (enters with papers): "This is from the Congressional Research Service. It's an old Bartlet speech on foreign policy."

Will: "Why wasn't it in the original?"

Staffer: "It was stricken from the Congressional Record at the President's request. Should I place it here on top of this pile?" 

Okay, that's funny stuff right there, Aaron.

More importantly for the overall course of the administration, though, is a crisis developing in Equatorial Kundu. Members of the governing tribe in that African nation have begun wholesale killing of a rival tribe, and the horror of that developing genocide grows along with the mounting number of casualties - first a few hundred, then five to seven thousand, the next day 15 thousand, then estimates of 25 thousand or more dead. Families taking refuge in churches are hacked to death by machetes. Radio broadcasts direct roving bands to where they can find their victims. It's a horrific story, made even more horrific by the fact that this all really happened in Rwanda in 1994.

President Bartlet isn't blind to the suffering. We've seen his essential moral goodness and quest for perfection many times in the past, and as calls to do something come in from the press and religious leaders, he feels the pull. On the other hand, he knows the options are limited. Humanitarian resources aren't going to stop the killing, and sending American military power into a sovereign nation is dangerously close to invasion - not to mention the public outcry over American lives being put at risk over something that arguably doesn't affect American interests.

Yet the killings hit him hard, as well as some of his staff, and particularly Will. He's already working on sprucing up the milquetoast foreign policy language in the address, and when he encounters a rousing House floor speech given by Rep. Josiah Bartlet 16 years ago (a speech given in reference to American interference in El Salvador, a speech Jed later had stricken from the Congressional Record), he thinks he may have found inspiration for a much more forceful view of using American power and influence:

Will (reading Bartlet's speech): "'America needs a new doctrine for a new century -'"

Toby: "Mr. Bailey ..."

Will: "'-based not just on our interest, but on our values, across the world.'"

Toby: "Define those values for me, please."

Will: "I don't have to. The President of the United States already has. (reading) 'We are for freedom of speech everywhere. Freedom to worship everywhere. Freedom to learn for every child.'"

Obviously making a move in this direction would be establishing a completely new doctrine, a sweeping reversal from "America cannot enforce its own values," and it's a move that would spur widespread opposition not only here at home, but across the world.

But are the issues at play big enough, moral enough, human enough to justify that change? Government-led genocide of an entire tribe in an African nation? The President, hearing talk of Will's energetic promotion of this more forceful policy, surprises him by stopping by his office. He looks over his old speech, referring to it as "spicy stuff," and wonders out loud about what might be stopping him from going that big:

President: "Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?"

Will doesn't let that rhetorical question go by unremarked-on:

Will: "I don't know, sir, but it does."

In the course of considering all the options, Bartlet and Leo decide to get some facts. They want a force depletion report from the Pentagon, an estimate of the losses the American military might take should they be sent into Kundu. The problem, though, is that the Defense Secretary, Miles Hutchinson, has his own strongly held opinions about this kind of operation, and would almost certainly doctor the figures to make any such operation look much more costly than it might actually be. The President decides to go around Hutchinson by using Jack Reese, the naval officer assigned to Nancy McNally at the White House, to work up the report without Hutchinson's knowledge.

He does so, it shows losses would probably be minimal - but then Leo makes the mistake of telling Hutchinson they've seen a report, which leads to an outright argument in the Situation Room, with Leo pretty much calling the Secretary a racist:

Leo: "I said I don't give a damn what your problem is, Miles. The man wants to know if he sends troops, how many are going to die."

Hutchinson: "And if he wants to see force depletion, he asks me."

Leo: "He asks you and three days manage to go by before he sees it, Mr. Secretary. Yet miraculously, the Wall Street Journal, on day two, the numbers inflated all to hell. It's a hundred and fifty, not a thousand."

Hutchinson: "And that's acceptable to you in Kundu?"

Leo: "I don't know what you mean when you say, 'in Kundu.' Nah ... yeah, I do."

Hutchinson: "Go to hell."

Leo, angry with himself over revealing the report, takes it out on a poor glass of water.

Donna (who first met-cute with Reese as she tried to find someone to swap votes with in Election Night, then made the effort to fix his radiator in Process Stories, got Josh to help set them up on a date in Arctic Radar and went away with him on a romantic holiday trip in Holy Night) is excitedly anticipating spending the inaugural festivities with her new beau. She's really looking forward to Jack wearing his dress uniform complete with saber and thirteen buttons on the trousers (causing Josh to remark, "I don't want to know how you know that").

