“The President and General McClellan on the Battle-field of Antietam.”
MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): We’re going to talk briefly about a new book that Doris has written—Leadership in Turbulent Times. But principally we’re going to talk about her book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, and then a little bit at the end about a subject that everybody cares about and that Doris knows a lot about as well—baseball.
In the new book, you have taken four presidents you’ve written about and put together their leadership styles—Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Of those four, which one was the smartest?
MS. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN (DKG): Smartest in terms of intellectual breadth would probably be Teddy Roosevelt.
But there’s a different definition of “smart.” People thought that FDR was kind of a lightweight intellectual. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “He had a first-rate temperament but a second-rate intellect.” But he was a problem-solver. He could see how things fit together, which is another definition of intelligence.
DR: Let’s suppose you had a chance to have dinner with any of them. Who would you want to have dinner with?
DKG: I think it would be whomever I had been living with at the time. It takes me so long to write these books that I feel like I’m waking up with the guy in the morning, sleeping with him at night. Ten years with Lincoln, seven years with Teddy and Taft, six years longer than the war itself lasted with Franklin Roosevelt in World War II.
My only fear is that in the afterlife there’s going to be a panel of all the presidents that I’ve ever studied and every one is going to tell me everything I missed about them. The first person to scream will be Lyndon Johnson: “How come that damned book on the Kennedys was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?”
DR: If you could ask Abraham Lincoln any question, what would you ask him?
DKG: Instead of asking what I know I should as an historian—“What would you have done differently about Reconstruction?”—I would want him to come alive. If I could ask him to tell me a story, his whole demeanor would change, because when he told a funny story, he would just lighten up.
He loved to tell a story about the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, who went to England after the war. They decided to embarrass him by putting a huge picture of General George Washington in the only outhouse that was connected to the dinner party. He goes into the outhouse and he comes out and he’s not upset at all.
And they said, “Well, didn’t you see George Washington there?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It was the perfectly appropriate place for him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George Washington.”
If I had the chance to talk to Lincoln, what I would like to do instead of asking him something is to tell him something. He dreamed, at the age of twenty-three, that he would do something that would allow other people to remember him—something good for the world. And then he died. He knows that the war is won, but he could never have imagined how much he was remembered.
If I could talk to Lincoln, I’d tell him, “See what you did? You were a model for all of us. You bring us here together tonight, both sides of the aisle.”
DR: What would you like to ask FDR?
DKG: The hardest question would be, “Was there more you could have done to bring more refugees into the country before Hitler closed the door forever?” It’s the scar on his legacy. Or “Could you have gotten by without incarcerating Japanese Americans?”
Everything else he did makes him one of the most extraordinary leaders we’ve ever had. I’d be much happier talking to him about the New Deal.
DR: Then you would ask him, “What was it like having all those people living in the White House?”
DKG: I’d like to ask him if I could have lived up there with him.
What happens is he wants a cocktail hour every night in the White House during World War II so that he can enjoy himself and relax. The rule was you couldn’t talk about the war. You could have gossip. You could talk about movies you’d seen, books you’d read, as long as you didn’t mention the war.
After a while, this cocktail hour was so important to him, he wanted guests to be ready for it. So he invited his best friends and associates to live on the second floor of the White House.
His foreign policy advisor Harry Hopkins comes for dinner one night, sleeps over, and never leaves until the war comes to an end. His secretary, Missy LeHand, is living with the family in the White House. Lorena Hickok, who has a friendship with Eleanor, is living on the second floor. And Winston Churchill comes and spends weeks at a time in a room diagonally across from Roosevelt.
When I was writing the book, I kept imagining how it must have been at night, when they’re all in their bathrobes and they meet in the corridor, and what incredible stories they must have told.
I happened to mention this on a radio program in Washington, and it happened that Hillary Clinton was listening. She promptly called me up at the radio station and invited me to sleep overnight in the White House, so I could wander the corridor with her with my map in hand and figure out where everyone had slept.
So my husband and I sleep over there in the White House, and it turned out the room we were given that night was Winston Churchill’s bedroom. There was no way I could sleep. I was certain he was sitting in the corner drinking his brandy and smoking his ever-present cigar.
