Lincoln’s Character Assassins

The cover of national review’s December 8 issue announces: “Dishonest Abe: A New Look at the Lincoln Myth.” This, it turns out, is a review essay by Thomas Fleming of a new collection of Lincoln’s speeches and writings. Although the inside title of Fleming’s review is “Lincoln’s Tragic Heroism,” the cover title more accurately reflects its substance.

That this is in any sense a “new look” at Lincoln is utterly absurd. No generation has passed, since the end of the Civil War, in which John Wilkes Booth has not risen again to assassinate the reputation of Abraham Lincoln. In 1931 Edgar Lee Masters published Lincoln, the Man, a diatribe of some five hundred pages, and much of what M. E. Bradford has written—and that Fleming now writes—could have been paraphrased, if not transcribed, from Masters.

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Harry V. Jaffa

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The cover of national review’s December 8 issue announces: “Dishonest Abe: A New Look at the Lincoln Myth.” This, it turns out, is a review essay by Thomas Fleming of a new collection of Lincoln’s speeches and writings. Although the inside title of Fleming’s review is “Lincoln’s Tragic Heroism,” the cover title more accurately reflects its substance.

That this is in any sense a “new look” at Lincoln is utterly absurd. No generation has passed, since the end of the Civil War, in which John Wilkes Booth has not risen again to assassinate the reputation of Abraham Lincoln. In 1931 Edgar Lee Masters published Lincoln, the Man, a diatribe of some five hundred pages, and much of what M. E. Bradford has written—and that Fleming now writes—could have been paraphrased, if not transcribed, from Masters.