Hullabaloo

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

 
Beware of Histo-tainment

by dday

I'm very glad that Matthew Pinsker penned this op-ed today taking a more critical look at Doris Kearns Goodwin's pop pseudo-history "Team Of Rivals". As a yarn, I hear the book is quite good, but as a piece of history it's not exactly true to the source. And since it's become accepted wisdom among the DC chattering class and the politicians they influence, that's a serious problem.

There were painful trade-offs with the "team of rivals" approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.

Lincoln's decision to embrace former rivals, for instance, inevitably meant ignoring old friends -- a development they took badly. "We made Abe and, by God, we can unmake him," complained Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Joseph Medill in 1861. Especially during 1861 and 1862, the first two years of Lincoln's initially troubled administration, friends growled over his ingratitude as former rivals continued to play out their old political feuds [...]

By December 1862, there was a full-blown Cabinet crisis.

"We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln confided to a close friend after being deluged with congressional criticism and confronted by resignations from both Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Goodwin suggests that Lincoln's quiet confidence and impressive emotional intelligence enabled him to survive and ultimately forge an effective team out of his former rivals, but that's more wishful thinking than serious analysis.

Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.

The Village has a more of a sense of bumper stickers than history, and Goodwin, whose scholarship is not exactly spotless, is a Villager in good standing, so this will probably pass through the Beltway without comment. But I hope someone in the office of the President-elect is paying attention. Pinsker doesn't even tackle the false equivalence between the Civil War and our day - the real rivals were seceding from the Union and massing an Army at the time. This was a moment that called for unity between anyone who wasn't a Confederate, necessitating Lincoln's choice - and it STILL DIDN'T WORK VERY WELL.

That is not to say that any of these so-called rivals potentially in Obama's cabinet would create similar controversy. And I'm actually not really talking about Hillary Clinton in this context. But Obama is talking about this "fully bipartisan government," and he's even exploring options for Republicans in major posts, and that ought to have you worried if he's basing that on a work of what amounts to fiction. If you want to broaden out the analogy, is there that big a difference between the Republicans and the Confederates, in this scenario? Is it that wise to put people in positions of power, after a triumphant election, who want the country to be "avowedly with them," as Lincoln put it?

Another question: Is it odd that the traditional media keeps parroting this concept when its application was fatally flawed and nearly sunk the Union? Or is that the point, a kind of back-door way to mandate bipartisan, "center-right" leadership on the new Administration?


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dday 11/18/2008 08:00:00 PM |