Freedom

...The right thought we should have fought an anti-Communist war...

...The climax of Freedom comes at the book's close, after more than a thousand pages devoted, in the main, to Lincoln's defeats, military and political...

...And while Lincoln had not decided on war out of hatred for slavery, hatred, it appeared, was needed to firm up his army emotionally, and bring it the recruits it required...

...Modern historians have indicated that they are now opposed to narrative form in the writing of history...

...And his war, Lincoln finally came to see, could not be won...

...Now the figures of Roman history were at least as articulate as nineteenth-century Americans, and the situations they found themselves in were often extraordinary...

...Let us call it a work of intellectual journalism, of which this century has seen some very great examples...

...From which one must assume that in C. Vann Woodward's judgment, Freedom does not offer enough to the "finicky"—this is Woodward's word—to be worth reading...

...He quotes Edmund Wilson's remark on the articulateness of almost everyone in the period, and asks: With such articulate individuals, and "a script that outdoes fiction for improbability . . . why resort to fiction...

...To which there is a corollary: Facts lose interest when not in a story...

...And they often describe their feelings in a way which makes us speculate on the kind of columnists they might have been in other circumstances—Mr...

...One idea that I was left with after having read Freedom—an idea certainly not proved, but then little is proved by historical fact—is that even during the nineteenth century, we Americans were not capable of fighting an unideological war...

...though he never expected the Southern blacks to revolt, and was not disappointed that they did not...

...Our weakness in this respect was demonstrated during the Vietnam fiasco...

...So it will be seen that Mr...

...Now hatred is what the Abolitionists alone could supply...

...Safire who are ready to reintroduce into historical accounts that element of story telling without which facts lack any color or quality, and cannot persuade us to remember them...

...Now that President Johnson did not want to fight in this way does him credit, in my view...

...But it had already become apparent by the time of Nixon's election that if it was dangerous to fight an ideological war in Vietnam, without a fighting ideology we might actually be defeated, a dilemma for the American President in 1968 not unlike that faced by Lincoln between 1861 and 1863...

...W illiam Safire has written a wise and often absorbing account of the first two years of the Civil War, from the First Manassas (Bull Run) defeat of the Union Army in 1861, to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which at least gave some promise of Union victory...

...And then, on the first day of 1863, Lincoln announces his Emancipation Proclamation, sought from the outset of the war by the Abolitionists...

...If Mr...

...The hero of this account—most certainly not a novel despite its publisher's claim—is hardly a dramatic creation of Mr...

...Professor C. Vann Woodward in the New York Review of Books has even asked, " . . . is it worth reading...

...I have in mind the love relationships of John Breckinridge, the Senator from Kentucky (later to be a general in the Confederate Army), with the Abolitionist Anna Carroll, and also with the Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow (the double liaison is an invention of Mr...

...Satire's unnovelistic treatment of them we are left only with the fact of their unconventionality, but without a clue as to how they were socially regarded...

...Lincoln would surely have made a columnist to excite even Mr...

...And something else has restricted the author...

...but these are the very reasons which made Corneille write of Pompey, Sertorius, and Horatius, Racine of Britannicus and Berenice...

...Safire has given himself a most significant task, and if I am right about how he has acquitted himself at it, this country and its literature are greatly in his debt...

...T hough I am by no means the only 1 reviewer to have found Freedom interesting, I do seem to be among the very few who have found an importance in it that goes beyond its evident readability...

...Safire also shows us Lincoln making every effort to get along militarily without it...

...What they have in mind is something I came to think myself many years ago when in an essay on Georges Bataille I penned this sentence: "A story is true to the degree that it is not a story...

...Safire sometimes satisfies this first requirement of the novelist, he often fails the second...

...I have in mind Gide's Journey to the Congo, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, and, greatest of all, The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn...

...Can there really be any legitimate reason for questioning the worth of an original slant on the first two years of our Civil War, and this by a man who at least can write, even if he is not a professional historian...

...At that time, the point was constantly made by the political right that President Johnson had erred in trying to fight the war without justifying it ideologically...

