Of all the people you might expect to know the presidential oath of office, the Chief Justice of the United States should be pretty high on the list. If that Chief Justice also happens to be a former president who has already administered the oath to another president, you would think you could safely entrust him with the ceremony without worrying about a constitutional mishap.

On March 4, 1929, William Howard Taft demonstrated that even the most impressive résumé is no guarantee against embarrassing yourself in public.

Fortunately, thirteen-year-old Helen Terwilliger was listening. She knew something was wrong, and she wasn’t about to let a little thing like the Chief Justice of the United States tell her otherwise.

A History Lesson That Turned Into a Constitutional Controversy

Helen Terwilliger was an eighth-grade student at the public school in Walden, New York, a small village in the Hudson Valley. On March 4, 1929, her American history class was listening to something rather more exciting than the usual discussion of the Missouri Compromise or the economic consequences of the Erie Canal.

Herbert Hoover was about to become the thirty-first president of the United States, and thanks to the relatively new wonders of radio broadcasting, students could listen to the inauguration without having to travel to Washington, D.C., put on uncomfortable formal clothing, or stand outside in the rain.

Helen had memorized the presidential oath of office, which turned out to be a particularly useful bit of knowledge that afternoon. This wasn’t an especially demanding feat of memorization, considering that the oath consists of only thirty-five words. It is considerably shorter than the Gettysburg Address and requires rather less memorization than the periodic table. Still, while most people could reasonably be expected to forget a word or two, Helen had learned the oath well enough to recognize when someone else got it wrong. Unfortunately for William Howard Taft, she was about to put that knowledge to use.

What nobody expected was that the assignment would prepare one of those students to correct a former president and sitting Supreme Court Chief Justice.

As Helen listened to the broadcast, Taft began administering the oath to Hoover. Everything seemed to be proceeding normally until the Chief Justice reached the final portion, where the president promises to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

Except that wasn’t what Taft said.

Helen recognized the mistake immediately. She knew the proper wording, and she was fairly certain that the man conducting the ceremony had just departed from it. This presented an awkward situation, because when a thirteen-year-old disagrees with the Chief Justice of the United States about constitutional language, the general assumption is that the thirteen-year-old should probably check her homework.

Helen had already done her homework. The Chief Justice, as it turned out, could have used a little additional study time.

William Howard Taft: A Man Who Really Should Have Known Better

William Howard Taft was not exactly an inexperienced public official who had been pressed into service because everybody else was busy.

Before becoming Chief Justice, he had served as solicitor general of the United States, a federal appellate judge, civilian governor of the Philippines, secretary of war, and president of the United States from 1909 to 1913. After leaving the White House, he taught constitutional law at Yale University. President Warren G. Harding appointed him Chief Justice in 1921.

Taft remains the only person in American history to have served as both president and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Either job would ordinarily be enough to secure a place in the history books, but Taft apparently preferred to avoid the inconvenience of choosing between the executive and judicial branches.

Interestingly, the Supreme Court had always been his greater ambition. Taft wanted to be Chief Justice even more than he wanted to be president, which probably made him one of the few people who regarded moving out of the White House as a promotion.

He also had experience administering presidential oaths. In 1925, he had sworn Calvin Coolidge into office, becoming the first former president to administer the oath to another president. Four years later, Hoover’s inauguration would be his second opportunity.

That meant Taft had personally taken the oath once, administered it once, spent years teaching constitutional law, and served nearly eight years as the nation’s highest-ranking judge. By any reasonable standard, he was spectacularly qualified to repeat thirty-five words.

As qualifications go, however, his were about to prove less useful than Helen Terwilliger’s eighth-grade education.

Thirty-Five Words That Are Actually Written Down Somewhere

Unlike most ceremonial traditions surrounding presidential inaugurations, the oath is specifically prescribed by the Constitution. Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 provides the exact language the incoming president must swear or affirm before executing the duties of the office.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That’s it. Thirty-five words, assuming the president chooses to swear rather than affirm. There are longer instructions on some bottles of shampoo.

The Constitution doesn’t specify who must administer the oath, whether a Bible must be used, or whether the president should conclude with “So help me God.” Those elements developed through tradition, with varying degrees of historical consistency. The Constitution does, however, specify the actual words, which seems like a fairly reasonable place to begin.

Preserve. Protect. Defend.

Three distinct verbs, carefully arranged in that order. No optional substitutions, no editorial improvements, and no provision allowing the Chief Justice to consult a thesaurus if one of the words temporarily escapes him.

Taft Had Even Written Himself a Plan

The truly wonderful thing about Taft’s mistake is that it wasn’t caused by a lack of preparation. Three days before the inauguration, on March 1, 1929, he sent Hoover a detailed letter explaining how the swearing-in ceremony would work.