All Donna's excitement over Reese starts to get to Josh. We've known all along Josh and Donna have a special relationship (Janel Moloney said, in an interview, that from the outset she decided to play Donna with the subtext of being hopelessly in love with Josh, but unable to express it outwardly). Josh has his moments - the note he writes in her gift in In Excelsis Deo, the true appreciation of her outfit and appearance in The Portland Trip, the real concern he shows over her story about her car accident and her ex-boyfriend in 17 People - but while his affection and friendship is evident, he also takes Donna for granted, a lot. He also tends to (intentionally or not) undermine her romantic life, as he comes to realize and tries to address in Holy Night.

Back to my opinion here: I think the seven-year arc of the Josh/Donna relationship as it plays out on the series is actually really well done. The chemistry between Moloney and Bradley Whitford is obvious, right from Pilot, and they just are two characters that fit together really, really well. Josh is an ass, most of the time, and Donna may seem a little pathetic in letting him treat her the way he does, but in future seasons that power structure changes, actually a lot, and by the time the arc of these two characters finally resolves it feels right.

But for now ... Josh is still an ass. After Hutchinson learns Reese worked on the force depletion report behind his back, in a fit of pique he immediately reassigns Reese to a base in Italy. Obviously, while a very upset Donna doesn't know why that's happened, she knows it can only be because somebody very important asked him to do something. She goes to Josh to try to find out, and while he also doesn't know the reason, his impulse is to passive-aggressively lash out at her relationship with Jack:

Donna: "He said he was asked to do something for somebody. It can only be Nancy, Leo, or the President."

Josh: "Three doors you definitely want to knock on to complain about your boyfriend being transferred to the Italian Alps."

Donna: "Hey, I'm not Gidget, okay? Something -"

Josh: "Is he complaining?"

Donna: "He doesn't complain."

Josh: "I ask you that because sometimes people request transfers."

Oh, Josh. Insinuating that Reese asked for a transfer to get away from Donna. That is cruel. And it really pisses off Donna, rightly.

There's a couple of other storylines: the President's waffling over which Bible to use for the inauguration, which ends up with him using one from Donnie's Motel, is seen right at the beginning. Upon a bit of reflection, this back-and-forth indecision is a parallel with Bartlet's stalling over doing something in Kundu. Not only is he paralyzed by the various consequences of changing how the United States uses force and how they ought to impose their values worldwide, but he's also paralyzed by what each one of these Bibles he's considering might represent. I completely missed that connection in the first couple of watches (it only sank in later, as I mulled over this blog entry right here), but it's actually really obvious once you connect the dots.

And then there's CJ playing Danny like a fiddle, with her perfume and her blouse and Danny's flusterment over how she'd "have me."

But the big picture here is the role of American power overseas: should it be used only to protect American interests or to actually promote American values, and how does a President go about making such a massive change in the direction of foreign policy and the use of force? We get the outlines of where he's going to go. In the next episode we'll get the wrap-up of how he gets there.

Tales Of Interest!

- Rob Lowe is still seen in the opening credits, although this is the fourth straight episode he hasn't appeared in. 

- Right at the start, we see a title onscreen saying it's Inauguration Day and it's a Sunday. That poses a couple of conflicts with reality. The Constitution (specifically the 20th Amendment) sets the exact time a new presidential term begins as noon on January 20. In 2003 - which is where we are here, we've heard direct references to the presidential election being in 2002, there's no confusion about that - January 20 fell on a Monday, not a Sunday.

Also, in the past, when the official presidential term/inauguration date did fall on a Sunday, the public inauguration events have never been held on that Sunday. In 1957, 1985, and 2013, when January 20 was a Sunday, a private official swearing-in was held that day to satisfy the constitutional requirement. However, the public ceremony and the inaugural address and the parades and the balls were all held on the following Monday.

I really have no idea why Sorkin set this Inauguration Day on a Sunday. There's no obvious story-related reason for it.

- A small continuity error, where they used different takes for parts of the same scene: in the briefing room, when Toby brings up the Chief Justice's opinion written in trochaic tetrameter, he's standing by Will looking at the document while holding a coffee cup. As he brings the papers up to the lectern for the President to see, he's no longer holding it. Until he appears next to Bartlet with, ta-da, the cup in his hand again!

Toby has his coffee.

Now he doesn't.

Now it magically reappears!

- I have an issue with Sorkin portraying the President as ignorant about Equatorial Kundu ("I had to reach for an atlas"). President Bartlet met personally with President Nimbala of Equatorial Kundu in In This White House, who was there to negotiate on the price of AIDS drugs. Bartlet urged Nimbala to stay in the United States when his government fell in a military coup, but he refused, only to be assassinated at the airport upon his return - an event which struck Bartlet deeply. It's hard to believe he would have forgotten about the country in just a couple of years.

- Another little tidbit about the previous line of (fictional) administrations - Assistant Secretary of State Lilly tells Will he's worked under the last three presidents, to which Will responds he's worked for both parties. We already know Bartlet defeated a Republican in 1998, so this does confirm that. Also, we know Leo served as Secretary of Labor under a Democratic president in 1993, so the Republican Bartlet defeated was a one-term President.

