The American Story
Page 17
DR: I’ve listened to all of the Johnson tapes over the years. I always heard about the “Johnson treatment”—that he could be difficult and vile in person—but I never heard any curse words on the tapes. Where are the curse words?
DKG: The curse words are more in the stories people tell about him. He did use them. I must say I heard that.
But the Johnson tapes show an extraordinarily brilliant one-on-one figure. He could persuade anybody to do anything.
When you hear the tapes that focus on his relationship with Republican minority leader Senator Everett M. Dirksen, you hear how he needs to get the Republicans to join with the Democrats from the North to break the filibuster on the Civil Rights Act of ’64. You hear him saying to Dirksen, “What do you want for Illinois? Public works projects, dams, pardons, whatever you want.”
But then, most importantly, he says, “Everett, you come with me on this bill, and two hundred years from now, schoolchildren will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”
Years later, I met the CEO of Pepsi Cola, Don Kendall. When Nixon first went into office, he asked Kendall, who was a good friend of his, to go down and talk to Johnson at the ranch about some sensitive matter.
Kendall gets to the ranch. Johnson’s working on his memoirs, and he’s saying, “How am I going to remember what happened forty years ago, thirty years ago? The only chapters that are any good at all are from this little taping machine in the Oval Office. I could turn it on when I was having an important conversation. So you go back and tell your good friend Nixon, as he starts his presidency, there’s nothing more important than a taping system.”
DR: Let’s talk about Team of Rivals. It’s said that more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American. Why did you think that the world needed another book on Lincoln?
DKG: I don’t think I thought that the world needed another book. I just knew that I wanted to live with him. Because it takes me so long, as I was saying, to write these books, and because I get so involved with whoever it is—I haven’t written twenty books like a lot of my historian friends. I knew that I wanted to live with Lincoln.
I wanted to learn about him. I wanted to know about him. I’d written about Franklin and Eleanor in World War II, and I thought, “What more exciting era to live in than to try to understand the Civil War?”
When I started, I was really scared. I wasn’t sure I could produce anything different. I went with my confidence at the beginning that I would write about Abe and Mary like I had Franklin and Eleanor. But after two years, I realized that Mary couldn’t carry the public side of the story the same way Eleanor could.
Just luckily, I went up to Auburn, New York, and I happened to visit William H. Seward’s house there, and then I found out that he’d written thousands of letters to his wife. I knew what an important part of the cabinet he was. [Seward served as Lincoln’s secretary of state.]
I started reading those letters, and they talked about Salmon P. Chase [Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury], and they talked about Edward Bates [Lincoln’s attorney general], and I realized that if I could learn about Seward’s relationship with Lincoln, and Chase’s and Bates’s relationships with him, maybe I could get at Lincoln that way. Eventually that became Team of Rivals.
DR: You start the book with the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago. At the time, Abraham Lincoln was not thought likely to get the nomination. Why were the other three candidates you just mentioned considered likely to get it, and how did they not get it?
DKG: The nomination struggle is such an extraordinary moment. There is a picture of the contenders, probably taken in 1859. Lincoln’s not even mentioned, which is an extraordinary thing.
Seward had been the governor and then U.S. senator from New York. He was the most important orator in the Whig Party and then the new Republican Party. He was considered at that time a liberal, almost a radical.
Everybody thought Seward would be the nominee. So Lincoln, brilliantly, knowing that he is never going to be the first choice of any of the delegates, says to his managers, “Just tell everybody if they can’t get their first love, I’m there. I’ll be the second love.”
He never attacked any of the other three, while they attacked one another. Also, he made sure that the convention was in Chicago, which seemed like neutral ground. Of course, it helped Lincoln [who was from Illinois] that the convention was in Chicago.
When Seward misses getting the majority on the first ballot, and people are trying to figure out where to go, they peeled off to Lincoln, because he was the one who hadn’t attacked their man. It was an incredibly brilliant strategy.
DR: He gets the nomination on the third ballot. Does he reach out to these other men or just ignore them?
DKG: That’s the incredible thing he does. Right away, he knows that the way the Republican Party’s going to win—and the way they absolutely can win, because the Democratic Party is split in two—is to stay united.
So he reached out to each one of his rivals. He wrote letters that said, “I’m the humblest of all of you. I need your support.”
Seward finally came along and did a grand tour for Lincoln on a train trip. Chase supported him. Bates wrote a public letter about him.
And so Lincoln united the Republican Party behind him, in part because of who he was and because he had the confidence and the humility to reach out to his rivals. They were all better known, better educated, more celebrated. They each thought they should have been president instead of him. But he was able to bring them aboard.
DR: How do you campaign for president in 1860?
DKG: Well, you don’t leave the place where you’re from—which is an amazing thought, right? Lincoln just stays in Springfield.