The letter described where the two men would stand, how the oath would be delivered, what Hoover should say in response, and how the Bible would be handled. Taft wanted to eliminate any uncertainty so that, as he put it, “you and I shall know what we are to do.”

This was perfectly sensible. Presidential inaugurations involve enough moving parts without the incoming president and Chief Justice having to improvise the central constitutional requirement. The president-elect should know where to stand, when to speak, and what to do with his hands. Ideally, the Chief Justice should know what to say.

It’s rather like sending everyone a detailed agenda for a meeting, explaining exactly how the proceedings will unfold, and then being the only person who forgets why the meeting was called.

Hoover, for his part, had every reason to believe he was in capable hands.

Inauguration Day: Rain, Radio, and a Missing Word

Hoover’s inauguration took place on the East Portico of the United States Capitol. At that time, presidential terms began on March 4 rather than January 20, a change that would not take effect until after the ratification of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933.

The weather was miserable. Heavy rain began shortly before the oath, and the enormous crowds surrounding the Capitol made it difficult for anyone to escape the downpour. According to the official account of Hoover’s inauguration, the temperature hovered around 48 degrees, and Hoover was thoroughly soaked by the time he completed his inaugural address.

His family Bible was opened to Proverbs 29:18, traditionally translated as “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It was an appropriate passage for a new president preparing to assume responsibility for the nation’s future. One might argue that a passage emphasizing the importance of accurate transcription would have been more helpful to the man administering the oath.

Taft stood before Hoover and began the ceremony. When he reached the familiar constitutional promise, however, he substituted “maintain” for “protect.”

Instead of asking Hoover to promise to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, Taft instructed him to “preserve, maintain and defend” it.

Hoover replied, “I do,” and the ceremony continued. There was no emergency meeting of the Supreme Court, no frantic search for a replacement Chief Justice, and no indication that the assembled dignitaries considered the mistake significant enough to interrupt the inauguration.

Hoover delivered his address, speaking confidently about American prosperity and the country’s promising future. Less than eight months later, the stock market would crash, launching one of the darkest chapters in American economic history. The new president had plenty of difficulties ahead, and the Chief Justice’s choice of verbs wasn’t even going to make the list.

But back in Walden, New York, Helen Terwilliger had noticed.

Dear Mr. Chief Justice, You Got It Wrong

Helen didn’t merely recognize Taft’s mistake and return to her schoolwork. She decided to write him a letter.

There is something rather admirable about a thirteen-year-old who considers correcting the Chief Justice a reasonable use of her afternoon. Most students that age might hesitate to challenge their history teacher, particularly if the disagreement involved something they were supposed to have memorized. Helen was prepared to take her complaint directly to the highest judicial authority in the country.

She wrote politely, explaining that Taft had used the wrong wording during Hoover’s inauguration. The Constitution required “preserve, protect and defend,” but she had heard him say “preserve, maintain and defend.”

The letter wasn’t an accusation of constitutional sabotage. Helen wasn’t demanding impeachment proceedings or insisting that Hoover be removed from the White House until somebody could locate a Chief Justice capable of reading aloud.

She was simply pointing out an error.

And Taft responded. Considering his position and responsibilities, that was a gracious gesture. He could easily have ignored the letter or sent a form response thanking her for her interest in constitutional government. Instead, he took the time to answer the young student’s criticism personally.

He acknowledged that he had departed from the constitutional text and explained that he did not believe the error invalidated Hoover’s oath. Had he stopped there, the correspondence might have become an agreeable little story about a distinguished public servant accepting correction from a schoolgirl.

Unfortunately for Taft, he wasn’t finished.

Taft Was Wrong, But Not the Way Helen Said He Was Wrong

In his reply, Taft insisted that Helen had misunderstood exactly what he had said.

He acknowledged making a mistake but maintained that his actual wording had been “preserve, maintain and protect,” not “preserve, maintain and defend.”

This created a rather peculiar disagreement. Taft agreed with Helen that he had misquoted the Constitution. He simply disputed her account of how he had misquoted it.

Helen said he had replaced “protect” with “maintain.” Taft claimed he had replaced “protect” with “maintain” and then replaced “defend” with “protect.” Under his version, he had actually committed a more elaborate error than the one Helen was attributing to him.

One doesn’t ordinarily expect someone to respond to an accusation of making a mistake by insisting that the mistake was substantially worse.

Taft wrote, “You are mistaken in your report of what I did say,” and attributed the variation to “the defect of an old man’s memory.”