In fact, my favorite story about Churchill was that he came to Washington right after Pearl Harbor, and he and Roosevelt were set to sign a document that put what they were calling the Associated Nations against the Axis powers. That morning Roosevelt awakened with a whole new idea of calling them the United Nations against the Axis powers.
He was so excited, he had himself wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom to tell him the news. But it so happened that Churchill was just coming out of the bathtub and had nothing on.
Roosevelt said, “I’m so sorry. I’ll come back in a few moments.” But Churchill, dripping from the tub, has the presence of mind, with nothing on, to say, “Oh, no. Please stay. The prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.”
The next morning, I couldn’t wait to go in the bathtub, and I thought, “I’m in the presence of the greatness of the past.”
DR: You knew Lyndon Johnson, and you helped on his memoirs. You worked at the Johnson White House as a White House Fellow. In hindsight, what would you like to ask him?
DKG: First, it was the most extraordinary experience for me as a twenty-four-year-old White House Fellow to work for Lyndon Johnson. I had been a graduate student at Harvard. I got this White House Fellowship.
The night we were selected, we had a big dance at the White House. Johnson did dance with me. That was not that peculiar, because there were only three women then out of the sixteen White House Fellows.
In the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I’d been active in the anti–Vietnam War movement, and had written an article with a friend of mine that we’d sent to the New Republic that they suddenly published. The title was “How to Remove Lyndon Johnson from Power.”
I was certain he would kick me out of the program. Instead, surprisingly, he said, “Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can’t win her over, no one can.” I did eventually end up working for him in the White House, and then accompanied him to his ranch to help him with his memoirs the last years of his life.
I must say I saw him at a time when all of that energy and the extraordinary skill and legislative wizardry that he had in the mid-1960s was over. There was a sadness in him at the ranch, which is probably why he ended up talking to me so much. If I’d known him at the height of his power, I never would have had that experience. But he knew that the war in Vietnam had cut his legacy in two.
Again, rather than asking him a question now, I’d like to tell him that fifty years later, people are beginning to remember the extraordinary things that he did—Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, the Civil Rights Act, aid to education, fair housing, immigration reform. Any one of those legislative achievements would make a president today. He went to his death, sadly, not knowing that that was going to be.
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.
Douglas agreed somehow to have these seven debates with Lincoln, and this is what made Lincoln a national figure. Debates in those days—when you think about it today, how incredible it must have been—were the biggest sporting event of the times. Before we had a lot of professional sports, people would go to debates by the thousands.
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 got 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.
DR: When the war starts, the North is considered so likely to win that at the First Battle of Bull Run, people come out with picnic tables and carts. They’re going to watch the North annihilate the South. What happened?
DKG: Many of the soldiers ran away from the battle, and it was a humiliation for the North. That night, Lincoln couldn’t sleep, and he saw the soldiers and people coming through Washington and knew what had happened. So he stayed up all night.
This is what Lincoln was like. He just had to figure out what went wrong. He would always write down what he could when something went wrong so that he could learn from mistakes.
He realized the three-month term of army service was too short. Many of these people were about to be out of the service, so they ran away from the battle. He realized the general wasn’t right. The discipline was wrong. As long as he could figure that out and start to change what had happened, then he was able to finally go to sleep.
Always that was his mantra. He said, “As long as I can figure out what I’ve done wrong, I’d like to believe I’m smarter today than I was yesterday because of what I’ve understood about what happened.”
DR: His general at the beginning was George McClellan. Why was McClellan not so effective? Why did he not attack the South?
DKG: Oh, McClellan. When I say I want to live with the people that I love—I did not love George McClellan.
He was very popular among the troops. They loved him. But unlike Grant later, he was always assuming he didn’t have enough troops and that he didn’t have enough supplies. There was a lack of forward movement on his part.
Worse than that, when you read his diary, or you read the letters that he wrote to his wife—which she should never have allowed to be published; his reputation might have been different—he says terrible things about everybody. He says, “The whole cabinet are geese, Lincoln’s stupid. I could be a dictator if I wanted to, they love me so much.”