...Are Americans still incapable of fighting an unideological war...

...From Mr...

...How Lincoln was prevailed upon by events to yield to the ideological promptings of the Abolitionists makes not only fascinating but instructive reading...

...I must also say against Freedom (considering it for a moment as a novel) that while its action develops, the characters who are entangled in it—with the possible exception of the President—do not, so that we can hardly ever feel that we have come to know them better...

...unhappily, Mr...

...Such a goal had little meaning to the Abolitionists so long as Washington had not publicly committed itself to cleansing the South of slavery...

...Safire makes it clear that Lincoln was unable to fight successfully so long as he did not commit himself to the Abolitionist ideology...

...The Proclamation was just a war measure and Lincoln understood it to be essentially that...

...The possibilities of drama for an American politician caught in such involvements are most intriguing...

...And while the events in Freedom are only occasionally of the kind one expects in a novel, the narrative does turn up situations which have novelistic interest...

...Safire's...

...If the Romans came from Aeneas, then the French came from Andromache, and that is why she and Astyanax emerge safely from the tragedy of Racine's play...

...FREEDOM William Safire/Doubleday/$24.95 Lionel Abel 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 Surely Professor Woodward knows as well as anyone that in the great theatre of the French seventeenth century, every story told by Livy and Tacitus was dramatized...

...I bring this matter up again because it has not been sufficiently noted that Freedom was conceived and actually begun while its author was a speechwriter for President Nixon, then trying to end our venture in Southeast Asia...

...Safire's Freedom can be classed with such outstanding works of mind, and loses nothing in our literary estimation when not regarded as a novel...

...Satire is, it seems to me, less intrigued by the incidence of erotic feeling in a political context than in the incidence of political feeling in an erotic one...

...If we try to think of some American figure we might plausibly compare with the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, we soon find we have no one at all in our literature, and in life only Lincoln...

...and refuses to answer his own question...

...If our historians from now on turn their backs on narration there are still gifted writers like Mr...

...Historical fact, it seems, may restrict literary invention, even as it may inspire it...

...For an ideological war at that time could easily have brought us into conflict with China...

...It has been said that the novelist lends his characters his vision without taking their place...

...But more is involved here than a taste for extraordinary characters and improbable situations, yielding different results to different writers...

...timental cast of mind in his full manliness before us...

...And our biographers, including Carl Sandburg, and our fiction writers, like Gore Vidal, have, in writing of Lincoln, done only partial justice to him, not having set the man with his unsenLionel Abel, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is author of Metatheatre, Intellectual Follies, and most recently, Important Nonsense (Prometheus Books...

...Satire, being none other than President Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, probably the most interesting individual—from a psychological as well as from a dramatic standpoint—to have appeared (in life or in print) on American soil...

...Safire, dealing with real individuals taken from historical records, did not have all the freedom to invent a novelist must have...

...I was struck by this detail: the two women involved sentimentally with Senator Breckenridge seem as free from sexual inhibition as the most aristocratic Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century's salons, and as interested in political ideas...

...Now I find this argument from a historian we all have to respect just amazing...

...His aim was simply to allay the rage against him of the Abolitionists, who had criticized him for fighting his war, not theirs...

...One wonders: To what extent did Anna Carroll and Rose O'Neal Greenhow depart from the accepted mores of their time...

...The war that Lincoln wanted to fight was to have as its sole political goal the vindication of the republic by force of arms...

...President Lyndon Johnson had no inkling of this historical weakness of ours—and his—and was not helped to understand it by the Democratic party's favorite historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., when a decision as to whether to intervene in Vietnam was before our government...

...Now we Americans hardly have a history to match that of either France or Rome, and there are not many Americans who know their own history well...

...If Freedom is not to be regarded either as a novel or as a scholarly history—I think it is because he took it from a scholar's viewpoint that C. Vann Woodward came to question its usefulness—then by what standard are we to judge it...

...The important fact about the drama of seventeenth-century France is that the writers of that period regarded Roman history as continuous with France's, the French, in their view, being the real inheritors of Rome...

...Satire's envy...