Surrogates are on the campaign trail for him. It was considered unseemly in that time for a candidate to campaign on his own behalf. Delegations would come to Springfield.
What he campaigns on is he understands the importance of the Republican Party not being too far to the right or the left. He keeps them moderate, because he knows that’s the way they’re going to win. He’s writing letters to them. He’s making public statements. But he’s still staying in Springfield while these other guys run around the country.
DR: A principal issue facing the country then was whether slavery should be extended past the original southern states. What position did Lincoln take on that?
DKG: The main issue that the Republicans ran on, and that Lincoln ran on, was not ending slavery. There was very little thought—except among the abolitionists, who didn’t have anywhere near a majority, even in the states in which they were popular—about ending slavery itself, because the Constitution protected property. [Enslaved people were considered property.]
The main issue was whether you extended slavery to the western territories. An act that had been passed by the Congress in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowed it to extend there.
That’s what mobilized the Republican Party. They always thought that if we could keep slavery in the South, someday it might die out, but if you brought slavery into the western territories, slaves would continue to be used in the West, and then those states that were new would become slave states. That was the theme of the Republican Party—not to end slavery, but to end its movement out west.
DR: Lincoln was running against the candidate that he’d lost to before, Stephen Douglas, who was the Democratic candidate. But the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates did not occur during that campaign. When did they take place?
DKG: What happens is that Lincoln runs for the Senate in 1855 and loses. Then he runs again in 1858 and his main opponent is Stephen Douglas, whom he’s known ever since they were young.
In fact, at one point Lincoln said, “Stephen Douglas’s life has been this extraordinary success and mine has been a flat failure compared to him.” He’d watched the rise of Douglas, who was an extraordinary debater and a really strong, pugilistic kind of character.
The first guy would speak for an hour and a half, the second guy would speak for an hour and a half, then there’d be a rebuttal for an hour, and another rebuttal for an hour. They’re sitting there for six hours. There are marching bands. There’s music. And the audience is yelling, “Hit ’im again! Hit ’im again! Harder!” It’s an extraordinary thing, these debates.
Lincoln did great in the debates. They published them afterwards. People saw what an extraordinary debater and character he was in terms of understanding the issue of slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
But in those days, there weren’t really national newspapers yet, so the way you got your news, much like today, was by reading your own partisan paper. You would subscribe to the Republican paper or the Whig paper or the Democratic paper.
So when the papers would describe the debates, if it’s the Democratic paper, they would say, “Douglas was so amazing that he was carried out on the arms of the people in great, great triumph! And Lincoln, sadly, was so terrible that he fell on the floor and his people had to carry him out just to get him away from the humiliation.” So we had a certain partisan press in those days.
DR: So the general presidential election campaign is won by Lincoln. Did he win any southern states?
DKG: No southern states.
DR: He won the election, but he didn’t say he was going to abolish slavery. In fact, he supported what was then called the Thirteenth Amendment, which reaffirmed that slavery was part of the Constitution. So why did the southern states begin to secede?
DKG: Because the secession was in the works. It was afoot for years before that. The South and the North were pulling too far apart. The cultures were different. The economics were different. And the whole idea of what future slavery was going to have had torn the country apart already.
You could see that in the moment when Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, hits Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner over the head with a cane. [The incident took place on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1856, after Sumner made an antislavery speech.] Sumner was really hurt, out of action for several years.
The incredible thing is it mobilized the people in the North. They had mass meetings against it. But Preston Brooks was made a hero in the South. They carried golden canes in his honor. That kind of division in a country was not going to be healed.
The South understood that demographics were not on their side. If the North could keep slavery from moving to the western territories, the antislavery population in the West would add to that in the North, overwhelming the southern proslavery population. So they saw the writing on the wall.
DR: A number of states secede. Why doesn’t Lincoln say, “Go away if you want to go away. We’ll just have our country be the North”? Why did he feel so determined that the country had to stay together?
DKG: Lincoln believed that what America stood for, what made us a beacon of hope to other countries in the world ruled by kings or queens or dictators, was that we believed ordinary people could govern us, and that we could have an election and people would abide by the rules of that election.
If the South was able to secede, that meant the idea that ordinary people could govern themselves would not be true, and maybe someday the West would secede from the East. The whole idea that you could have a mass democracy in an area like the United States would be undone, and we no longer would be a beacon to the world.
DR: As he puts his administration together, the top jobs go to his former rivals. So the secretary of state is Seward. The attorney general is Bates. And then Salmon Chase becomes the secretary of the treasury. And the secretary of defense or war—who was that initially?
DKG: Originally it was somebody—a businessman named Simon Cameron—who had to be let go from his job because he let contractors give the Union troops horses that were blind—he didn’t know it was all happening—and knapsacks that fell apart in the rain. So he was pushed out of the job, and then Stanton comes in.
