President Bush’s inauguration ceremony down in Washington on Thursday was conducted in unusually frigid temperatures. But things were downright balmy in comparison with a different kind of chill that pervaded the place when retired Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (you can call me “Ike”) took over the reins of presidential power from the plain-speaking Harry S. Truman on Jan. 20, 1953.

Old-timers will re-call that Republican Eisenhower – irked by Democrat Truman’s characterization of Ike’s November 1952 trip to Korea seeking an end to the Korean War as grandstanding – had appeared to go out of his way to irritate Truman.

It hadn’t helped that Truman had also called Eisenhower a coward for allegedly backing away from a plan to castigate Mr. Loose-Cannon Communist Witch-Hunt Guy, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, in a speech Ike had delivered in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin.

Newspapers reported Ike as having wondered aloud “if I can stand sitting next to that guy” at the ceremonies. Things went downhill from there, and not just because of Ike’s shaky syntax. When Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, pulled up at the White House in their limo and honked the horn to pick up ol’ Harry and Bess for the short ride to the Capitol, the Eisenhowers refused Truman’s invitation to come in for coffee, waiting in the car until Truman came out.

I doubt that many citizens can recall Ike’s inaugural speech. But I’d bet they might remember that he had decided to wear a homburg style hat, rather than the top hat often worn on such high occasions in those days. And that, rather than brawl over hats, Truman eased the tension by announcing he had ordered Eisenhower’s son, John, an Army officer, home from Korea for his father’s inauguration.

As for Bush’s second inaugural speech on Thursday, in the days leading up to the Washington ceremonies advice was rampant among pundits as to how the president should handle the job.

His should be a visionary speech, heavy on poetic generalities and light on specifics, some said. Short sentences, grandiose alliteration and lofty rhetoric to knock your socks off. Well, perhaps, said others. But George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy, and he shouldn’t try to copy the cadence and tone of JFK’s 1961 “ask-not” spellbinder that electrified the nation.

He should get straight to the point, because he’s a plain-speaking guy, counseled other talking heads. Throw out a few lines about freedom, brotherhood, determination in the face of adversity, and liberty and justice for all. Then exit, stage right, leaving them wanting more. On and on droned the late-night cable television shout-show blatherers.

It served only to remind me of the immortal H.L. Mencken’s caustic take on President Warren G. Harding’s 1921 inauguration speech. (Yes. Him again. My contract stipulates that once a year I get to indulge my obsession for quoting the late Baltimore Sun columnist, presuming your gracious forbearance. This is it.)

Consider this passage, which comes from “The Impossible H.L. Mencken,” a collection of Mencken columns published by Doubleday in 1991, and tell me you haven’t heard your fair share of political speeches based on the alleged Harding approach.

“When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think it out in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand.

“That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed primarily to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters…”

But even though the rubes can’t understand many of the big words, “the roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them. They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery. Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust… If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning…”

Read the inaugural address and it will gag you, Mencken cautioned.

“But roared from an actual stump, with arms flying and eyes flashing and the old flag overhead, it is certainly and brilliantly effective…”

I’d say The Great One pretty much nailed the formula for a good inaugural speech right there, although I suppose it would take the right sort of audience to appreciate the resulting masterpiece.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net