Personal Remembrances on the Occasion of the Lincoln Birthday Bicentennial

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Christine Bowman

My father, a Republican, was born exactly 91 years ago today, on the 109th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. That was a point of pride for my father, now deceased for going on five years. I wonder what he would think about America's new Democratic president taking America's 16th president as his role model and mentor? I wonder if he could have admired President Obama, in the spirit of cross-partisan respect? Or would he be laughing at the liberals, alongside Rush Limbaugh?

^{The Lincoln Memorial, where my parents took me when I was seven.}

I thought about my father when Lincoln biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin reflected about her own yesterday. Both our fathers were avid baseball fans. When Doris was only six her father came to depend on her for detailed, excited recountings of weekday Brooklyn Dodger baseball games that he had missed seeing. Because her dad depended on her (and she had no idea he could have turned to the sports pages instead), Doris learned to craft dramatic stories with a beginning, middle, and end. These days her stories are mostly about presidents, and they can run 900 pages long and take ten years to research. But she learned "this curious love of history" from her dad, whom she lost when she was still a student. It seems as though LBJ, with whom Doris Kearns worked closely, filled part of that gap.

I read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals last summer, and I am reading No Ordinary Time about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt now. Every personal and political detail comes as news to me, a mostly naive reader of American history. I grew up in Houston, where our public schools focused more on "Remembering the Alamo" than on White House tensions and presidential wives and friends. I am grateful for the Pulitzer-Prize winner's ability to spin a tale that puts a reader in the room with Lincoln's contentious cabinet, or with Eleanor Roosevelt's hypercritical mother-in-law.

At a short press conference Wednesday attended largely by student journalists, Kearns Goodwin showed flashes of humor and shared tantalizing stories, but she also reflected thoughtfully on each question put to her. A historian at heart and Sunday-morning pundit by chance, she weighed how Obama's challenges might mirror FDR's, especially his need to gear up an isolationist nation to produce armaments for the world war that was on the near horizon. She also gladly imagined Lincoln telling Obama what to do now.

Generously, she shared glimpses of her own life as a writer as well. After working for six years on No Ordinary Time, Kearns Goodwin really couldn't imagine writing next about a Millard Fillmore. It had to be a personality that could grab her imagination, a person like Lincoln, regardless of the volumes upon volumes already written by others. When the book was nearly done, the author and her collaborators had not yet settled on a title. Eventually, pressured by the editor, they went with the idea that had been right under their noses all along: the working title, "Team of Rivals."

Before the book was even finished in 2005, the movie rights were snapped up by a Kearns Goodwin friend -- director Steven Spielberg, who said he had always wanted to do a Lincoln movie. Not yet in production, the film will star Liam Neeson and Sally Fields. Tony Kushner, another Pulitzer winner, is working on the screenplay. A 2011 release date is reported at IMDB.

Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts that Lincoln moved on from mourning his lost loved ones and suffering a deep depression by resolving to live with purpose and to change the lives of others. It's advice we can all take, as we celebrate the life of Lincoln, and the lives of our own lost fathers.

One further political point: Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn was a front-row guest at Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wednesday lecture. The Chicago crowd greeted him with a standing ovation. Meanwhile, former Governor Rod Blagojevich was engaged in disparaging the character of Illinois legislators on Fox News.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS