THOMAS J. CRAUGHWELL: Treasures From the Attic
Emerson, Jason
esting case for the view that Bill Clinton was the “greatest huckster ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” that the Clinton era was, in some respects, “a holiday from history,” and...
...Emerson characterizes Robert Lincoln as a classic Victorian gentleman motivated by a profound sense of duty...
...After reading Emerson’s arguments and the documentary evidence he has marshaled to support them, I am now convinced that Mary Lincoln was not of sound mind, and that Robert Todd Lincoln, while not exactly the most lovable character in American history, was not the coldhearted bastard I took him to be...
...In letters to friends Mary could not bring herself to write her son’s name, referring to him as “the young man” or using his initials...
...the lessthanflattering role her friends James and Myra Bradwell played in the case...
...esting case for the view that Bill Clinton was the “greatest huckster ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” that the Clinton era was, in some respects, “a holiday from history,” and that there is an astounding and disturbing number of questions about the probity of the Clintons...
...Once his viewpoint is understood (about halfway through the first page of the introduction), the author’s style is pleasing: amusing and brisk, and spiced with unusual or invented words (e.g., crapulent, repristinated, scortatory, rastaquouere, apolaustic, preposterosity, sempiternal...
...As I write, he is awaiting sentence after one of the most sensational fraud trials of recent years, with the prospect of years of litigation ahead...
...She sent him long lists itemizing all the gifts she had ever presented to Robert and his wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln—jewelry, furniture, books, even clothing given years earlier and worn out long ago— and demanded that everything be returned to her...
...If Black goes to prison, I trust he will take Addison with him...
...Whatever force of nature propelled him to the pinnacle of power and influence he wielded for nearly two decades has by no means deserted him in extremis...
...The book is, first of all, a sympathetic portrait of Mary Lincoln, a woman who showed signs of mental illness long before the assassination of her husband, Abraham Lincoln, on April 14, 1865 (although that event is generally considered the poor woman’s breaking point...
...It enables the Catholic Black to share the Quaker Nixon’s fascination with the amorality of megalomaniacs such as Mao...
...Some were also uncontroversial, such as Patricia Hearst...
...Black’s empathy with Nixon is a great asset...
...Yet he is undaunted, unrepentant, unabashed...
...In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have tended to regard Mary Lincoln as an eccentric who was railroaded into an asylum by her unfeeling son Robert...
...and the intense feelings of resentment and even hostility Mary nurtured against her son Robert Todd Lincoln in the years after her release from Bellevue...
...It isn’t conclusive, but the case it makes requires a response from its subjects...
...In one droll footnote, for example, Black quotes Bobby Kennedy’s waspish remark about Clark Clifford’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, that President Johnson “might as well have named Attila the Hun...
...In summer 2005, independent scholar Jason Emerson hit the jackpot—twenty forgotten, neverbeforepublished letters written by Mary Lincoln...
...Yet while some biographers of Mary Lincoln have accused Robert of scheming to get his hands on his mother’s money, Emerson has collected a small mountain of letters written by Mary’s family and friends assuring Robert that he had done the right thing in placing his mother “under the B O O K S I N R E V I E W “Congratulations . on forty successful years...
...the thrilling discovery of long-lost documents...
...In keeping with his treatment program, which emphasized “rest, diet, baths, fresh air, occupation, diversion, change of scene, no more medicine than… absolutely necessary, and the least possible restraint,” Dr...
...But there is nothing ordinary about Conrad Black...
...As his mother’s behavior became more and more erratic Robert felt obliged to collect medical opinions of her condition from physicians (he consulted at least half a dozen), and then to arrange for the trial that would determine if his mother should be institutionalized...
...Mary Lincoln even took pleasure in the thought that her son would end up in hell...
...Taken together, these documents offer scholars what they have never had before: fresh insights into Mary’s mental and physical condition before she was sent to Bellevue...
...As for the building, all the rooms were large, airy, well lit, and elegantly furnished...
