Jimmy Carter's inauguration

Jimmy Carter's inauguration appears in Andy Warhol's diary not as a sustained account of national ceremony but in two brief, telling details: an invitation addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Andy Warhol,” and a note that Carter had been inaugurated while Warhol was traveling from Kuwait to Rome. Together, they place a public political event inside the diary's intimate, incident-by-incident record of social and business life.

The invitation

On December 27, 1976, Warhol recorded receiving an invitation to President Carter's inauguration. It was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Andy Warhol,” a form of address that made him laugh. The entry preserves the small personal joke rather than explaining the invitation's circumstances or giving details about the ceremony. In the diary, the event first appears as an unexpected address on an envelope, filtered through Warhol's amused response.

Inauguration on the move

On January 20, 1977, Warhol was aboard an Alitalia flight from Kuwait to Rome. The flight lasted five and a half hours, and he read the Rome Daily American. His terse note that Carter had been inaugurated places the national event among the day's travel particulars: the plane, the newspaper, and the people he encountered after landing. The diary records the inauguration as news reaching a traveler, not as a ceremony he describes witnessing.

The diary's frame

The two references offer different scales of the same event. The invitation brings the inauguration close to Warhol's social world, while the flight entry reduces it to a brief item in a day of movement. That compression suits the diary's broader method: its weekday accounts began as records of activity and cash expenses, then became a personal narrative shaped through morning conversations between Warhol and Pat Hackett. Hackett later selected and condensed the original material for publication, cutting whole days and portions of entries. The surviving mentions therefore preserve the event's place in Warhol's daily record without claiming to provide a complete account of either the inauguration or his response to it.