At seventy-one, Taft was willing to acknowledge that his memory wasn’t quite what it used to be. What he wasn’t willing to concede was that Helen’s recollection of the event might be more accurate than his own.

The irony would have been difficult to improve upon. Here was the Chief Justice of the United States, a former president who had taught constitutional law at Yale, explaining to an eighth grader that she had incorrectly remembered the mistake he admitted making.

Helen remained unconvinced. She knew what she had heard, and she wasn’t prepared to change her account simply because the man contradicting her happened to occupy the most prestigious judicial office in America.

Fortunately, 1929 had something that 1909 hadn’t.

When the Newsreels Became the Ultimate Fact-Checkers

Radio had already changed the way Americans experienced major events. Rather than waiting for newspapers to describe what a politician had said, listeners could hear the words themselves, often as they were spoken.

Of course, that didn’t mean people always believed what they heard for the right reasons. Just three years earlier, a British priest named Ronald Knox had demonstrated radio’s extraordinary influence by broadcasting a fictional revolution that supposedly destroyed Big Ben and Parliament. As explored in our account of the 1926 BBC radio hoax that terrified listeners, the new medium could cause considerable confusion when reality and performance became difficult to distinguish.

But radio could also expose mistakes that would once have escaped public notice.

Even more importantly, motion picture technology had recently made another major advance. Sound newsreels now allowed film companies to capture not merely images of important events but also the actual words spoken by the people appearing in them.

Hoover’s inauguration was the first presidential inauguration recorded by talking newsreel cameras, a distinction that suddenly became rather inconvenient for William Howard Taft.

Fox Film, Pathé News, and Paramount News had recorded the proceedings. Their footage offered a way to settle the disagreement without relying on either Helen’s memory or Taft’s considerably more distinguished recollections.

The companies went back to their recordings and examined the critical portion of the ceremony. In effect, the former president and current Chief Justice was about to undergo the first presidential-oath fact-check conducted with the assistance of talking pictures.

There was no need for a hearing, expert witnesses, or complicated legal arguments. The evidence consisted of a recording of the Chief Justice speaking into a microphone.

And the recording was not particularly sympathetic to his position.

The Verdict: Eighth Grader 1, Chief Justice 0

The sound recordings confirmed that Helen had been right all along.

Taft had said “preserve, maintain and defend,” exactly as she had reported. He had not said “preserve, maintain and protect,” as he insisted in his letter.

That meant the Chief Justice had made two separate errors. First, he had incorrectly administered the presidential oath. Then, when a thirteen-year-old student pointed out his mistake, he had incorrectly remembered the incorrect wording.

It was an impressive performance, particularly for a man who had written detailed instructions three days earlier specifically to prevent confusion during the ceremony.

The story attracted national attention. In its March 25, 1929, issue, TIME described the controversy and the newsreel verdict, reporting that the films had vindicated Helen. Taft reportedly took the result with good humor and continued to regard the original mistake as unimportant.

That was a reasonable position. The substitution hadn’t changed Hoover’s understanding of his responsibilities, and there was no serious constitutional crisis arising from the ceremony.

Still, the episode had produced something rather unusual: a middle-school student had publicly corrected the Chief Justice, refused to accept his competing explanation, and ultimately been proven right by independent evidence.

For someone hoping eventually to become a high-school teacher, Helen was off to a promising start.

Taft Had Heard This One Before—or So He Remembered

Taft’s correspondence with Helen included another interesting claim. He recalled that Chief Justice Melville Fuller had made a similar mistake when administering the oath to him twenty years earlier, in 1909.

That inauguration was already memorable for entirely different reasons. A massive snowstorm had struck Washington, forcing officials to abandon the traditional outdoor ceremony and conduct the swearing-in inside the Senate Chamber. Approximately ten inches of snow fell, and the city deployed thousands of workers and hundreds of wagons to clear the parade route.

The 1909 inaugural record describes a capital city struggling with blocked streets, stranded trains, and thoroughly miserable weather. Under those circumstances, the occasional verbal stumble would have been understandable.

Taft remembered Fuller making an error, but unlike the 1929 ceremony, there was no sound recording available to confirm precisely what had happened. His account therefore remains a recollection rather than an independently verified transcript.

And considering Taft’s recently demonstrated difficulty remembering exactly what he himself had said, historians should probably resist treating his recollection as conclusive evidence.

There is a useful distinction between remembering that someone made a mistake and remembering the precise wording of that mistake. Helen Terwilliger had demonstrated the importance of that distinction rather convincingly.

Does Getting the Oath Wrong Mean You’re Not Really President?

The episode raises an interesting constitutional question: If the Constitution requires a specific oath, what happens when the Chief Justice gets the words wrong?