...Tyrrell squarely raises the question of whether the Clintons are frauds, confidence tricksters, and lowlifes, or whether the admiration of their many supporters is justified and they have been shabbily treated...
...shrewd analysis of the people, the period, and the sources...
...Live and learn...
...Face to face with catastrophe, including the loss of his fortune, his reputation, and his liberty, Black has refused to contemplate defeat...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W 86 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 specific mental illness, Emerson called in John M. Suarez of the Department of Psychiatry, Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles, and James S. Brust, M.D., chair of the department of psychiatry and medical director of the psychiatric unit at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, San Pedro, California, to evaluate the case...
...Bellevue was a private sanitarium run by Dr...
...The discovery of these letters is thrilling, but the documents themselves are only useful if they are set within their historical context, and that is what Emerson does so well in The Madness of Mary Lincoln...
...There were 20 women staying at Bellevue when Mary Lincoln was admitted...
...Indeed, it requires no great prescience to predict that, if the worst came to the worst, Conrad Black would pursue his new literary vocation even within the confines of a federal penitentiary...
...She excoriated her son as one “of the greatest scoundrels of the age,” warning him that in the afterlife when she was reunited with Abraham Lincoln and her three dead sons, Robert would not be permitted to come near them...
...the actions she took to win her release from the sanitarium...
...She says she will never again allow you to come into her presence,” Uncle Ninian wrote Robert...
...Pardongate” may have elicited an exaggerated response, but a large number of the 140 recipients were convicted drug dealers, some sponsored by both Clintons’ brothers...
...Patterson],” as Mary’s closest friend, Sally Orne put it...
...In addition to the Mary Lincoln letters, Emerson found five other previously unknown letters written to the president’s widow during this unhappy chapter in her life...
...Treasures From the Attic AMERICAN HISTORIANS DREAM of finding a cache of Lincoln letters the way the rest of us dream of picking six winning numbers for Powerball Lotto...
...Richard J. Patterson...
...Johnson advised a writer who wanted to cultivate an “elegant but not ostentatious” style to “give his days and nights to the volumes of [Joseph] Addison...
...This is an enjoyable and very readable political polemic...
...In an attempt to identify Mary Lincoln’s B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 5 The Madness of Mary Lincoln By Jason Emerson (SOUTHERN ILLINOISUNIVERSITY PRESS, 304 PAGES, $29.95) Reviewed by Thomas J. Craughwell Thomas J. Craughwell is the author of Stealing Lincoln’s Body (Harvard University Press, 2007...
...A Fundamentally Decent Man NO ORDINARY PERSON, deprived of a global newspaper empire that had taken a lifetime to create, would embark on an entirely new career as a biographer of presidents...
...Nor was Mary shipped off to some Dickensian madhouse...
...And these are not letters from some random period in Mary’s life—these letters date from “the insanity episode,” as Emerson calls it, the months before, during, and after her 1875 confinement in the Bellevue Place Sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois...
...At the nadir of a lifetime of vicissitudes, Richard Nixon remarked to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig: “Some of the best writing in history has been done from prison...
...that defense-sensitive technology was exported to China at a time when China was a source of large contributions to the Democratic Party...
...The Clinton theory of a “right-wing conspiracy” to smear critics is nonsense, and Robert Tyrrell, who is usually represented as one of the chief conspirators (with this magazine), properly debunks this myth...
...There were no bars on the windows, just a white wire netting or screen, and the doors were only locked at night...
...The author’s views of the Clintons are well known, and he spares the readers the hypocrisy of many partisan historians and journalists who try to masquerade as even-handed evaluators of public figures...
...Black observes that this “dark, ironic, recondite cynicism” was “often one of his most attractive qualities...
...Painful as it is to read such letters, they do give us, at last, a clearer picture of the state of Mary Lincoln’s mind, as well as the true character of Robert Lincoln...
...This was a confection of Hillary’s and has become part of the Clinton gospel, but it was made from whole cloth and was always partly a diversionary red herring, and the rest outright paranoia...
