[Mb-hair] William Swiggard sent from the Boston Globe

[Michael Butler]

  What Bush could learn from Lincoln

By Robert Kuttner  |  December 24, 2005  |  The Boston Globe

MY CHRISTMAS present to George W. Bush is a copy of Doris Kearns
Goodwin's splendid study of Lincoln and his Cabinet, ''Team of Rivals."
President Bush believes in redemption, and so do I. Here are just a few
things Bush might profitably learn from our first Republican president.

Lincoln assumed the presidency at a time when the nation was horribly
divided, not into culturally warring ''blue" states and ''red" ones, but
into a real civil war between blues and grays -- the states that stayed
in the Union and those that seceded. Even among the unionists, Lincoln's
own Republican Party and Cabinet were bitterly rent between those who
wanted to accelerate emancipation and punish the South and those who
gave top priority to keeping the Republic whole.

Lincoln's priority, always, was to preserve the Union and to reduce the
sectional and ideological bitterness. As Goodwin brilliantly shows, he
did so by the force of his personality and the generosity of his spirit.
Lincoln had an unerring sense of when public opinion was ready for
partial, then full abolition of slavery, and he would not move until he
felt he had the people behind him. He governed by listening and persuading.

By contrast, Bush's entire presidency is about eking out narrow
victories, not about building national consensus. Even when he prevails,
Bush wins by manipulation and stealth. His legacy is deepened division
and bitterness.

Bush is said to live in a bubble. His tiny inner circle protects him
from realities that might upset him or challenge his dimly informed
certitudes. Lincoln, by contrast, had the confidence to reach out to
critics and seek out widely divergent viewpoints.

Goodwin's unusual title, ''Team of Rivals," refers to the fact that
Lincoln deliberately included in his Cabinet the prominent leaders of
different factions of his party who had opposed him for the 1860
nomination. Some, like his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, a fierce
abolitionist, wanted Lincoln to proceed much more aggressively. Others
feared that Lincoln was moving too fast and alienating border states
like Maryland and Kentucky that permitted slavery but had voted not to
leave the Union.

Goodwin, improbably finding something wholly new to illuminate this most
heavily researched of historic figures, relies partly on the diaries of
his contemporaries to reveal Lincoln's sheer genius at winning the trust
and affection of rivals.

Can you imagine Bush including in his inner Cabinet such Republicans as
John McCain, who opposes Bush on torture of prisoners, or Chuck Hagel,
who challenges the Iraq war, or Lincoln Chafee, who resists stacking the
courts with ultra-right-wingers? Not to mention Democrats, a group
Lincoln also included among his top appointees.

Bush, despite today's ubiquity of media, doesn't read newspapers, much
less the Internet, and he settles for carefully filtered briefings.
Lincoln was a voracious reader; he haunted the War Department's
telegraph office to get firsthand reports from the battlefield.

Lincoln gained incomparably in wisdom over four years. Does anyone think
George W. Bush is wiser now than in 2001?

Despite civil insurrection, Lincoln resisted broad intrusions on
democratic rights. Bush runs roughshod over liberties.

Bush's visits to Iraq are choreographed media events. Lincoln often went
to the front on horseback or by ship, almost alone, shunning news
coverage, to confer at length with his generals, thank the troops, and
educate himself.

Bush relies on secondhand inspirations of a speechwriting staff. He
blathers when he wanders off script. Lincoln wrote his own words,
including the timeless eloquence of the Second Inaugural or the
Gettysburg Address. More often, his eloquence was extemporaneous.

Lincoln was magnanimous almost to a fault. His personal generosity and
numerous acts of kindness helped him win over critics and, too briefly,
to ''bind up the nation's wounds." Salmon Chase, who never gave up his
dream that he should have been elected in 1860, allowed his allies to
seek to push Lincoln aside and nominate Chase in 1864. Urged to break
irrevocably with the faithless Chase, Lincoln instead appointed him
chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Critics of the more moderate William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of
state, claimed that Seward functioned as acting president. Goodwin makes
clear that this was fantasy. Dick Cheney, however, really does operate
as de facto president.

When Lincoln was assassinated, three days after Robert E. Lee
surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, the nation lost the one man who might
have spared America the awful years of inconclusive struggle between
radical Reconstructionists and segregationists who wanted to restore
slavery in everything but name. Much of today's red state versus blue
state bitterness has its roots in the struggle for black liberty versus
the wounded humiliation of the white South, something Lincoln wanted to
avoid at all cost.

The crippled presidency of his successor, Andrew Johnson, who ended up a
pitiful captive of radical reconstructionists in Congress, was one of
the bleakest chapters in our history. But this Union of the people did
not perish from the earth. Reading Goodwin's magnificent book, one has
to believe that our nation, in a new birth of freedom, will survive even
George W. Bush.