LINCOLN AND KENNEDY
Current, Richard N.
LINCOLN and KENNEDY by RICHARD N. CURRENT We must "get right" with Abraham Lincoln. So once declared the junior Senator from Lincoln's home state, Everett M. Dirksen. Getting right with Lincoln...
...He is the author of "The Lincoln Nobody Knows," "Mr...
...Slaves fleeing from ol' massa used to follow the North Star...
...The Buchanan Democrats in Illinois were doing their worst to defeat their fellow Democrat, Douglas...
...So, in effect, Buchanan was on Lincoln's side...
...The ayes have it...
...But Lincoln and the Republicans needed the votes of those same anti-foreigner and anti-Catholic Know-Nothings (or "Native Americans...
...These divisive issues included that of civil rights...
...And nothing here is intended to exalt Kennedy...
...The juxtaposition of the heavenly bodies being what it is, the advent of John F. Kennedy to the Presidency cries out to commentators for comparison with the advent of Abraham Lincoln...
...Such is the kind of comment that has been heard or read during the past several months...
...As for the crisis, it is of course upon us, but let us pray that nothing comparable to the Civil War ensues, to make Kennedy the center of celebrations when the earth has revolved around the sun another hundred times...
...Four of his appointees had been his rivals for the Presidential nomination...
...Quite recently, since World War II, a new principle has begun to control Cabinet appointments...
...None of them, so far as is known, ever reached it...
...He did not jeopardize his objectives by pressing them prematurely...
...But thousands found their way to freedom in the Northern states or in Canada...
...Douglas afterward tried to call attention to the contradiction between Lincoln's Chicago and Charleston statements...
...He has filled it, the experts say, with men who may be able enough but who are no such robust politicians as Lincoln chose...
...The play had been put together, skillfully and interestingly, from the actual words of the rivals...
...He could get along with individuals and groups who could not get along with one another...
...Five—Lincoln presided at a time when the country took a major turn in its history, and he had a moving part in this...
...Privately, Lincoln had written: "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy...
...He usually acted as if he were more capable than the men around him...
...And now, a word of caution," he added...
...He had a sense of timing and a knowledge of the art of the possible...
...Now, nothing said here is intended to denigrate Lincoln...
...And this brings to mind the contrast of Lincoln's "humility...
...Getting right with Lincoln has become an imperative of American politics...
...He may, or may not, prove to be outstanding in the Presidential office...
...He had plenty of self-confidence...
...No one knew where he stood on questions like Fort Sumter until he had read his inaugural address, and even then no one could be quite sure...
...Throughout the Nineteenth Century, and well into the Twentieth, a President seldom chose technical experts for his top advisers...
...He selected men to whom he owed political debts or to whom he looked for the political strengthening of his administration...
...This fact—rather than Lincoln's mastery of supposedly strong men—is the real point of the story in which "the ayes have it...
...As judged by the first of these items, Kennedy has done pretty well so far...
...His "Last Full Measure" won the Bancroft Prize in 1956...
...Two—Lincoln had convictions but not doctrinaire notions...
...John Foster Dulles had groomed himself consciously for the State Department job...
...He could arouse enthusiasm and a sense of dedication in support of his policies...
...They say he is "arrogant...
...There should be little doubt of his political skill...
...However, Lincoln was not so humble as he often has been described...
...One—Lincoln was an effective politician, skilled in the arts of getting and holding the support of other politicians and the people...
...he was not the sort who could win election to high office...
...Deliberately he followed a strategy of avoidance, counseling Republican campaigners to keep silent on all issues that might divide the party...
...In 1860, as a Presidential candidate, he made no public statements at all...
...He did not look upon them as a regular council...
...Regarding the second, third, and fourth points, Kennedy has shown promise, but only time will tell the extent of his achievement...
...Nobody knows where Jack really stands...
...Confidentially he averred that he had never been in such a place...
...Dean Acheson brought this quality (and not political strength) to the Truman Administration...
...The Kennedy men are gray and colorless, and largely bureaucrats...
...The Secretaries are his creatures, answerable to him...