...We do not know what is best to be done...
...Why Mary Lincoln suddenly went about armed is unknown, but her sister and brotherinlaw, Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, feared Mary planned to use it on Robert the next time he visited his mother...
...The Clinton party cannot simply shrug, smile, call it another “nice conservative hit job,” and pretend that the Clintons are beyond reproach...
...It enables him to identify with the president’s bizarre insecurity about social status: the eternal underdog in the White House, who loved the proximity of the rich and famous while despising their culture and politics...
...Mary Lincoln was not so forgiving...
...And she started carrying a pistol...
...carriages and sleighs were at her disposal to take her on outings off the grounds...
...He would not, of course, be alone in this pursuit...
...Like all the other patients, she had freedom to wander Bellevue’s 20 acres of lawns, woodland, and gardens...
...WHILE MAKING THE CASE for Mary’s mental instability, Emerson also rehabilitates the reputation of her sole surviving son, Robert...
...Patterson would not accept patients who were violent or destructive...
...Patterson lived there with his wife and two adult children...
...Clinton enthusiasts cannot simply ignore the allegations that the former president committed perjury, that his wife parlayed $1,000 into $100,000 in a day of commodity trading, illegally...
...and it’s a pleasure to read...
...Mary was welcome to take her meals with the Pattersons, or privately in her suite...
...JOE DONNER T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 40th ANNIVERSARY B O O K S I N R E V I E W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 8 7 loving care and wise guidance [of Dr...
...It has everything—a compelling story...
...He climbed Everest and became famous six years after she was born and christened...
...Kennedy misjudged Clifford,” Black comments, “who had already concluded the Vietnam War could not be won on any acceptable basis...
...Clearly Robert Lincoln had not packed his mother off to some hellhole...
...or even that the Clintons repeat canards, such as that Hillary was named after the New Zealand conqueror of Mount Everest, Edmund Hillary...
...It is simply a breathtaking find, and the fact that Emerson stumbled on the letters in an old steamer trunk tucked away in the Towers family’s attic (Frederic N. Towers had been Robert Lincoln’s attorney) gives the discovery an almost fairy tale quality...
...Here is a model of the historian’s art...
...That is not to say that Attila, if available, might not have been a competent nominee...
...Mr...
...She would not let him touch her, denounced him as “wicked...
...In keeping with her status, she was given a suite of two rooms with a private bath on the second floor in the part of the building that served as the Patterson family’s residence (Dr...
...Think of Lenin and Gandhi...
...If at the bottom of the trunk Emerson had also turned up a hand-drawn map with “X” marking the spot where Jefferson Davis buried the gold from the Confederate treasury, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised...
...The psychiatrists believe she suffered from Bipolar Disorder, which would account for the periods of depression, wild mood swings, reckless shopping binges, and hallucinations—at the time of her committal to Bellevue, Mary complained that the spirit of an Indian removed, then replaced, her scalp, picked bones out of her face, and drew wires from her eyes...
...There is plenty of it in this book, for a black, sardonic humor is as characteristic of the author as it is of his subject...
...God is just,” she wrote to a friend, “retributionmust follow those who act wickedly in this life...
...For the sake of such delicious lines, the reader will forgive Black his occasional baroque extravagances...
...Black knows all about the ruthless self-reliance that enabled Nixon to return again and again from the political dead, but which also rendered Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full By Conrad Black (PUBLICAFFAIRS, 1,148 PAGES, $40) Reviewed by Daniel Johnson Daniel Johnson is a writer living in London...
...Finally, I’d like to make a prediction: Jason Emerson’s The Madness of Mary Lincoln will become a classic of American history...
...He cared exclusively for women who suffered from nervous disorders, or depression, or had suicidal tendencies...
...Jason Emerson, then, places himself squarely in the camp of those biographers and historians who believe that Mary Lincoln suffered from a severe mental illness...
...After her release from Bellevue (she stayed there four months) her rage against her son escalated...
...a fascinating cast of characters...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
