The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

For forty years The New York Times has, from time to time, put its collective “mind” to work in trying to find ways of coping with my disturbing presence on the American scene. When my novel Lincoln was recently turned into a miniseries by NBC, I wondered what the fun paper would do to try to kill the project. Richard Nixon’s “the easy way” would be to allow the neoconservative reviewer John Corry to give it a bad review; after all, he has even attacked me for my appearance as a guest on the Today show. But wouldn’t that be too little, too late? Why not assign a journalist to make a preemptive strike a week before the television program in order to assure the potential audience that Lincoln was a false portrayal based on a book that had been “faulted by historians,” to put it in Timesese. This is what happened in the Sunday New York Times of March 20.

Several months ago the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era was assigned the bloody task. He went on location in Virginia. He talked to me on the telephone. He was pleasantly scatterbrained. I quoted to him Henry Adams; that it was the why of history not the what that interested him. I said that I was the opposite. For reasons unknown, the reporter then changed the author of my quotation, Henry Adams, to, of all people, Thoreau! This means that for scholars in the future The New York Times‘s error will be used as a primary source to prove that I—not the reporter—did not know Adams from Thoreau. Then, serenely unaware of his own blunder, he tells us that he found “troubling” the liberties I took with history. The first of the troubling errors is that “Lincoln reminisces about the day that Seward…regaled the 1860 Republican National Convention with his provocative ‘irrepressible conflict’ speech.” The caption writer is stern: Seward made the speech two years earlier; and Lincoln wasn’t at the convention. What did I say of this in the book?

“The conflict is irrepressible is what you said.” Lincoln smiled. “That’s how you got me the nomination.”

In the dramatization Lincoln refers to Seward’s speech at a “Republic convention”; but does not say which one, or if he himself was there. Then the caption writer is troubled when the dramatization puts a meeting between the President and black leaders in what may or may not be the wrong chronological place, yet he does not dispute the content of what was said at the meeting. Finally, the caption writer can find nothing of importance in book or drama to be troubled about except for Lincoln’s, according to him, “half-hearted” suggestion that the freed slaves be colonized in Central America or Liberia, “an option he soon discarded.” This is untrue: but it is at the heart of a curious ongoing backlash to my view of Lincoln, and this whole business should be addressed with candor.

Plainly the fault is mine for not responding earlier to certain charges that were made against me in these pages (September 24, 1987) by C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. Sadly, he noted in The New York Review that the

book was extravagantly praised by both novelists and historians—a few of the latter at least.

Some of the foremost Lincoln scholars do not share these views. After listing numerous historical blunders and errors of the novel, Richard N. Current, a leading Lincoln biographer, declares that “Vidal is wrong on big as well as little matters. He grossly distorts Lincoln’s character and role in history.”

Woodward gives no examples of these distortions. He does tell us that “Roy P. Basler, editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, estimates that ‘more than half of the book could never have happened as told,’ and that another 25 percent consists of ‘episodes that might have happened, but never as told by Vidal.’ ” Apparently, Woodward believes that it is sufficient merely to assert. He does not demonstrate; perhaps innocent of the text in question, he cites, vaguely, other assertions.

The late Vladimir Nabokov said that when anyone criticized his art, he was indifferent. That was their problem. But if anyone attacked his scholarship, he reached for his dictionary. After reading Woodward, I took the trouble to read the two very curious little essays that he cites. What case do they make? Is half the book all wrong: and Lincoln himself grossly distorted? Although I do my own research, unlike so many professors whose hagiographies are usually the work of those indentured servants, the graduate students, when it comes to checking a finished manuscript, I turn to Academia. In this case, Professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard, who has written a great deal about the period, which Woodward, as far as I recall, has not written about at all. I also used a professional researcher to correct dates, names, and agreed-upon facts.

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures.^* I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, [Vidal] claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (‘hagiographers,’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.

Now it is true as I said on the King show that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle, and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson.

In any case, zeroing in on my chat with Larry King, Current writes that

by denying there is any real basis for Vidal’s intimation that Lincoln had syphilis, [Stephen] Oates “shows,” according to Vidal, “that,…Mr. Oates is not as good a historian as Mr. Vidal.”

First, I like Current’s slippery “any real basis” for Lincoln’s syphilis. No, there is no existing Wasserman report or its equivalent. But there is the well-known testimony of William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, that Lincoln told him that he had contracted syphilis in his youth and that it had “clung to him.” This is a primary source not to be dismissed lightly; yet Mr. Oates was quoted in the press as saying that there was never any evidence that Lincoln had had syphilis, ignoring Lincoln’s own words to Herndon. It was Newsweek, not I, who said that Mr. Vidal is a better historian than Mr. Oates. I have no opinion in the matter as I’ve never read Oates except on the subject of me, where he is bold and inaccurate.

Current finds my trust in Herndon naive; and quotes Professor Donald on Herndon as being important largely because of “the errors that he spread.” But Donald was referring to Herndon’s haphazard researches into Lincoln’s family and early life, conducted after Lincoln’s death. I am not aware that Donald or anyone—except a professional hagiographer—could doubt Herndon when he says that Lincoln himself told him something. For the record, Donald’s actual words: “Herndon stands in the backward glance of history, mythmaker and truthteller.”

Current has literary longings; he frets over my prose. I spell “jewelry” and “practice” in the English manner and speak of a house in Fourteenth Street instead of on Fourteenth Street. It was not until H.L. Mencken, in 1919, that an attempt was made to separate the American language from the English; and even then, many writers ignored and still ignore the Sage of Baltimore. Since Burr and 1876 were written in the first person, as if by an American early in the last century, I used those locutions that were then common to agreed-upon American speech. For consistency’s sake, I continued them in Lincoln. As for myself, neither in prose nor in life would I say that someone lived on Fourteenth Street, though in the age of Reagan I have detected quite a few people living on rather than in streets. I also note that two novels I’ve been rereading follow my usage: The Great Gatsby, 1925, The Last Puritan, 1936. Current wins only one small victory: I use the word “trolley” in 1864 when the word did not come in until the 1890s. But his other objections are not only trivial but wrong. He says Charles Sumner was struck with a “cane” not, as I say, a “stick”; then and now the words are interchangeable, at least in Senator Sumner’s circles. He also trots out the tired quibble over the origin of “hooker.” For the purposes of a Civil War novel it is enough to give General Hooker the credit because the whores in Marble Alley, back of what is now the Washington Post Office, were commonly known as Hooker’s Division. According to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang, the only British meaning we have for the word at that time is a watch-stealer or pickpocket.

Current then fires off a series of statements that I have written such and such. And such and such is not true. This is dizzy even by contemporary American university standards. For instance, “Ulysses S. Grant had not failed in ‘the saddlery business.’ ” That he had failed is an offhand remark I attribute (without footnote) to a contemporary. The truth? At thirty-eight Grant had failed at every civilian job he had put his hand to, obliging him to become a clerk in his father’s firm, Grant & Perkins, which “sold harnesses and other leather goods…providing new straps for old saddles” (William McFeely’s Grant), and the business was run not by failure Grant but by his younger brother Orvil. Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln’s bowels, whose “frequency,” he tells us, “cannot be documented.” But, of course, they can. “Truth-teller” Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called bluemass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence “wrong.”