The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Gore Vidal recently used the occasion of his renewed “exchange” with Lincoln scholars and biographers [Letters, NYR, April 28] to rebut an unnamed “caption writer’s” New York Times article on the NBC-TV mini-series based on his novel.

I am perfectly happy to identify myself as the “caption writer” to whom he refers. I am the coauthor of two studies of Civil War iconography, The Lincoln Image and The Confederate Image, both of which certainly have captions, but also text, and none of which, I presume, Mr. Vidal has read. I, on the other hand, actually read all of Mr. Vidal’s novel. Thus forearmed, I required a fee from the Times to read the script of “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” and watch the television production. Now I believe I must respond to some of the outlandish comments Mr. Vidal made on your pages.

Needless to say, the Times did not assign me to “bloody” the mini-series, as Mr. Vidal suggests, but to measure its faithfulness to history, and in so doing, consider the genre of historical drama and the confusion it can generate. The case of “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” presented special problems. It was not biographical drama, per se, but a dramatization of a historical novel. As such, it not only revivified many of Mr. Vidal’s errors and excesses, but manufactured some new ones of its own, for which no reasonable observer would think of holding Mr. Vidal responsible.

Nevertheless the novelist recites a litany of attacks he insists I levelled against him in the Times. I would remind him that only a 200-word sidebar that accompanied the article dealt directly with Mr. Vidal and his opus. The other 2,200 words surveyed the television program. How easily one might have yielded to the temptation to lump the two products together.

For example, Mr. Vidal will surely remember, given his astounding total recall of our long-distance telephone conversations, that at one point I broke the news to him that the mini-series would conclude with Mary Tyler Moore—as Mrs. Lincoln—reciting a highly unlikely, fatalistic rumination on her husband’s murder. His death, she laments, was all but preordained for his decision to wage a bloody war rather than let the South secede. In Mr. Vidal’s novel, these words had been uttered not by Mary but by Lincoln’s young private secretary. Wasn’t their sudden emergence as Mrs. Lincoln’s beliefs “scatter-brained” (Mr. Vidal’s word for me), or at best, “dizzy” (his assessment of Lincoln scholar Richard Current)? As it turns out, the sentiments were re-assigned to Miss Moore, the producers cheerfully admitted, when the actress complained that she hadn’t been given enough lines. “Oh, my God,” Mr. Vidal exclaimed in response. “Mary Lincoln would never have said that. Or even thought it. It’s totally out of character, to say the least.” Yet the producers also boasted that Mr. Vidal had read and applauded the script, and so Mr. Vidal confirmed.

In fact, the script of “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” was riddled with errors, large and small, which Mr. Vidal, for all his self-professed knowledge of history, failed to catch. In retrospect, I regret that I did not ascribe more responsibility to him, especially in view of his apparent assumption that the blame belonged entirely to him anyway.

As for Mr. Vidal’s assertion that my criticisms were few and minor, he might be interested to know that space constraints alone prevented me from alerting viewers to more. For example, Lincoln hardly made a “shady bargain” with his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, to win his support for his 1864 re-election campaign, by offering him in return the job of chief justice, as “Gore Vidal’s Lincoln” contends. For one thing, the vacancy did not present itself until the seemingly indestructible Roger B. Taney finally died, by which time Lincoln had safely won renomination. After that, he had about as much need for fellow Republican Chase’s endorsement as he had for the late Mr. Taney’s Mr. Vidal and his mini-series were simply irresponsible, in this instance, in their apparent quest to topple the “plaster saint.”

Finally, Mr. Vidal’s efforts to defend his—and the mini-series’—oversimplified and distorted portrayals of Lincoln’s views on Emancipation, remain unconvincing to anyone who has read what has been published on the subject since the 1950s. Apparently Mr. Vidal has not considered LaWanda Cox’ milestone work, Lincoln and Black Freedom, or Gabor S. Boritt’s essay on Emancipation in his Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, or Mark E. Neely, Jr.’s recent scholarship. How, Mr. Vidal, could Lincoln have remained committed to the idea of deporting blacks to Africa until his dying days, while advancing the prospect of equal educational opportunities for free blacks in America, while urging a southern governor to allow blacks to vote? How could Lincoln have been desperately seeking a way to renege on Emancipation while at the same time spearheading the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in the states not affected by the Proclamation?

The answer is, he could not have—and did not. Mr. Vidal has convinced himself that he has taken a legend and made of him a man. In reality, he has taken a myth and advanced in its place a countermyth that is as shrouded by misinformation as what it endeavors to revise. Mr. Vidal is the Sandburg of our times.

If I were indeed a “caption writer” I might label the novelist’s latest foray into the subject, “Picture of Confusion.”

