articles 12/30

W. Post
Terrorism on the Web

Misinformation Age
More computers, less learning
by David Gelernter

Satan's Micro Minions
Is Radio Frequency Identification a tool of the Antichrist?
By Dave Shiflett

Travels with Cheney
The Vice President visits the front lines of the war on terror
by Stephen F. Hayes

Disorder in the Court
by David Tell, for the Editors

Another Cloning "Breakthrough"
The world's first phony stem cells
by Wesley J. Smith

The Fast Rise and Steep Fall of Jack Abramoff
How a Well-Connected Lobbyist Became the Center of a Far-Reaching Corruption Scandal
By Susan Schmidt & James V. Grimaldi
The Abramoff Galaxy
This graphic maps out lobbyist Jack Abramoff's web of contacts.
Unraveling Abramoff
Key players, the money trail and a timeline of Abramoff's rise and fall
More Coverage on Abramoff

USA Today
Whatever happened to thank- you notes?

Decline of Congress
by Robert Novak
Typical of what ails Congress was consideration of the Patriot Act last week as Congress finished for the year.

War for the Homeland
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 944 pp., $35)
ARTHUR HERMAN

What an irony that just as George W. Bush’s presidency and reputation reach their low point, liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin comes riding to his rescue. By far her best book, Team of Rivals is Goodwin’s account of how President Abraham Lincoln managed to turn a cabinet full of bitter former foes into his supporters’ club and an indispensable instrument of victory in the Civil War. But the real theme is greatness under trial, and how an underestimated man, the object of scorn and hate to millions, did a job no one else in the country could, and led it through a crisis unlike any other in its history. The book thus sheds an unexpectedly penetrating light on Bush, who ends up resembling Lincoln more than any president has in our lifetime. “The man is not equal to the hour”: Such was political pundit Charles Francis Adams’s judgment of Lincoln when the Civil War began. Indeed, the deck was stacked against him the moment he decided to run for president. New York’s William Seward, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s Edward Bates were the Republican party’s most distinguished leaders in 1860, grizzled men of gravitas and influence compared with the tall, gawky attorney from Illinois best known for the elections he had lost. Goodwin reveals that even as Seward and Chase were confidently awaiting their party’s nod, Lincoln turned to a savvy quartet of Karl Roves — Illinois lawyers Norman Judd, Leonard Swett, and Stephen Logan, and 330-pound circuit judge David Davis — to work behind the scenes at the Republican convention to make sure Lincoln was everyone’s second choice. When the steam ran out of the Seward candidacy on the second ballot, and Chase and Bates failed to catch fire, Lincoln was the last man standing. Republicans and Democrats on the Hill, and the press, were incredulous. They dismissed Lincoln as “a third rate Western lawyer” and an “illiterate partisan” incapable of uttering a grammatical sentence. But the Democrats were in worse shape: They were self-destructing over slavery and secession, and ended up running three separate presidential tickets. Lincoln’s victory in November became a foregone conclusion; but whether he could govern a country that was literally pulling itself apart was not — especially when his cabinet included his three bitter rivals, Seward, Chase, and Bates, ready to pounce on his first misstep. Yet as this book shows, Lincoln’s genius first revealed itself in his handling of these touchy egomaniacs. Lincoln humbly reached out to all three, and later to secretary of war Edwin Stanton, for help but not for guidance; and by a combination of beguiling magnanimity and gentle firmness, he was able to show them who was boss. He turned them from doubters into believers in the Lincoln presidency, with the same skill and adroitness that George W. Bush would later show in turning Rumsfeld, Powell, and Cheney into an effective team, and even bringing in former foe John McCain as a useful ally after the 9/11 attacks. Like Bush, Lincoln had no time for a presidential learning curve. The very first piece of paper he was handed as president was a dispatch from Fort Sumter in South Carolina, saying time was running out for a relief expedition to keep it from surrendering to the secessionists. Pundits like Adams assumed Lincoln would be too weak and ignorant to face the crisis and that Seward would take charge; every member of Lincoln’s cabinet except one, including the vaunted Seward, said saving Fort Sumter would be a waste of time and needlessly provoke war. But Lincoln saw more clearly: He knew that Fort Sumter’s fate was the nation’s fate. Giving in to the threat of force at the start meant giving in for good. Seward was stunned when Lincoln decided to send a relief force to South Carolina. “Thunder, George!” he said to an aide when he learned Lincoln had rejected his advice. “It cannot be.” Lincoln was unable to save Fort Sumter or to stop Virginia, the crown jewel of the South, from joining the Confederacy. But as Goodwin points out, the incident taught Seward a powerful lesson: His president was a man willing to act when others hesitated, for the sake of principle. Seward soon became Lincoln’s staunchest ally in the cabinet. When war did come, Lincoln was