There’s a famous story where Lincoln went to McClellan’s house one night. This is in 1861. McClellan is coming home from someplace, and he’s supposed to be home soon, and Lincoln’s waiting in the parlor.
McClellan knows that Lincoln is there, but he goes straight up to bed. John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, was there, and he said, “This is the insolence of the epaulet.” And Lincoln says, “I will hold his horse if he wins a battle. That’s all that matters.”
He gives McClellan too many chances—always wanting somebody to have a second chance was one of the weaknesses that he had—keeps him on too long, until finally he decides that McClellan has to go and fires him.
DR: Toward the end of the war, Lincoln gets a general he likes—Ulysses S. Grant. But initially he resisted efforts to free the slaves. Why was that, and why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation?
DKG: He initially resisted it because he didn’t think that the federal government had the power to do anything about slavery, because of the Constitution.
But after the defeat of the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, when McClellan was so out-generaled by Lee, Lincoln said that we were at the end of our rope and that something had to happen. So he went to his summer cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, which is where he would often go to think just to get away from Washington.
In those days, people who wanted to see Lincoln could come in the mornings. They would be lining up outside his office to ask him for a job. These are the days before the Civil Service.
He would spend two hours with these ordinary people. When his secretary said, “You don’t have time for these ordinary people,” he said, “I must never forget the popular assemblage from which I have come.”
But he knew he needed time to think about what to do, so he went to the Soldiers’ Home, and it was there that he began drafting, in the summer of 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation.
He had visited the troops at least a dozen times and realized, as he talked to the soldiers, that slaves were an enormously positive force for the Confederacy. They were working in the camps, they were tending to the kitchens, and they were helping the Confederates in the balance of power.
He began to realize that “I’m commander in chief of the army, and if I can emancipate the slaves to help the war struggle, then I can issue an emancipation proclamation.”
He comes back to his cabinet and he tells them. They’ve been debating for months what to do about slavery. Several people in the cabinet thought he should have done it right away. There were others who thought, “If you do it, the South will never, ever stop fighting. This war will never end.”
Lincoln tells them, “I’m issuing an emancipation proclamation, and I will listen to your advice about its timing and its implementation, but I want you to know I’ve made up my mind about it.”
Seward comes back and says, “I’m with you on this, but you can’t issue it now. It’ll look like it’s part of the defeat of the Peninsula Campaign. Wait until the eagle of victory takes flight.” That’s the way they talked in those days—“Wait until the eagle of victory takes flight.”
So Lincoln waits until the Union victory at Antietam in September. He doesn’t issue it in July. When Lee’s forces are pulled back, he issues the Emancipation Proclamation.
The amazing thing is he meets with the cabinet again, and at that point—even though several of them are still not happy with what he’s doing, and he tells Montgomery Blair, his postmaster general, “I’ll let you file your written objections to anybody”—none of them go against it publicly. So much do they by that time respect Lincoln, they present a united front to the country, which was essential—that the cabinet be together in that important moment.
DR: The Gettysburg Address is very eloquent, and so is Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Why is the Emancipation Proclimation just boilerplate?
DKG: He meant the Emancipation Proclamation to be a legal document, not a speech. Also, he knew that it was so important that this be accepted by as many people as possible in the North. He knew, and was told, that a lot of soldiers would leave the army if he freed the slaves. They were just fighting for the Union, not against slavery.
There were states in the North that passed resolutions saying they might secede from the Union because New England was pushing us into this emancipation. So he wanted the proclamation to be the least incendiary document it could be, so as not to spark the tinder that was already there.
DR: While there are slaves who are freed, and some of them do fight for the North, it still takes a long time for the war to come to an end. The final, critical battles take place in Gettysburg. What happened there?
DKG: They begin to make Lee’s army retreat. But the hard thing for Lincoln about Gettysburg was that they were sending telegrams to General Meade and saying to him, “Just don’t let Lee’s army escape, no matter what you do.” Unfortunately, Meade did let Lee’s army escape.
The soldiers from the North were decimated as well. They were exhausted. Lincoln later understood why that might have been so, but it was one of the biggest moments of depression for him when they heard that Lee’s army had escaped.