Harold Holzer

Rye, New York

To the Editors:

Gore Vidal need not have troubled himself to compose a hysterical diatribe against “scholar-squirrels” in general and me in particular if he had not pretended to be one of those scholar-squirrels himself. “As for Lincoln and the other historical figures,” he wrote in the afterword of his Lincoln: A Novel, “I have reconstructed them from letters, journals, newspapers, diaries, etc.” Thus he gave the impression of having frequented dusty archives, pored over manuscripts and documents, and squirreled away his notes just like one of those contemptible professors. Later he implied that he was a greater Lincoln authority than Stephen B. Oates or any other academic historian except David Herbert Donald.

Actually, as I pointed out in my review, Vidal’s book is a potpourri of his own inventions and bits and pieces he has picked up from other authors—bits and pieces mostly long discredited. Few would question Vidal’s cleverness as a writer of fiction. Certainly I do not. A reviewer, as I suggested previously, would hardly be justified in pointing out inaccuracies in the book if its author had not claimed to be writing authentic history but, instead, had prefaced his story with the kind of disclaimer that some novelists make to the effect that any similarity between the novel’s characters and real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To summarize my main criticisms of Vidal in the review to which he objects: For such a good historian, he often has unexpected difficulty in finding the historically appropriate word. At many points it is hard to know whether his version of Lincoln’s life and times is an outright invention, a dubious interpretation, or simply a mistake. He is wrong on big as well as little matters. He grossly distort’s Lincoln’s character and role in history by picturing him as ignorant of economics, disregardful of the Constitution, and unconcerned with the rights of blacks.

In his New York Review diatribe Vidal does not undertake to refute all my specifics but selects those in regard to which he thinks he has a case. This selectivity of his cannot be due to constrictions of space, for he maunders at great length with his ad hominem arguments—the kind of arguments a person commonly resorts to when his position is weak. Anyone interested in seeing which of my criticisms he evades entirely can find my review essay “Fiction as History” in The Journal of Southern History (February 1986) or in my Arguing with Historians: Essays on the Historical and the Unhistorical (1987).

As for Vidal’s attempted rebuttal, I confess I must yield him one point. I said he makes Lincoln so stupid as to think the Secretary of the Treasury personally signed every greenback. Instead, he makes Lincoln so stupid as to think the Treasurer of the United States did it. I’m afraid I misread Vidal there. But it is the only point I will concede to him in his entire screed.

I questioned his use of Briticisms when writing on a subject so distinctly American. He shows his characteristic preciosity when he replies that he prefers the Briticisms, and he shows his utter ignorance when he goes on to assert: “It was not until H.L. Mencken, in 1919, that an attempt was made to separate the American language from the English.” Apparently he has never heard of Noah Webster, who as early as 1789 urged his fellow Americans to “establish a national language [Webster’s emphasis] as well as a national government.” Webster proceeded to promote this cause through his spellers, readers, and dictionaries. By the time of the Civil War, millions of copies were in use and their influence on the language was profound.

Vidal stands stubbornly by his assertion that prostitutes got the name “hookers” because General Joseph Hooker was “so addicted…to the flesh.” I repeat that the term was in use before the Civil War. Originally a “hooker” was a resident of the Hook, that is, Corlear’s Hook, a whorehouse district that sailors frequented in New York City. I refer Vidal to Mitford M. Mathews’ A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, which incidentally will help him to understand the historical development of Americanisms as distinct from Briticisms.

Vidal pretends to do no more than rearrange “agreed-upon facts,” but he does not tell us who, besides himself and two readers of his manuscript, agreed upon them. He calls me “a master of the one-line unproved assertion” when I draw attention to his unproved and unprovable assertions. Consider this one: When issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln exempted certain Louisiana parishes and Virginia counties “as a favor” to “pro-Union” slaveholders. Here, as elsewhere, Vidal simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The fact is that Lincoln exempted those parts of Louisiana and Virginia, plus all of Tennessee, because the Union was in control of those areas. He justified the proclamation as a military necessity, a means of putting down the rebellion, and he did not consider the measure militarily justifiable in places where the rebellion had not occurred or where it had already been put down.

In his novel Vidal asserted that Ulysses S. Grant “had gone into the saddlery business, where he had attractively failed.” In my review I said Grant “had not failed in ‘the saddlery business.’ ” Now Vidal fudges by dismissing his statement as an “offhand remark” that he attributed “to a contemporary.” He further fuzzes up the issue by saying “the fact that harness and other leather goods were sold along with saddles by the failure Grant is a matter of no interest.” Of course, it is a matter of no interest. The point is that Grant had never gone into the saddlery, harness, or leather-goods business and therefore could not have failed at it. He was only an employee.