- Sorkin's ongoing love of Gilbert and Sullivan gets a shout out with President Bartlet's "Talk about the very model of a modern major general," a quote from HMS Pinafore.

- Bartlet's House floor speech concerning El Salvador is placed at 16 years ago, so around 1987. That fits with the El Salvador civil war, which took place between 1979 and 1992, and had considerable American government involvement.

- Leo's comment about President Bartlet being in office "three years, 51 weeks, and three days" would place the date at Thursday, January 16, 2003 - but as mentioned above, Sorkin is futzing around with the dates here, since January 20 wasn't actually a Sunday in 2003. In fact, according to this script Leo said those words on Wednesday (January 15 in reality), which would place the 1999 inaugural on January 19 as well. Maybe The West Wing universe 20th Amendment puts the inauguration on the 19th? Yeah, no, that's not it ... in Arctic Radar Sam explicitly tells Will the big presidential speech Toby needs help with is going to be given on January 20. Does Sorkin even own a calendar?




Quotes    

(Charlie comes running up to the President, handing him a Bible)

Charlie: "Sir."

President: "Thank you."

(The President opens the Bible, sees the inside front cover)

President: "Donnie's Motel?"

Charlie: "Yes, sir."

President: "They didn't have one in the House library?"

Charlie: "This is the one from the House library." 

-----

Secretary Lilly: "This White House has to be careful about the use of force, it's a hostile Congress."

Will: "Well, personally I'd have no problem using force on Congress, but that's not my call."

-----

Carol: "CJ, Danny wanted to see you for a second."

CJ: "No way."

Carol: "Well ..."

CJ: "Stop trying to get us together, okay? If I wanted Danny, I could have him. And he's still a jackass from the foreign ops vote and many other things, so tell him I'm getting my hair done."

Danny: "Your hair looks great."

CJ (to Carol): "There was no way you could tell me he was right behind me? You couldn't fit that in?"  

-----

Toby: "You really comfortable going through life with a name like Elsie Snuffin?"

Elsie: "I've never been comfortable, but I'm not sure it's because of my name." 

-----

President: "So tell Jeff Tomlinson and Bibby-Bob to take a deep knee bend, would you? I'm just as big a cotton candy ass as they are."

Josh: "Yes, sir."

President (looks up): "You're just going to let that hang in the air?"

Josh: "Of course not, sir. You're a much bigger cotton candy ass than they are."

President: "Damn right." 

Story threads, callbacks, and familiar faces (Hey, it's that guy!)

• Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Bryce Lilly is played by Granville Van Dusen (lots of TV appearances including Soap and Judging Amy, long runs on the daytime dramas Port Charles and The Young And The Restless, the voice of Race Bannon in the 1986 version of Jonny Quest).

• Secretary of Defense Miles Hutchinson appears for the first time, and as a foil for President Bartlet in the Cabinet we're going to see him plenty more in the future. He's played by Steve Ryan (Crime Story, Wiseguy, Oz).

• I've been remiss in not mentioning Thomas Kopache as Assistant Secretary of State Bob Slattery. He's been seen many times in the Situation Room; here he gets a one-on-one with the President in the Oval Office.

• Also, here's Victor McCay as Peter, another recurring Situation Room advisor. He played a significant role in the Haiti crisis seen in Manchester, Parts I and II, and was mentioned as a State Department advisor dealing with the Qumari weapons being delivered to the Ba'hi terrorists in Debate Camp.

• Word of Jack Reese and his reassignment to Italy - leading to Donna's angry reaction - continues the thread of Reese's assignment to the White House and his romantic relationship with Donna. We first saw Reese (played by Christian Slater) in Election Night. While Reese's actions play a big part in this episode and the next, it all happens off-screen. Sorry, Mr. Slater.

• "Mr. Leader" - in Swiss Diplomacy we saw the Senate Minority Leader, Senator Triplehorn, played by Geoff Pierson. This guy is not that guy ... could Leo mean he's the Republican Majority Leader? He's credited as "O'Donnell" although his name is never said. I suppose Leo's short conversation with him doesn't rule out that he could be Republican and not Democrat (although we will see the Senate Majority Leader in Season 5 and it's not this guy, either).

Senate Minority Leader Triplehorn

"Mr. Leader"

• We hear the voice of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court greeting the President before the inauguration. Later on in the episode we discover the Chief Justice is writing opinions in verse, and may be showing elements of mental decline, a storyline which plays out in Season 5. When we eventually see the actor playing the Chief Justice next season, this is not that actor's voice. In fact, I think the voice actor that was used is meant to remind us of Edward James Olmos, who played Roberto Mendoza, President Bartlet's first nominee to the Supreme Court seen in The Short List and Celestial Navigation. Mendoza isn't the Chief Justice, though, and we did not see him among the full Supreme Court at The Red Mass, either.