He wrote a long letter to General Meade saying, “I’m immeasurably distressed you didn’t do what we asked you to do. Had you been able to get Lee’s army, the war might have ended in a few months. Now it could go on year after year.”
But he knew that that would paralyze the general, who was in the field, so he did what he often did in these moments: he wrote what he called a “hot letter” to General Meade. He would then put these hot letters aside, hoping he would cool down psychologically and never need to send them.
When his papers were opened in the twentieth century, underneath this one to Meade was written “Never sent and never signed.” He did that dozens of times.
It seems to me that would be a good thing for people in today’s world of Twitter to learn. Just write a hot Twitter account, don’t post it.
DR: After Gettysburg, although Meade did not pursue Lee the way Lincoln would have preferred, ultimately the North does prevail. Grant becomes a great general. He defeats Lee. Was Lincoln’s view that Lee and the South should be humiliated at the surrender at Appomattox?
DKG: Without question, no. Lincoln understood early on—and he made it known to Grant—that he wanted to treat the South with as much leniency as possible, even in terms of what he hoped would happen to the Confederate leaders. He knew that if they stayed in the United States, there would be a wish to put them on trial. He didn’t want that.
He hoped they would kind of escape—go somewhere else, so that they didn’t have to be caught. He hoped that the government could give the soldiers in the South guns so that they could go back to their farms, give them back their horses, not take away their personal property.
And indeed, on the last day of Lincoln’s life, when Grant came to the cabinet to talk about the terms that he had given to Lee’s army and to the soldiers, that was what Lincoln wanted, and he was so happy.
That’s what’s so sad. That day was probably the happiest day he’d had in his life. His son Robert was back from the war. He and Mary went together that afternoon on a carriage ride and talked about how difficult the years had been for her. They’d lost their son Willie, the favorite kid in the family, at ten years old.
And the Lincolns said maybe they could dream about what would happen after the presidency. He wanted to go to California more than anywhere, over the Rockies. She wanted to go to Europe. They had the sense of a future before them.
He’s at the White House talking to a bunch of his friends that night. He used to go to the theater for recreation. He went a hundred times, during the Civil War, to the theater—more than a hundred times. He said, like Roosevelt with his famous cocktail hours, that for a few precious hours he could go back to another time and forget the war that was raging.
But that night he didn’t want to go, he was so happy talking to his friends in the White House. But he had given his word, and it was in the newspapers that morning that he was going to go. So he said to them, “I’d rather stay, but I’ve given my word, so I have to go to the theater.”
DR: The night before he goes, he gives his last speech at the White House, and he talks about incendiary things. John Wilkes Booth was standing there, listening. What made Booth so upset?
DKG: What Lincoln talked about that night was the possibility of giving the vote to black soldiers. John Wilkes Booth turned to the person next to him, one of the conspirators, and said—in worse words—“That means Negro citizenship. We have to get him.”
DR: He plotted not just to kill Lincoln but to kill three people. Who were the three?
DKG: He was going to kill Seward and Andrew Johnson, the vice president, and Lincoln. The conspirators did actually go to Seward’s house. It’s an extraordinary scene. Seward lived with his wife and his daughter and son in a mansion that’s right where the Hay-Adams hotel is right now.
The guy comes in with a knife and pretends that he’s bringing a prescription medicine for Seward, because Seward had been in a carriage accident several weeks earlier and had broken his jaw. The attacker goes into Seward’s room and he slashes Seward’s jaw. The only reason Seward lived was that his jaw had been wired, so the assailant didn’t hit the artery that he would otherwise have.
The guy who was supposed to kill Andrew Johnson was staying at a hotel. At the last minute he goes and has a drink at the bar, and he decides not to do it.
But, of course, John Wilkes Booth comes to the back of the Lincolns’ box at the Ford’s Theatre because he was known in the theater as an actor. His brother Edwin Booth was the most famous Shakespearean actor at the time, whom Lincoln had met and admired.
They let him into the back of the box. He shoots Lincoln, as we know, in the back of the head.
