• In the tense negotiations over a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama swore he would make no concessions to America’s most dangerous enemy. Unfortunately for him, Congress held firm.
• Farmer’s son, hick politician, railroad lawyer; warlord, philosopher, saint. One hundred fifty years after his assassination, do we think Abraham Lincoln our greatest president? His only competitor for that honor, George Washington, had the advantage of not being murdered halfway through his lifework. We know, from Lincoln’s speeches in 1865, the outlines of his post–Civil War policy: malice toward none, charity for all, citizenship for freedmen. An impossible balancing act? Lincoln was both a determined and a wily politician. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was a man of shifting purpose (from hanging ex-rebels to flattering them) and ham hands. After four years of chaos, America got eight years of Ulysses Grant, who did his best — then 80 years of inequity. Still, the Union was saved from a losers’ veto, and 4 million men, women, and children were freed. In his Peoria speech of October 1854, Lincoln said, “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. . . . Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit if not the blood of Revolution.” It was washed of the stains of slavery, then of rebellion. So long as democracy can find men such as Lincoln in its hours of need, it will endure.
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