WASHINGTON — I begin most days in the library of my northern
Virginia home a couple of blocks from a Confederate war memorial.
From atop a stone pedestal, a young soldier, hands clasped on the
muzzle of his rifle, peers forever south towards Richmond, once the
capital of the Confederacy. Two blocks from the brooding soldier I
sit, taking my coffee and reading the morning newspapers under an
enormous picture of Abraham Lincoln. It is my first irreverent act
of the day, but on a good day it is not my last.
The library is known in my family as “The Lincoln Library,”
because of this old picture of the savior of the Union. Given by
the President’s son to my great great grandfather, its thick
mahogany frame bears a bronze plaque, which reads: “Presented To P.
D. Tyrrell, U.S.S.S. By Robert T. Lincoln April 14, 1887 For
Loyalty And Service To His Father Abraham Lincoln.” April 14 was
the date on which the President had been shot 12 years earlier on
Good Friday. That Easter Sunday, it would have been a rare church
that did not echo with comparisons between the assassinated
president and Christ. I assume it was not coincidental that Robert
Lincoln made his gift to my ancestor on April 14.
In a fine new book, Land of Lincoln, my friend, Andy
Ferguson, describes how the eponym of my library has been
reinterpreted through the years, usually through evolving
contemporary values. Recently, you will recall, Lincoln was
reintroduced to the reading public as a gay. Soon he will doubtless
be presented as an opponent of Global Warming. Former Governor
Mario Cuomo has served up the resolute conqueror of Confederate
armies as a likely opponent of the war in Iraq. “Lincoln hasn’t
been forgotten,” Ferguson writes, “but he’s shrunk” to conform to
our “wised-up world.” It is only a matter of time before Bill
Clinton announces that the 16th President is endorsing Hillary and,
perhaps, making a small donation to the Clinton Library, possibly
through a Swiss bank account.
For some reason books on Lincoln are suddenly in season. Another
superb book just out is Thomas J. Craughwell’s Stealing
Lincoln’s Body. The book explains how I came to be the
possessor of the aforementioned picture. In the 1880s my great
great grandfather was a Secret Service agent, pursuing
counterfeiters, for that was then the Secret Service’s main duty.
Counterfeiting and stealing bodies for ransom were major crimes in
those days. When Captain Tyrrell got wind of a plot by Chicago
counterfeiters to steal Lincoln’s corpse from its burial place in
Springfield, Illinois, he maneuvered to insert his agency into a
police action that might otherwise have been left to local
authorities. Mark it down as another expansion of federal
authority. From the attempt to steal Lincoln’s body on the Secret
Service’s responsibilities for presidential protection spread.
The attempt itself was comic, described by a reviewer at the
Times of London as a plot hatched by the three stooges.
Craughwell’s books conveys the comedy and more serious stuff: the
tragic assassination at Ford’s Theatre, the suffering of the
Lincoln family, crime and police work in early Chicago, and the
drama of the now forgotten Lincoln Guard of Honor, which took it as
a sacred trust to protect the Lincoln remains from ever again being
desecrated. Craughwell’s book would make a hell of a movie.
I admire both of these books, but apparently in my admiration I
can be viewed as an oddity, at least by New York Post
columnist John Podhoretz., who has written about the Ferguson book.
In a column of tortured praise for it, Podhoretz notes that
“writers don’t really root for each other. Usually they root
against each other.” Well, many of us writers have long been in awe
of Podhoretz’s essential smallness. Here he reveals himself as so
cemented in it that he psychologically projects smallness on the
rest of us. Acknowledging that Ferguson has written a fine book,
Podhoretz confides, “The dark secret is that I would have been
happy to think Land of Lincoln wasn’t very good.” It takes
a person of colossal narcissism to make such an admission in
public, but I thank him for it. The ass has given me another good
day.