Taft believed his mistake did not invalidate Hoover’s oath, and there was no judicial ruling declaring otherwise. The Constitution places the obligation to take the prescribed oath on the incoming president; it does not even require the Chief Justice to participate in the ceremony.

Indeed, presidents have taken the oath from a variety of officials, including judges, notaries, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, a president’s own father. Calvin Coolidge was sworn in by his father, a Vermont notary public, after Warren G. Harding died in 1923. Concerns about the ceremony eventually led Coolidge to take the oath again.

As we’ve previously explored in our look at presidents who have taken the oath of office multiple times, the seemingly simple requirement has produced a surprising number of complications.

The constitutional distinction is important. The oath is required, but the familiar inaugural pageantry is largely ceremonial tradition. A mistake by the person prompting the president does not necessarily establish that the president failed to undertake the required constitutional obligation.

Nevertheless, because the oath’s wording appears directly in the Constitution, a sufficiently serious deviation could invite legitimate questions about whether it had been properly taken. For that reason, some presidents have repeated the oath to eliminate uncertainty rather than spend their administrations arguing about thirty-five words.

Herbert Hoover was not among them.

John Roberts Discovers That Thirty-Five Words Are Harder Than They Look

Eighty years later, another Chief Justice would demonstrate that Taft’s difficulties were not unique.

On January 20, 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the presidential oath to Barack Obama. Roberts, like Taft, was an accomplished attorney with an extraordinary command of constitutional law. Unfortunately, when the critical moment arrived, he misplaced the word “faithfully,” causing an awkward exchange as Obama attempted to follow his lead.

The ceremony continued, but the mistake immediately raised questions about whether the oath had been properly administered. Unlike Hoover and Taft, Obama and Roberts decided to repeat the process.

On January 21, Roberts visited the White House and administered the oath again in the Map Room. This time, Obama suggested that they proceed slowly, which seems like an entirely reasonable precaution when the previous attempt had produced several million witnesses to a mistake.

White House Counsel Greg Craig explained that the administration believed the first oath had been valid but repeated it out of an abundance of caution.

That phrase is familiar to attorneys. It generally means that doing something unnecessary is preferable to spending the next several years explaining why it wasn’t necessary.

The second ceremony went smoothly, proving that even Supreme Court Chief Justices can learn from their mistakes. It also demonstrated that the solution to a botched thirty-five-word oath might simply be to say the thirty-five words again.

What Happened to Helen Terwilliger?

Helen’s correction brought her unexpected national attention. TIME described her as one of Walden’s most distinguished students and included a few personal details that give us a glimpse of the girl behind the constitutional controversy.

She enjoyed outdoor sports, reading, and caring for babies. She particularly liked books about college life and hoped someday to become a high-school teacher after completing her own education.

There is something especially fitting about that ambition. Before finishing eighth grade, Helen had already managed to teach a former president and sitting Chief Justice a lesson about careful listening and accurate reporting. One would imagine that the experience would look rather good on a teaching application, although explaining it might require additional space.

The available contemporary accounts don’t establish whether Helen ultimately pursued that career or what became of her later in life. Her brief appearance in the national spotlight remains the best-documented part of her story.

Taft, meanwhile, resigned as Chief Justice in February 1930 because of declining health. He died on March 8, 1930, just over a year after Hoover’s inauguration, leaving behind an extraordinary record of public service that included both the presidency and the Supreme Court. Even the house where he died would eventually acquire an unusual place in history. It later became the Syrian Embassy, meaning that although Taft died in Washington, D.C., he did so in a home that would become foreign territory. Apparently, even after his death, Taft couldn’t resist throwing history a few curveballs.

But among the many stories associated with his remarkable career is one involving a thirteen-year-old girl who knew the presidential oath better than he did.

A Lesson in Constitutional Law, Courtesy of an Eighth Grader

Helen Terwilliger didn’t have a law degree, a judicial appointment, or decades of experience in constitutional government. She had memorized thirty-five words, listened carefully, and recognized when somebody got them wrong.

When the Chief Justice challenged her recollection, she didn’t automatically assume that his impressive credentials made him right. She trusted what she knew, and the evidence eventually supported her.

To Taft’s credit, he acknowledged his original mistake and treated the controversy with good humor. But he also demonstrated a particularly human tendency to remain confident about something even after admitting that his memory had failed him.

The story is a useful reminder that expertise deserves respect, but it doesn’t make someone immune to error. Sometimes the most important qualification in an argument is simply having paid attention.

And if you’re ever administering the presidential oath of office, it might be wise to keep a copy of the Constitution handy. Particularly if there’s an eighth grader listening on the radio.

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