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by Gore Vidal

  Current is a master of the one-line unproved assertion. Here are some of what he calls my false “contentions.” “As early as April 1861 Lincoln was thinking of emancipation as possibly justifiable as ‘a military necessity.’ ” I looked up the scene in the novel and found that it was not Lincoln but the abolitionist Sumner who was thinking along those lines; Lincoln himself was noncommittal. Then “Vidal pictures Lincoln as an ignoramus in regard to public finance. He makes him so stupid as to think Secretary of the Treasury Chase personally signed every greenback, and so uninformed as to have ‘no idea what the greenbacks actually represented.’ ” This is nicely—deliberately?—garbled. It is not Chase that Lincoln thinks signs the greenbacks but the treasurer, Lucius Crittenden; this provided a famous scene in Carl Sandburg’s hagiography, on which I do an ironical variation.

  Current tells us that I go along with the “innuendo” that Stanton “masterminded the assassination.” If he had actually read the whole book, he would have been able to follow almost every turn to Booth’s assassination plot, in which Stanton figures not at all; had he got to the end of the book, he would have heard Hay make fun of those who believed that Stanton had any connection with the murder of the man to whom he owed everything. Next I “intimate” that there was a second plot afoot, involving “Radical Republicans in Congress.” There was indeed a second plot, to be found in Pinkerton’s Secret Service files. But no one knows who masterminded it.

  Next, I propose the following outrage: that “Lincoln excluded Union-held areas from the Emancipation Proclamation” as a favor to “pro-Union slaveholders.” Yet it is a fact that seven counties in and around Norfolk, Virginia, and several Louisiana parishes were allowed to maintain slavery while slavery was banned in the rest of the South. Why did Lincoln do this? He needed Unionist votes in Congress, and one belonged to a Louisiana congressman. After all, Lincoln was never an abolitionist; he was a Unionist, and as he most famously said, if he could preserve the Union only by maintaining slavery, he would do so. Apparently, saints don’t make deals.

  * * *

  By and large, Current’s complaints range from the trivial to the pointless. Does he find me wrong on anything of consequence? Yes, he does. And I think it is the whole point to his weird enterprise. Current tells us that “there is no convincing evidence” for Vidal’s contention that “as late as April 1865 [Lincoln] was still planning to colonize freed slaves outside the United States.” This is a delicate point in the 1980s, when no national saint can be suspected of racism. I turned to one of my authorities for this statement; and realized that I may have relied on suspect scholarship. Here is the passage I used:

  Lincoln to the last seemed to have a lingering preference for another kind of amendment, another kind of plan. He still clung to his old ideas of postponing final emancipation, compensating slaveholders, and colonizing freedmen. Or so it would appear. As late as March of 1865, if the somewhat dubious Ben Butler is to be believed, Lincoln summoned him to the White House to discuss with him the feasibility of removing the colored population of the United States.

  This is from a book called The Lincoln Nobody Knows (p. 230) by Richard N. Current. So either Current is as wrong about this as he is about me, or he is right and between March and April 15, 1865, when Lincoln departed this vale of tears, the President changed his mind on the colonizing of slaves. If he did, there is no record known to me—or, I suspect, to anyone else.

  What is going on here is a deliberate revision by Current not only of Lincoln but of himself in order to serve the saint in the 1980s as opposed to the saint at earlier times when blacks were still colored, having only just stopped being Negroes. In colored and Negro days the saint might have wanted them out of the country, as he did. But in the age of Martin Luther King even the most covertly racist of school boards must agree that a saint like Abraham Lincoln could never have wanted a single black person to leave freedom’s land much less bravery’s home. So all the hagiographers are redoing their plaster images and anyone who draws attention to the discrepancy between their own past crudities and their current falsities is a very bad person indeed, and not a scholar, and probably a communist as well.

  * * *

  Roy P. Basler, Woodward’s other “authority,” is given to frantic hyperbole. He declares Sandburg’s Lincoln a “monumental achievement.” Well, it’s a monument all right—to a plaster saint, of the sort that these two professional hagiographers are paid to keep dusted. Basler finds my Lincoln the “phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.” Well, there may be one phony bit, the Crittenden signature story, which I got from Basler’s monumental biographer Sandburg. Basler should have at least liked that. Also, “more than half the book could never have happened as told.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler’s Vidal’s Lincoln.

  Like Current, Basler gets all tangled up in misread or misunderstood trivia. He goes on at great length that it was not the Reverend James Smith whom Lincoln appointed consul in Scotland but his son Hugh. Well, the son, Hugh, was appointed consul on June 10, 1861; then died; and the father was appointed, later, in his place. Basler says that Mary Todd’s scene with General Ord’s wife “is histrionically exaggerated out of all proportion to the recorded facts.” But it conforms with those recorded facts given by Justin G. and Linda Levitt Turner’s standard Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters. He is also most protective of the saint. For instance, every saint is a kind and indulgent yet gently stern father, devoted to his children who worship him. But Lincoln’s oldest son, Robert, did not much like his father.