hammered, as Bush would be, for not having adequate plans or preparations, especially after the opening defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, and for not having an exit strategy if things went wrong. But Lincoln believed there could be no substitute for victory. What a commentator on CNN might dismiss as his “stubbornness” led him to shut his ears to critics who were less committed to defeating the South, not because they were wiser, but because they refused to confront what was truly at stake: the survival of the United States itself. For four long years, Lincoln endured attacks from a hostile press, clamorous opposition in Congress, threats of intervention by foreign powers, and a constant stream of bad news from the battlefield. The skill and daring of southern generals like Lee and Jackson disguised the Confederacy’s deteriorating position, as the Union death toll mounted day by day. Yet through it all, Goodwin observes, “Lincoln remained remarkably calm, good natured, and self-controlled.” The deaths of young men in the war that he and he alone had started, haunted him; but, secure in the knowledge that he had done the right thing by going to war, he persevered to the end. He put up with the petty rivalries between Seward and Chase, and Bates and postmaster general Montgomery Blair, and forced them to work together; he ignored whisperings that Seward was Lincoln’s Dick Cheney, “the president de facto” who was running the war into the ground, and had to deal with a resolution passed by his own party in Congress practically begging him to kick Seward out. Lincoln knew the truth. “They wish to get rid of me,” he told a friend, “and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.” But Lincoln did not quit, as the editor of the New York Herald and others urged him to do. He even raised the war’s ideological stakes by pushing ahead his Emancipation Proclamation, against the opposition of even his most staunchly anti-slavery cabinet members. He went ahead with plans to arm and train black soldiers, even though the experts said that the blacks couldn’t fight and that their presence on the battlefield would only make the southerners fight harder. Lincoln had understood, even before Bull Run, that “if the issue be distinctly presented — death to the American republic or death to slavery, slavery must die,” and with it the America that had supported and tolerated slavery for 250 years. In Washington, however, this kind of moral clarity grew more unpopular as the war dragged on. The summer of 1864 brought even Lincoln’s staunchest supporters a feeling that the nation was stuck in a quagmire. “Our troops have suffered much and accomplished but little,” Navy secretary Gideon Welles wrote on June 20, after battles in which 10,000 or 15,000 men would fall in a single day. Everyone missed the significance of the victory at Gettysburg, and complained that Lee had been allowed to get away; there was also little notice of Lincoln’s speech afterward, with its affirmation that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Even Lincoln told a friend his Gettysburg address had been a “flat failure.” Anti-draft riots had burned through New York City, resulting in nearly 1,000 dead and injured; when Democrats met at their presidential convention that summer, they put together a peace platform so conciliatory that one observer said it read as if Jefferson Davis had written it: “It contemplates surrender and abasement.” But the collapse of the Confederate army in front of Atlanta was the “September Surprise” that saved Lincoln’s reelection. If the Confederate army had hung on another eight weeks, a Democratic president in 1865 would have given us an intact Confederacy and continued slavery. Instead, as the light at the end of the tunnel approached, Lincoln’s own mood turned inward and became more religious. This shift was reflected in his Second Inaugural Address, with its suggestion that God had given “to both North and South, this terrible war,” as punishment for the sin of slavery. This made many in the press furious. The New York World accused him of “substituting religion for statesmanship,” and the Tribune said the Biblical overtones would only prolong the war (the South surrendered little more than a month later). Lincoln did not care. After the address, he greeted well-wishers at the White House. One was black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who had begun the war considering Lincoln a pro-slavery imbecile and ended up realizing, as Leo Tolstoy would say later of Lincoln, that “his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character. . . . Our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.” No persons of color were supposed to enter the reception; but Lincoln saw him, and exclaimed, “Here comes my friend Douglass!” They shook hands and the president asked Douglass how he had liked the speech. “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass said, “that was a sacred effort.” Lincoln grinned with delight and said, “I’m glad you liked it!” Six weeks later Lincoln was struck down by an assassin’s bullet. But it was too late: The new America had begun. Goodwin’s fine book makes an important contribution to our national understanding of this crucial era.

Mr. Herman’s latest book, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, was released in paperback in November.