KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Tomorrow, President Obama will enter a pretty exclusive club. He'll be one of the few American presidents to give a State of the Union speech to close out two full terms in the White House. It's kind of like the beginning of a president's farewell tour. And according to NPR senior Washington editor and correspondent Ron Elving, only five other presidents have done this. Ron, really only five other presidents - that seems low.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: It does, indeed. But for much of our history, the State of the Union was actually a written report that was sent to Capitol Hill by the president. Now, the very first president, George Washington, did do it in person, including at the start of his final year in office, 1796. But not long after that, the idea of delivering it as a speech went out of fashion until Woodrow Wilson. And Woodrow Wilson did not give one in his eighth year because he had had a stroke.
MCEVERS: Well, OK. So what about FDR, though? I mean, he must have given a lot of State of the Union addresses, right?
ELVING: Yes, but by the time he got to his eighth year, he was running for a third term, which he would win, and he subsequently died in office. So we jumped to Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. By then, the two-term limit had become part of the constitution, so when he gives the speech, Eisenhower knows he's leaving.
MCEVERS: And that's 56 years ago. What kinds of things was he talking about?
ELVING: This was the era of the backyard bomb shelter and schoolchildren learning to duck and cover beneath their desks at school. It was a time when nuclear war seemed to be kind of a 50-50 kind of proposition and every crisis threatened to end the world as we knew it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DWIGHT EISENHOWER: With both sections of this divided world in possession of unbelievably destructive weapons, mankind approaches a state where mutual annihilation becomes a possibility. No other fact of today's world equals this in importance.
ELVING: You know, many people remember the 1950s as a happy time, right? But it was also the time of confrontation with the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
MCEVERS: And the next president on the list is Ronald Reagan, and he used his final speech as a way to talk about all the good things his administration was doing, right?
ELVING: Yes. He really gave the State of the Union the air of a victory lap. Here he is in January of 1988.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RONALD REAGAN: And as we've worked together to bring down spending, tax rates and inflation, employment has climbed to record heights; America has created more jobs and better higher-paying jobs; family income has risen for four straight years, and America's poor climbed out of poverty at the fastest rate in more than 10 years.
(APPLAUSE)
MCEVERS: OK. You got two more presidents on the list - Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Tell us about those speeches.
ELVING: Clinton and the second Bush got to give State of the Union speeches to begin their eighth year in office. Here's Bill Clinton in January of the year 2000.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL CLINTON: Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.
MCEVERS: Wow.
ELVING: Yeah, yeah. That was the peace and prosperity speech.
MCEVERS: Yeah.
ELVING: And eight years later, George W. Bush would spend much of his speech wrestling with the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and trying to emphasize the positive.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GEORGE W. BUSH: In the coming year, we will work with Iraqi leaders as they build on the progress they're making toward political reconciliation. At the local level, Sunnis, Shia and Kurds are beginning to come together to reclaim their communities and rebuild their lives.
MCEVERS: Wow. Listening to this one, it does feel like a long time ago considering what's happening in Iraq now. I mean, looking forward to Obama's speech, I guess the question is, what are all these presidents trying to accomplish in these final speeches?
ELVING: There is a common theme in what they have written and said - a shared note, if you will. It sounds like the powerful coming to realize their power is passing and that their legacy will be determined by events and people largely beyond their control.
MCEVERS: That's NPR's Ron Elving. Ron, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Kelly.