  Basler gets all trembly as he writes,

  When Vidal has Robert Lincoln say to Hay about his father, “He hates his past. He hates having been a scrub….He wanted me to be what he couldn’t be,” I find no excuse. Robert did admit that he and his father had never been close after he was grown, and he may have felt neglected, but for him to speak thus is beyond comprehension.

  But he did speak thus, to Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma, my grandfather, who often talked to me about Robert’s bleak attitude toward his father, who, having sent his son to Exeter and Harvard in order to move him up in the world, then found that he had a son with whom he had not much in common. I myself attended Exeter four score years after Robert, and memories of Lincoln were still vivid; and well-described not long ago in the alumni bulletin: how Lincoln spoke at the Academy shortly after Cooper Union, and enthralled the boys. But not Robert.

  Basler is also protective of the only recently beatified, by Academe, Walt Whitman. (This miracle was accomplished by making Walt Whitman homoerotic rather than homosexual.) “Consider,” he rails, “the three pages [actually one and a half] that he devotes to a fictional interview with Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, looking for a job.” Basler correctly notes that a Mr. Trowbridge presented a letter to Chase from Emerson, asking that Whitman be given a job. I have Whitman delivering the letter. Basler is stern. “Anyone who knows about Whitman would recognize that presenting the letter in person…is wholly false to Whitman’s character at this time of his life, and his conversation with Chase is entirely what Vidal might have said, but not Whitman.” If Whitman had thought a meeting with Chase would have got him a job he would have done so because, as he wrote of himself then, “I was pulling eminent wires in those days.”

  As for Whitman’s dialogue with Chase, I quite fancied it. He describes the decorations of the Capitol and how “not in one’s flightiest dreams has there been so much marble and china, gold and bronze, so many painted gods and goddesses.” Whitman compares the Capitol—favorably—but fatally for the teetotaler Chase—to Taylor’s saloon in New York. I took this particular passage from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, as anyone immersed in the Whitman style—or mine for that matter—would know. Literary criticism is not, perhaps, Basler’s strong suit. Actually, I need
ed the encounter to fill in my portrait of Chase, who, exactly as I described, detested Whitman as the author of a “very bad book,” which he had not read; then, being an autograph collector, Chase kept the Emerson letter; then, being a jittery man on the subject of public rectitude, he turned the letter over to the Treasury archive. This is not too bad for a page and a half—of agreed-upon facts, used to illuminate the character not of Whitman but of Chase.

  * * *

  Basler like Current is eager to bring the saint into the mainstream of today’s political superstition. Both are appalled whenever I mention his scheme for colonizing the ex-slaves. Both deny that he ever had anything but love and admiration for blacks, who were, he believed, in every way his equals, once slavery was past. “The one thing I most resented,” writes Basler, “is the perpetuation of ‘Lincoln’s unshaken belief that the colored race was inferior to the white….’ I have never found any such categorical avowal in anything Lincoln wrote or was reported to have said.” The slippery adjective here is “categorical.” Yet Basler himself wrote in The Lincoln Legend (pp. 210–211), “[Lincoln] never contemplated with any degree of satisfaction the prospect of a free negro race living in the same country with a free white race.” Not even I have dared go so far as to suggest that I have ever had any way of knowing what Lincoln may or may not have contemplated! In any case, Basler, like Current, is revising himself.

  Actually, Lincoln’s views of blacks were common to his time and place but, as he was an uncommon man, he tried to transcend them, as he did in a speech in Peoria, in 1854: “My first impulse,” he said rather daringly for that year, “would be to free all slaves and send them to Liberia.” He then lists all the objections that others would later make to him. He finally throws in the towel when he asks: “Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? Our own feelings would not admit of it, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”

  * * *

  It is my radical view that Americans are now sufficiently mature to be shown a Lincoln as close to the original as it is possible for us so much later in time to get. Since the race war goes on as fiercely as ever in this country, I think candor about blacks and whites and racism is necessary. It was part of Lincoln’s greatness that, unlike those absolute abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, he foresaw the long ugly confrontation, and tried to spare future generations by geographically separating the races. The fact that his plan was not only impractical but inadvertently cruel is beside the point. He wanted to do something; and he never let go the subject, unless of course he had a vision in the last two weeks of his life, known only to Current, who has chosen not to share it.

  Recently, an excellent academic historian, Theodore S. Hamerow, published a book called Reflections on History and Historians. It was reviewed in The New York Times by an English history don, Neil McKendrick. Here is what two professionals have to say of the average American history teacher. As presented by Hamerow, he is “cynical.” I quote now from McKendrick: “He is also mean-minded, provincial and envious. We hear verdict after verdict condemning, in the words of one academic, ‘the wretched pedantry, the meanness of motive, the petty rancors of rivalry, the stultifying provincialism.’ ” But then “most professors of history do little research and less publishing and there are statistical tables to prove it. What little is produced is seen as ‘coerced productivity,’ mainly a parade of second-hand learning and third-rate opinions.” Thus, the high professional academics view their run-of-the-mill colleagues.