That’s the most amazing story. Edwin Stanton had been a famous lawyer in the 1850s, and he had a patent case that was going to be tried in Chicago. He came from Ohio. They thought they needed someone who would know the judges in Chicago. This is in 1855. They came and interviewed Lincoln. They thought he’d be good for the case.
Lincoln was so excited at the thought of working with this nationally famous lawyer, Stanton. But the judge changed the case from Chicago back to Cincinnati, Ohio, so they didn’t need Lincoln anymore—but they forgot to tell him.
He kept working on his brief. He went to Cincinnati all on his own. He goes right up to Stanton and Stanton’s partner on the street corner, and he says, “Let’s go up to the courthouse together in a gang.”
Stanton took one look at Lincoln—this was recorded at the time—and he said to his partner, “We have to lose this long-armed ape.” Lincoln had a stain on his shirt. His hair was disheveled. His sleeves were too short for his long arms.
And they turned away from him. They never opened the brief he had painstakingly prepared. He was humiliated. In fact, he said he never wanted to go back to Cincinnati again.
But he stayed that entire week to listen to Stanton deliver the case, and he was so impressed by Stanton’s way of doing it that he went back to Illinois and he said, “I have to educate myself even more. I thought I was a good lawyer.”
He would go on the circuit with his fellow lawyers, stay up at night studying Euclid, reading books. He said, “I’m going to become even more than I was,” which is an extraordinary thing.
Anyway, when Cameron, the first secretary of war, has to leave, everybody says to Lincoln, “The only man for this job is Edwin Stanton.” Somehow Lincoln is able to forgive that resentment that he must have felt against Stanton and make him his secretary of war. Stanton ends up loving him more than anyone, outside of his family.
Lincoln had that ability to forget past resentments and to appoint somebody not because they hurt you in the past but because they are the best man for the present—and the two of them were perfect together because they were so opposite.
Stanton was blunt and intense. He could be mean-spirited. Lincoln was always compassionate and giving people too many chances. But they worked together brilliantly, and Stanton became, along with Seward, one of his closest friends.
DR: Seward, Stanton, Bates, and Chase become the leading members of the cabinet. They’re all well educated—college, law school. Lincoln basically didn’t go to school. How did he get to be so well read and such a good writer?
DKG: Some of it is probably a gift. Teddy Roosevelt one time wrote an essay arguing that there are two kinds of success in the world. One comes from people who have a talent that is just given to them as a gift: Keats’s poetry, Lincoln’s gift for writing.
But the other kind of success comes from people—of whom he thought he was one, and most people are—who have ordinary talents but an extraordinary ability for hard, sustained work, to bring everything possible out of those ordinary talents.
Lincoln had both. He had a gift for language that must have been inborn. There’s a poet in that man.
But as a child, he only went to school for less than twelve full months, he later figured out, because his father needed him to work on the hardscrabble family farm. But he scoured the countryside for books, and he read everything he could lay his hands on. It was said when he got a copy of the King James Bible or Aesop’s Fables or one of Shakespeare’s plays, he was so excited he could not eat, he could not sleep.
He learned to read early on. He would read aloud. He learned to love poetry. He would stay up as late as he could at night reading. When he’s plowing in the field, he’s g
ot a book with him by the tree.
And he learns to tell stories when he’s a young boy. That becomes part of his stock-in-trade later. He would listen to his father and their friends tell stories at night, and he would not be able to sleep until he could recount the story to his little friends in the field. He’d listen to ministers giving sermons. Eventually, on the circuit in Illinois, he became the storyteller that everybody wanted to come and hear.
DR: Lincoln becomes president. How does he get into Washington, D.C.? There’s a rumor that he snuck in dressed as a woman. Is that true?
DKG: What is true is that he was taking the train from Springfield to Washington. He came early because he thought he had to be closer to Washington as everything was happening.
But the Secret Service, or whatever they were called at the time, heard a rumor that there were thugs in Maryland who were going to stop the train as it was passing through.
I don’t think he was wearing a skirt, but the Secret Service did bring him in secretly. He was always later sad that he had done that, because it was made into a big story that he came in without being openly who he was, but he was just listening to them in terms of security.
DR: He’s president of the United States. The South secedes. There’s going to be a fight. Is it true that he asked Robert E. Lee to be the general for the North?
DKG: Absolutely. He respected Robert E. Lee. They met in the Blair House, near the White House, and Lee said he needed a little time to think about it.
In the end, he had to go where Virginia went. That was his home state. But things might have been so different. If the North had had the generals from the South and the political leadership of Lincoln, it would have been a much shorter war. As it was, the South had the generals but not the political leadership.