Big Guns

David Maraniss: In taking the oath of office as the first African American president in the nation's nearly 233 years, one man reached a singular achievement. But at four minutes after noon yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama was inevitably transformed — no matter what happens during his administration — from an individual, a politician, to an icon and a symbol. Here was history at its most sweeping and yet intimate.

Wil Haygood: Eugene Allen, who worked for more than three decades as a White House butler — some of those years during an era of brutal segregation when he often had to use back doors despite his employer's rarefied address — sat in the shadow of the Capitol dome yesterday and…