  Recently in The New York Times Herbert Mitgang took me to task, indirectly, when he wrote: “Several revisionist academics have advanced the incredible theory that Lincoln really wanted the Civil War, with its 600,-000 casualties, in order to eclipse the Founding Fathers and insure his own place in the pantheon of great presidents.” Now there is no single motive driving anyone but, yes, that is pretty much what I came to believe, as Lincoln himself got more and more mystical about the Union, and less and less logical in his defense of it, and more and more appalled at all the blood and at those changes in his country, which, he confessed—with pride?—were “fundamental and astounding.” The Lincoln portrayed by me is based on a speech he made in 1838 at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. He began by praising the Founding Fathers and their republic; then he went on:

  This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field. It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true to suppose that men of ambitions and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passions as others have done before them. The question, then, is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot.

  Thus Lincoln warns us against Lincoln.

  Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions unexplored….It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the path of any predecessor however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.

  Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln’s invention of himself and, in the process, us. What the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the Civil War is to us. What the wily Ulysses was to the Greeks, the wily Lincoln is to us—not plaster saint but towering genius, our nation’s haunted and haunting re-creator.

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  April 28, 1988

  GORE VIDAL REPLIES

  It’s savory scholar-squirrel stew time again! Or, to be precise, one scholar-squirrel and one plump publicist-pigeon for the pot. So, as the pot boils and I chop this pile of footnotes fine, let me explain to both pigeon and the no doubt bemused readers of these pages why it was that The New York Times, the Typhoid Mary of American journalism, should have wanted to discredit, one week before airing, the television dramatization of my book on Abraham Lincoln. The publicist (a caption-and-text writer for two Civil War picture books that he shrewdly guesses I’ve never looked at) tells us that “the Times did not assign me to ‘bloody’ the mini-series…but to measure its faithfulness to history,” etc. This begs the question: Why, if the Times were so uncha­racteris­tically concerned with faithfulness to fact of any kind, should they select him, a nonhistorian, whose current job, he told me, disarmingly, is that of publicist for the admirable Mario Cuomo? I suspect that he was chosen because a publicist will give an editor exactly what he wants. In any case, my own long history with The New York Times does, in a curious way, illuminate not only this peculiar dispute but the rather more interesting nature of history itself.

  * * *

  In 1946 my first novel was published. A war novel, it was praised by the daily book reviewer of the Times, one Orville Prescott, whose power to “make or break” a book was then unique; and now unimaginable. I was made. Then, in 1948, two books were published within weeks of each other. First, The City and the Pillar by me; then Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, et al. In my novel, I found the love affair between two ordinary American youths to be a matter-of-fact and normal business. Dr. Kinsey then confirmed, statistically, that more than a third of the American male population had performed, at least once, a vile and abominable act against nature. Since the generation of American males that he was studying had just won the last great war that our sissy republic ever was to win (as R. M. Nixon would say, I mean “sissy” in the very best sense of that word), it was unthinkable that…The polemic began; and goes on.

  At the time, Orville Prescott told my publisher, Nicholas Wreden of E.P. Dutton, that he would never again read much less review a book by me. The Times then refused to advertise either my book or the Kinsey report. True to Prescott’s word, my next five novels were not reviewed in the dail
y Times or, indeed, in Time or Newsweek. In freedom’s land what ought not to be is not and must be blacked out. I was unmade. For ten years I did television, theater, movies; then returned to the novel.

  The war goes on, though with less spirit than in the old days when the Sunday editor of the Times, Lester Markel, canvassed five writers, among them my friend Richard Rovere, to see if one would “bloody” The Best Man, a play that their autonomous daily reviewer had liked. Finally, Douglass Cater wrote a mildly dissenting piece, which was duly published. Simultaneously, a writer was assigned to “bloody” my campaign for Congress in New York’s Twenty-ninth District, a polity usually unnoticed by The New York Times; and then…and then…Anyway, we need not believe the publicist when he says that he was not engaged to “bloody” the television Lincoln. Of course he was; and I fell into the trap.

  The publicist wrote to tell me that he was writing about the television Lincoln and the problems of dramatized history. Since I had nothing to do with the production, I thought that the Times might be playing it straight. Plainly, I had lost my cunning. I was interviewed on the telephone. He asked me if I read historical novels. I said, almost never. I’m obliged to read history. A few moments later he said, “As you never read history…” I realized then that I’d been had yet again by the foxy old New York Times. I remarked upon the mysteriousness of history. Quoted Henry Adams’s famous summing up on the “why” and the “what.” The publicist got the quotation right but attributed it to Thoreau.