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LINCOLN: A NEW BIOGRAPHY
OCTOBER 17, 1995
TRANSCRIPT
David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," talks to David Herbert Donald, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard University, about his new book Lincoln. Donald discusses his biography on the 16th president, noting Lincoln was the first U.S. president to make appeals directly to the American public.
DAVID GERGEN: There are an estimated 5,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln, more surely than about any other figure in our history. Why does Abraham Lincoln have such a hold upon our imagination?
DAVID HERBERT DONALD, Author, Lincoln: Well, there are I think a number of reasons we can put together about this. First of all, he was the President in the nation's most serious crisis and say of the union. Second, the Emancipation Proclamation and what it meant for African-Americans everywhere is such a major accomplishment that it would cause him to be such a person as that. But added to those accomplishments, of course, there is the assassination, and Americans have a fascination with assassinations and their legacy.
And this was the first American President, alas, to be assassinated. But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics. This is the first time an American President appealed directly to citizens, and people began writing thousands of letters in the Lincoln Papers. They would write to him, "Father Abraham."
This is the first time--you never thought of say Father George Washington and Father Thomas Jefferson, Father Millard Fillmore, for example. He was somebody who belonged to them, and that sense of being a people's President, I think, makes Lincoln such an enormously appealing, as well as enduring, figure.
DAVID GERGEN: Well, it's interesting that the number of historians who placed him or treated him as an icon, put him on a pedestal, sometimes on a cross, and one historian called him the "Christ figure of democracy's passion play." It was a lovely quote.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: You've really looked at him as a person and tried to treat him in terms of what he was seeing as President, what letters were coming in, what he was reading in his legal papers. You're the first really who had the opportunity to do that.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them. I didn't think it was terribly important for me to stand on the sideline cheering and say, oh, what a grand thing that was, my wasn't that statesmanlike--we all know that. That isn't important here. What we need to see is how leadership works, how a man with very poor training came to be such a skilled, adroit leader in a terribly troubled time.
DAVID GERGEN: You've described him as having a passive personality. And I wonder whether your reviewers have misunderstood or whether you have not communicated sufficiently to the reviewers what it is you're talking about when you talk about having a passive personality.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: What I was talking about was not laziness. Goodness, this was the hardest-working President we ever had. It was not lack of ambition, as Herndon said quite correctly, his ambition was a little motor that knew no rest. But I'm talking here about a reluctance for deep inner psychological reason stemming mostly from one's youth to take the lead to go out on a limb to do something that's sort of daring, to be the kind of leader who pokes his standard out in front and says this is where we're going, and then looks over his shoulder to see if his army is following him. This was never Lincoln's--
DAVID GERGEN: He stayed very close to where he thought the country's mind was, the mind set of the country was.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: He was very cautious about these matters, and fortunately, he was very cautious. Had he gone out in advance, had he early in the war stated we're going to emancipate all the slaves, the union would have been destroyed.
DAVID GERGEN: He would have lost the border states.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: He would have lost the border states. The war would have been lost. Now,it was this kind of caution that exasperated his opponent, people like stately Sen. Charleson of Massachusetts, who said that in terms of dithering, there's never been such a ruling in the world since Louis XVI, and you know what happened to him. Sumner would have gone out and said, this is where we're going, everybody has to follow me. Lincoln was exactly the reverse of this. Let's all work together, slowly, incrementally, to get into this direction.
DAVID GERGEN: Yeah. The closest analogy of other Presidents might be Franklin Roosevelt.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: I think that's a very good analogy in so many different ways, Roosevelt's close attention to public opinion like Lincoln, Roosevelt's willingness to experiment, his flexibility. He understood, like Lincoln, that you try one thing, it doesn't work, you try something else; if that doesn't work, you try again. Another one, you're not absolutely fixed as to means to getting where you want to go.
DAVID GERGEN: I love the quote that you used from Lincoln about how--comparing himself essentially to the men who were out in the rivers in the West, and they steered from point to point so that there was a zig and a zag as they went, while all along, they were going downstream, they were heading in a certain direction.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: Exactly right.
DAVID GERGEN: And that seemed to be--characterize the way he tried to feel his way through it.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: A very good way, and Lincoln ought to have used it more often than he did. His phrase that he more often used was my policy is to have no policy. And this infuriated people. What's do you mean, a President's supposed to have policy, but if he'd used the analogy that he did use on occasion of the steamboat--the river boat man--he had been a river boat man, after all, he knew these things, and when you get on the river, you don't--the Mississippi River--you don't simply say I'm headed South. If you head South, you'll run into a Cyprus Tree, into a riverbank within 15 minutes. And so you zig and you zag and you go back and forth. And this is where he was going. He knew where he was going.
DAVID GERGEN: It reflects your Mississippi heritage too.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: Yes, I think it does. (laughing)
DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) Tell me about Lincoln's lessons for leadership today. What lessons did you draw from him?
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes. They can get, after all, a little more--about 40 percent of a total huge electoral popular vote, so he had he had no mandate that he could follow and capitalize on immediately. It reflects the kind of leadership also of a President without much experience in Washington who did not have strong ties with leaders of his own party, many of whom were almost unknown to him. He had met Seward, he had met Chase, then most of the others in his cabinet, he didn't really know them.
Many of the leaders in Congress he didn't know at all. And so he had to forge connections with them in a very slow, careful kind of way. So this combination of a cautious personality, of a lack of a mandate, of unfamiliarity with the circumstances makes, I think, for the model of a Presidency that has to proceed very slowly, very cautiously, but on the whole, in the end, successfully.
DAVID GERGEN: And there were two other elements about it that struck me in reading your book. One was his capacity for personal growth. You said he grew into greatness, and he seemed to do that, in particular, in working with his generals, going from McClellan in the beginning, a man who wouldn't listen to him and wouldn't fight, going to Grant in the end, a man he convinced where he ought to go and would fight.
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: That's exactly right. At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago. Nobody really knew how to command an army of a hundred thousand people, but he believed that they did, and so he deferred to them. And they said, no, we can't go this way, we've got to go down the Potomac and land on the peninsula, he said, okay, I don't think it's a good thing, but that's the way we have to do it.
Then by the time Grant came along, he was so shrewd that he knew exactly what he wanted, namely, he wanted his army to make the Confederate Army their object, not seizing territory, not seizing capital, but the army. And when Grant came in, he was clever enough to let Grant think that this was his idea, and Grant in his memoirs boasted, this was my idea, the President didn't understand it at all, and in fact, it was Lincoln's plan that he'd exactly laid out prior to that.
DAVID GERGEN: The other thing was Lincoln--a man with only one year of formal education--became certainly the most eloquent of all of our Presidents, and his capacity to speak to the country, to go back to your point, to speak to the citizens and to--and to speak to public opinion too, and he learned how to influence public opinion--I thought was very, very striking. You know, there's no anthology of American literature today that's not--it's filled with quotes from Lincoln over the years, and his understanding of language, of figurative language and metaphors and of stories--I'm curious. Do you have a favorite Lincoln story?
DAVID HERBERT DONALD: Oh, I do. My favorite Lincoln story is one that Lincoln himself told very often, and it shows something about the way he perceived--he told the story--in those days one always told ethnic stories--he told the story about the Irishman who had been drinking much too much and had sworn off the liquor, and so the parade was going through town and the Irishman shows up at the bar, and he goes to the bar and says, "Bartender, give me a glass of lemonade." The bartender looks at him, curious at him, and he says, "If you put a drop of whiskey in it unbeknownst to me, I wouldn't mind." Lincoln didn't mind for things to be done unbeknownst to him.
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