...This was in Chicago, peopled largely by anti-slavery and freesoil settlers from New England and the Northeast...
...Still, he has done as well as, or better than, Lincoln in letting the people know what to expect of him once he was in office...
...But it is unfair to contrast him with a more or less imaginary Lincoln...
...Seward is a case in point...
...The wise men of press and RICHARD N. CURRENT, professor of American History at the University of Wisconsin, is one of the nation's foremost authorities on Abraham Lincoln and his times...
...Instead of a politician, Rusk is a career bureaucrat, if not a career diplomat...
...Four—Lincoln was articulate and eloquent...
...We need not take seriously the charge that Kennedy has chosen weak men so that he can dominate them...
...Which was nobly said...
...Very Lincolnian, but hardly Kennedian...
...In the case of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson would have been the almost inevitable choice if he had not accepted the Vice-Presidential nomination...
...We must first abstract Lincoln's qualities as a statesman and then judge Kennedy according to them...
...Independent though his secretaries were, Lincoln quickly made himself their master...
...He could state his convictions and aims in prose worthy of them...
...The Lincoln-Douglas debates, as every schoolboy presumably knows, laid bare the issues of the moment (1858) with vigor, honesty, and insight...
...He was a great President, probably the greatest of all...
...The recent play, The Rivals, in which Raymond Massey played the role of Lincoln and Martin Gabel that of Stephen A. Douglas, portrayed a Lincoln eloquent for freedom and equality in contrast to a Douglas trimming his remarks to fit his own ambitions...
...Lincoln knew this was not so...
...Despite the constraints of television, Kennedy and Nixon were able to engage in some double-talk and back-tracking, on subjects like Cuba and Quemoy...
...According to the traditional principle of selection, Nelson Rockefeller would have been the logical man for Secretary of State if Nixon had won the election...
...About us here," he confessed in a letter from Springfield, "they are mostly my old political and personal friends, and I have hoped their organization would die out without the painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them...
...The mythical Lincoln is invaluable as a symbol...
...The actual Lincoln did not, for instance, speak out quite so clearly and nobly, during his rise to the Presidency, as has been supposed...
...Kennedy, with his "New Frontier," is vague enough...
...Seven noes and one aye," he quipped...
...He was more capable...
...Attorney-General Edward Bates and Interior Secretary Caleb B. Smith, to name two of them, were gray and colorless enough...
...There is no reason he should have done so...
...Three—Lincoln managed to keep ahead of the people, but not too far ahead...
...At first glance it would seem a good thing to appoint men with special training for their tasks...
...When he did not dominate his Cabinet, Lincoln disregarded it...
...Another President, Warren G. Harding, did much the same thing when he put at the head of the Justice Department the man who had masterminded his campaign, Harry M. Daugherty...
...He was mentally flexible...
...And, with us, one hundred is a magic number, as witness the significance we attach to centennials...
...During that Lincoln-Douglas campaign for the Senate, Lincoln made a rousing speech on the all-men-arecreated-equal theme...
...He has said little to confirm, or elaborate upon, the bold civil rights plank of his party's platform...
...It would be no trick for Kennedy to dominate his Cabinet...
...The diary-keeping Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, jotted down frequent complaints that the President seldom consulted his Secretaries as a group...
...Orbiting in its accustomed path, the earth, after revolving a hundred times around the sun, has reached again approximately the same position it occupied when Lincoln was preparing to take over the United States government...
...From their lucubrations it appears that there has been a lamentable falling off in statesmanship since Lincoln's time...
...He could clarify issues...
...Lincoln," and, with J. G. Randall, "Lincoln the President...
...radio and TV have responded...
...When it came to picking a Cabinet, President-elect Lincoln was not afraid to surround himself with advisers who were strong in their own right...
...One of the four—William H. Seward, the Secretary of State—was better known and, in the East, more admired than Lincoln...
...It is good to have an ideal to aspire toward, even though it never can be attained...
...As for Kennedy's Cabinet, its composition does differ somewhat from Lincoln's...