The doctor said Lincoln should have died instantly, but he didn’t die, he was so vital. They said he stayed alive until that next morning, and then Stanton gives the words that have come down to us. “Now,” Stanton said, “he belongs to the ages.” The very thing he had dreamed of—that he’d be remembered over time.
The famous editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast offered a rosy view of post–Civil War life for emancipated African Americans, contrasting scenes of freedom with scenes of the horrors of slavery.
DR: It took you ten years to write this book. At the beginning, you mentioned to Steven Spielberg that you were doing this, and he said he was going to make a movie out of it, and he did. What part did he choose, and were you upset that he only used four pages out of your seven hundred?
DKG: No, no! The whole point is, did he get the man, Lincoln, that I thought I knew? He got this man who was an incredibly great political genius, who was able to trade for what he wanted yet was a transformative leader.
I’d met Spielberg because he was doing a documentary on the century that had just passed. He’d always wanted to make a movie about Lincoln. He said it would be the culmination of his life. He had read Franklin and Eleanor, so he asked me if he could have first dibs when I finished the Lincoln book—like there’s going to be twelve Steven Spielbergs wanting to do this book. Of course I said yes.
Then, whenever he was on a movie set, he would call me—he hadn’t bought the rights yet, he had just optioned them at this point—and he would say, “What did Lincoln do today?” And I’d tell him, “Lincoln was at the courthouse today,” “He’s on the legal circuit,” or “He was telling a funny story.” That’s the way Spielberg would relax between his other movies.
He finally put two scriptwriters on it even before I finished the book, and they both wrote really good scripts. But to neither of those scripts did Daniel Day-Lewis [who had been cast as Lincoln] say yes.
Finally Tony Kushner started working on the script, and I worked with him. At first he had something like a seven-hundred-page script. Chase was a big figure in it. The cabinet was a big figure in it.
But the filmmakers knew they had to focus on a smaller subject instead of telling a bigger story where you wouldn’t get into his character. The plot was less important than what it showed about Lincoln.
Finally Daniel says yes to the screenplay, and Spielberg called me the next day and he said, “Daniel wants a year to become Lincoln, so we’re not going to announce that he’s Lincoln yet, but I want you to take him to Springfield. He going to come under an assumed name, and you’ll take him around and show him all the sights.”
We get to the hotel, and I say, “We’re just supposed to eat in the hotel, right, with you under this assumed name?” He said, “Oh, no, let’s go to a bar.”
So we went to a bar, and immediately somebody bought us drinks, and I thought, “Oh my God. It’s already over.” But they didn’t recognize him; they recognized me. It became a huge joke between us.
For an entire year, as he’s preparing for the role, I’m sending him books, and we’re talking, we’re texting each other, and he’s becoming Lincoln. He’s reading about Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster.
I went to the filming in Richmond, Virginia—it was great the way that Richmond opened its doors to this film. It felt like a reconciliation between North and South.
Daniel was by now Lincoln. He never was out of character. Even the other actors had to call him Mr. President or Mr. Lincoln. It was an extraordinary experience to watch Lincoln come to life.
DR: Let’s go to baseball for a moment. Why do you care about baseball?
DKG: I grew up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in Long Island when the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the Giants were all there at the same time. My father came from Brooklyn and loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. He taught me how to keep score when I was six years old. He would come home, and I would recount every single play that had taken place that afternoon.
It made me think, “There’s something special about history, even if it’s only five hours old, keeping my father’s attention.” I’m convinced I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father, because at first, I’d be so excited I would blurt out, “The Dodgers won!” or “The Dodgers lost!” which took the drama of this two-hour telling away. I finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end.
My father died before I got married and had my three sons. But I have given them that love of my father through the stories I’ve told and through baseball. I then went to Harvard and became an equally irrational Red Sox fan. My kids are now Red Sox fans. I can sit there at a game with the kids and just imagine myself a young girl once more in the presence of my father watching my players—Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges—and it’s a magical thing, because then I can feel as if my father is still there.
Even though they never met their grandfather, they’ve heard about him through the stories I’ve told, which is why I love history. We make these people who were part of our families and part of our country’s history come back to life.