• In He Shall, From Time To Time ... I noted a misspelling of "welfare rolls" as "welfare roles" on the teleprompter as President Bartlet practiced his State of the Union address in the briefing room. Here's another teleprompter misspelling, of "obliged" as "abliged."

• The fictional nation of Equatorial Kundu played a key part of the plot of In This White House. In that episode we heard of the United States' intelligence contacts in Sudan and Angola, and that the wife of the nation's president fled to Kenya after a military coup. Those facts would place the nation somewhere in central Africa, around Uganda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now we are told Equatorial Kundu is near the Ivory Coast, which is in Eastern Africa and nowhere near Sudan or Kenya.

• Assistant Secretary Lilly makes it a point to say "especially this President" can't write a blank check for foreign policy, a reminder that President Bartlet never served in the military. That was first a plot point in "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" and was also important in Take Out The Trash Day, among other mentions.

• CJ calls Danny a jackass from the foreign ops vote, a storyline seen in Guns Not Butter.

• Will reveals he's on a three-week contract from the DNC, which doesn't really fit in with him getting Toby's offer in Arctic Radar and the obvious fact he was doing the work before Christmas in Holy Night (that's more than three weeks). In Arctic Radar Toby said there was no money involved (except for lodging). Maybe the DNC came up with some funding for Will and Elsie.

• Toby and his bouncing rubber "Spaldeen" returns, first seen in Ellie but made famous in the Season 2 arc including 17 People. It seems to have morphed from being a thinking device for Toby into a summoning device for whoever is working next door.

• Danny and CJ go round and round about the cricket-playing ramp agent from Bermuda who was Danny's source about the Sharif assassination, who was first brought up in Holy Night.

• Charlie talks about Jean-Paul (or, as he mockingly calls him, "Jean-Pierre") and the seating arrangements for the inaugural. Jean-Paul is Zoey's new boyfriend and Charlie's romantic rival, first seen in Holy Night.

• We haven't seen the logo of the fictional news network CND for a while, but here it is with footage of the atrocities in Equatorial Kundu.

• WHAT'S NEXT MOMENT - In the security briefing, President Bartlet moves on from the discussion of the new king of Bhutan with "What's next?" Twice, actually.

DC location shots    

• None.

They Do Exist! It's The Real Person, or Thing    

• Josh calls the President's foreign policy shift the most massive in American history since the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after World War II.

• The George Washington Bible plays a big part. The St. John's Lodge of the Masons in New York indeed does have physical custody of the Bible.

• Josh brings up the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as something the President could take the oath on (technically correct, but probably not a good idea).

• Leo says the President's style of decision-making makes the Prince of Denmark seem reactionary, a reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

• Thomas Jefferson's quote about entangling alliances from his 1801 inaugural address is very real.

• The mass killings of one ethnic group by another in Equatorial Kundu is a direct reference to what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Members of the Tutsi ethnic minority were slaughtered by militias led by the majority Hutus, with estimates of as many as 500,000 to 600,000 slain. The use of radio stations to direct killings, widespread sexual violence, and the killings of those taking refuge in churches, things mentioned in this episode, all took place during the Rwandan genocide.

• CJ calls Mark and Katie "the Smothers Brothers" after their joking questions about the President taking the oath.

• Jonathan Edwards was a famous pastor and theologian. He is known for an outsized Bible, one that was sewn together along with his own notes on each page, but it's not quite the ginormous four-language folio seen here. Also, the President is quoting Edwards when he says to Leo, "Grace is but glory begun and glory is but grace perfected." (Coincidentally, given the connections between Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway hit Hamilton and The West Wing, Edwards was also Aaron Burr's grandfather.)

• Toby calls Will's idea for use of force to correct injustices as "like Mother Teresa with first-strike capabilities."

• The Confederate general Robert E. Lee is mentioned by Hutchinson.

• President Bartlet says the new King of Bhutan is someone old enough to marry Jerry Lee Lewis. Lewis famously married his 13-year-old cousin in 1957.

• Donna says she's not Gidget, the lighthearted surfer girl from the 1960s movies and TV show.

• After Josh tells Charlie Donna is upset because of Jack Reese's transfer, Charlie says, "I've got my own Beach Boys song going."

• Those Starbucks cups keep sneaking in. You can see there's an effort to use generic coffee cups more and more, but the real-world corporate cups still make their occasional appearances. (Toby is seen with those Starbucks cups quite a bit.)

End credits freeze frame: The President having the inaugural balls discussion with Ed and Larry.

Previous episode: The Long Goodbye

Next episode: Inauguration: Over There