...What seems like Ken-endy's most startling new departure in Cabinet appointments, the naming of his brother to the Attorney General's office, is perhaps not quite so new and different as it appears...
...Customarily he named a leading party rival to the State Department, as Lincoln did with Seward, or Woodrow Wilson with William Jennings Bryan, or Franklin D. Roosevelt with Cordell Hull...
...Specifications for the Cabinet are not provided in the Constitution or in law, and essentially the Cabinet is what the President makes it...
...During the campaign of 1860 he declined to take an open stand even when he was accused of being seen coming out of a Know-Nothing lodge...
...Yet, for the most part, Kennedy and Nixon were every bit as clear and consistent as Lincoln and Douglas...
...Lincoln continued to hold his tongue on controversial issues during the winter after his election, while the nation was going to pieces...
...Buchanan and Douglas then were at outs...
...If Lincoln and Douglas had been on television, they would have found it difficult to shift their arguments as they sometimes did...
...Viewed objectively, he provides a standard by which to measure present-day politicians...
...Our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny the charge, by which some degree of offense would be given to the Americans"— that is, to the Know-Nothings...
...And, in the new day of the organization man, perhaps something of spontaneity and originality may be lost if we have in policy-making positions too many organization men —too many bureaucratic insiders...
...In Charleston he said he was no more in favor of giving equality in social or political rights to Negroes than was any other white man...
...Opinions may differ on the question of whether the new trend in Cabinet-making is healthful for the republic...
...It should be remembered, too, that Lincoln did his debating when he was running for the Senatorship, not the Presidency...
...Lincoln spoke out of the other side of his mouth at Charleston, in southern Illinois, where people from Kentucky and the Southeast had settled...
...For the most part, Kennedy has found places outside the Cabinet for the men who, according to the older practice, would have been given positions inside it—men like Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles, and Ave-rell Harriman...
...Everybody knew where Abe stood...
...Most of his Cabinet appointees, despite present-day impressions to the contrary, were run-of-the-mill politicians...
...The historical Lincoln also has his uses...
...Robert Kennedy happens to be closely related to John F. Kennedy, but he is also the man who managed the President's campaign for nomination and election...
...Some degree of technical experience and expertise is now a desideratum...
...Since his times were so different from ours, however, we cannot well make detailed and specific comparisons...
...The need is especially urgent now, in the light of certain astronomical facts...
...The Kennedy-Nixon debates —why, these were not debates at all...
...Not all comparisons are odious, perhaps, but comparing Kennedy with Lincoln has been a little like comparing, say, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan with King Arthur...
...He looks it...
...To some Republicans he seems the dominating and domineering type...
...Lincoln accused Douglas of conspiring with President James Buchanan and others to fix slavery upon the entire nation...
...Indeed, he came out with no statement at all...
...As for the change of nepotism (to get back to the comparison between Kennedy and Lincoln), it might be recalled that if Lincoln put no brother Bob in his Cabinet, he did get for his son Bob a rather cushy job as captain on General U. S. Grant's staff...
...The speeches had been edited in such a way, however, as to make Lincoln appear more straightforward and consistent than he really was...
...Not impossible, only difficult...
...For the Lincoln of whom we hear is more a legendary than a historical figure...
...And why not...
...In the real debates, Lincoln and Douglas seldom traded direct blows...
...He was willing to compromise on things of less importance in order to gain those of more importance...
...They shadow-boxed much of the time, though they were in the same ring...
...Yet, in the old days, some of the amateurs turned out to be remarkably able...
...Though he had a good word for the Reverend Martin Luther King in one of the latter's hours of trouble, he came out with no ringing statement at the height of the New Orleans school crisis...
...It is misleading to compare a President-who-is with a President-who-never-was...
...Each misrepresented the other's position...
...Douglas called Lincoln a "Black Republican"—an abolitionist—which Lincoln was far from being...
...And Dean Rusk fits the Acheson-Dulles category rather than the Seward-Byran-Hull tradition...
...Experience in foreign affairs had little or nothing to do with the matter...
...The story is told of a Cabinet meeting at which all except the President voted against a proposal of his...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
