U.S. President Joe Biden waits to speak about foreign policy at the State Department in Washington, on Jan. 13.Susan Walsh/The Associated Press
Joe Biden will undertake one of the most difficult – and perhaps one of the most historically significant – tasks of his dwindling presidency on Wednesday night. Following a tradition begun in the earliest days of the American republic and then revived by more recent presidents, he will issue a farewell address.
Mr. Biden’s farewell is, of course, not entirely of his own volition. He was forced out of his re-election campaign against Donald Trump after his disastrous performance in the June 27 debate. He did not expect to be saying goodbye to the presidency, to public life and to the country for another four years. When he departs from the White House, he will be drawing the curtain on a half-century of involvement in national politics.
The two most famous and historically significant farewell addresses were issued by chief executives departing after two successful terms: George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower. Mr. Biden’s seven predecessors all gave their own valedictory speeches.
Even Mr. Trump, 13 days after his supporters stormed the Capitol in support of his stated belief that he had won the 2020 election, issued a farewell, saying, presciently, in a videotaped message from the Blue Room, “I go from this majestic place with a loyal and joyful heart, an optimistic spirit and a supreme confidence that for our country and for our children, the best is yet to come.”
Mr. Trump’s confidence has been redeemed, for he is less than a week from being only the second president to return to power after having been defeated.
Mr. Biden’s style is formal, so it is not likely that his farewell will be personal and sentimental, though the 46th president, who entered office speaking of bipartisanship, likely will join the first president in warning, as Washington did, “in the most solemn manner against the artful effects of the spirit of party, generally.” He may also echo Washington by issuing, in a final swipe at Mr. Trump, another caution: “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Washington began thinking about a farewell address five years before he actually needed one. James Madison, considered the “father of the Constitution,” had set down some thoughts for him in 1792, when his first term was nearly completed. In the end, Washington won another election, but the notion lingered of sharing some ideas with the new country he had helped establish.
So 10 months before he finally departed the presidency, Washington began drafting his speech anew, with an entirely different message – one reflecting growing partisanship and continuing foreign-policy challenges. Shaped as an open letter to the American people and published in the American Daily Advertiser of Philadelphia, his remarks consisted of, as the historian Felix Gilbert wrote in his 1961 book To the Farewell Address, “a number of different, only loosely collected thoughts.”
Washington’s address is popularly remembered primarily for admonishing the U.S. to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” – a view embraced by Mr. Trump (who has questioned the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and endangered generations-long relations with Canada), but not supported by Mr. Biden.
With Mr. Trump – who made 30,573 false or misleading statements as president, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker – about to return to power, Mr. Biden also might echo the first farewell address by reminding Americans that, as Washington said, “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is the best policy.”
None of the five presidents after Washington issued an official farewell, but Andrew Jackson did in 1837. The ritual was then abandoned until Harry Truman took it up in 1953. With Eisenhower, a Republican, about to take office, the Democrat told the people: “The president is president of the whole country. We must give him our support as citizens of the United States. He will have mine, and I want you to give him yours.”
After Washington’s, Eisenhower’s is regarded as the most significant. In that address, the Second World War general and commander of the D-Day invasion of Europe warned: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
Past farewell addresses provide Mr. Biden with ample formats and points of departure. But perhaps his remarks will most closely resemble those of Jackson, whose portrait Mr. Trump placed in the Oval Office in his first week as president.
“My public life has been a long one,” Jackson wrote, “and I can not hope that it has at all times been free from errors; but I have the consolation of knowing that if mistakes have been committed they have not seriously injured the country I so anxiously endeavoured to serve, and at the moment when I surrender my last public trust I leave this great people prosperous and happy, in the full enjoyment of liberty and peace, and honoured and respected by every nation of the world.”
