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Obama Inauguration

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Washington, USA—Alexis de Tocqueville, that remarkable early student of the United States,  identified “the great privilege of the Americans” to lie not in their being more enlightened than other nations, “but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit”.

Many saw the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States as evidence of that country’s capacity to change. This son of a Kenyan and a Kansan waged a campaign that defeated a national politician who would have been the nation’s first female head of state as well as a maverick, a bona fide war hero. He did it all 40 short years after the assassination of the incomparable Dr Martin Luther King Jr. But this newly inaugurated president was the first to acknowledge that he did not, in fact, do it all.

His victory in November 2008 was won by the hundreds of thousands of Americans who volunteered and donated to his campaign. His election was the outcome of a pitched fight, a raucous crisscrossing of a continent, and a lengthy national conversation. Barack Obama’s inauguration in January of the following year, then, was as much a celebration of the peaceful transition of power.

Commemorated this week, this inauguration is and always has marked the passing of the office and the administering of the oath, from that citizen previously chosen by his fellow citizens to that citizen newly chosen to serve as president of the United States.

Tim Fernando is an engineer working for Oxford University Computing Services on the Mobile Oxford project. He grew up in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sri Lanka, and has a particular interest in documentary photography.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College, Oxford. He is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review.

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Robert Harris
Lustrum
Hutchinson, 2009
484 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0091801007

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Though he lacked a noble birth, military glory, and money—the three currencies of political power in ancient Rome—Marcus Tullius Cicero won the consulship, the highest elected position in the Republic, at the earliest possible age. Overcoming provincial origins (his name derived from the Latin word for chickpea, cicer) and the status of a novus homo (“new man”), he went on to become a leader in the Senate, the bastion of aristocratic power. Before Lincoln, there was Cicero.

Yet unlike Lincoln’s career, which coincided with and (most would admit) sustained his nation’s democratic experiment, Cicero’s trajectory began at the start of his republic’s decline. In Robert Harris’s 2006 novel Imperium and his latest effort, Lustrum, we see Cicero win more and more elections as those elections matter less and less. For the real power in the late Republic did not lie in the offices themselves, but with the men who could bribe the officials.

Those men constitute a cunning cast of characters. In this fictional thriller grounded in fact, Harris balances narrative force with historical detail to give us a vision of Cicero, man of words. Where Imperium recounted Cicero’s prodigious efforts to join the inner circle of men who rule Rome, Lustrum conveys an exclusive club all too willing to tear Cicero apart: there’s Crassus, the richest man in Rome; Pompey, its greatest general; a psychopath named Catiline; the patrician pervert Clodius; and a reckless young man named Julius Caesar. Instead of the Plutarchan case studies that examine each in their isolation, however, Harris studies these characters in chorus: it’s Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers meets standing armies, assassinations, and incest. These giants of antiquity hang out in each other’s homes. House calls were never so blood curdling.

Where the early Republic was characterized by rotation and collegiality in office, the politicians in Lustrum simply cannot share. Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, and Catiline refused to bow down to rivals, or to the Republic. This collective failure is showcased best in Harris’s retelling of the Catlinarian conspiracy, one of the most infamous episodes in the history of the Roman Republic—and one that defined Cicero’s career.

Catiline, a patrician from one of the most distinguished Roman families, lost the consular election to Cicero in 63 BC. He subsequently planned a revolt, which included assassinating Cicero. Before it hatched, however, the plot was uncovered and Cicero denounced Catiline and his conspirators on the Senate floor. Cicero then strategically allowed Catiline to leave Rome, situating the legions to crush the revolt and kill Catiline on the battlefield. Events unfolded as planned and the Senate executed the remaining conspirators without trial, a fact that hung over the rest of Cicero’s public life. For his role in crushing the revolt, Cicero was given the title “Father of His Country” and the Republic gave a public thanksgiving in his honour, the first ever for a non-general.

This episode is comparatively well documented in Roman history largely because Cicero himself documented it. His manuscript, In Catilinam, along with Sallust’s detailed history of the conspiracy, Bellum Catilinae, survive to this day, as do many of Cicero’s finest speeches. Harris wisely borrows from both of these sources, letting Cicero speak for himself. An old hat in this fusion of narrative forms, Harris expertly deploys lines from Cicero’s letters to pepper the dialogue and mobilises original passages to serve as synecdoches for his speeches.

But where his research shines, Harris’ political analysis falters. Most notably, he implies—but fails to explain or explore why—the late Republic is so unruly.

Catiline’s conspiracy was not an aberration but a symptom of a disease that plagued the Republic. Despite executing the conspirators, Cicero quickly found himself squeezed by the same men and forces that fueled Catiline’s cabal—Catiline was crazy, but his supporters were not. Sure, some of them were, as a University of Chicago professor once called them, “frat boys with money”, but many of them were poor citizens and disgruntled veterans. Catiline seized on the cause of agrarian reform—promising to give land to the landless—because it had been the cause célèbre of every populist and (consequently) the bête noir of the Senate for the preceding 500 years. This agrarian promise propelled Marcus Manlius, the Gracchi brothers, and Marius before Catiline, and it was championed by Pompey and Caesar once Catiline was killed. Harris dutifully includes the details about these proposed reforms, but does not explain why they commanded such popular support—and hence, misses a crucial element of one of the central episodes of his book.

But if Harris fails in explaining the motivations of the masses, he expertly sketches the machinations of the elite. Indeed, he delivers two politicians with diametrically opposed visions of leadership in Rome, Julius Caesar and Marcus Porcius Cato. As Harris presents them, Caesar and Cato serve as instructive foils to Cicero and his political genius.

While Caesar’s career mirrored Cicero’s meteoric and unexpected rise, he never cared about the means to success—bribing, betraying, and killing his way to the top. Despite being too young for the office and in spite of his and his wife’s notorious reputation for immorality and adultery, Caesar became Pontifex Maximus, the head of religion in Rome; later, he compelled his daughter to marry Pompey, a man twice her age, in order to cement the alliance of the First Triumvirate. Many believed that he was involved in Catiline’s conspiracy.

If Caesar’s ambition was, as Harris has Cicero say, “not of this world”, Cato’s fierce attachment to republicanism was equally extreme. Bare-foot and barely washed, Cato became famous for his full-throated denunciations of the generals, the kleptocrats, and the rest of the rotten elite. It was Cato’s oratory, not Cicero’s, that convinced the Senate to execute the conspirators. A year later, Caesar’s men literally threw Cato out of the Senate. He is antiquity’s answer to William Wilberforce.

Cicero, though, is both Cato and Caesar—indeed, most great politicians are. They are vicious competitors, strategic and cunning, but idealists at the core, motivated by a vision of the state they seek to lead. Whereas Cato could not be bothered with bargains, Cicero brokered them; while Caesar relied on extralegal methods, Cicero painstakingly adhered to the law. Watching this alchemy of the compromised and the uncompromising occur in Cicero is an arresting sight, even while Rome burns.

Through Harris, Cicero tells us: “Caesar and Pompey have their soldiers, Crassus his wealth, Clodius his bullies on the street. My only legions are my words. By language I rose, and by language I shall survive.” As Harris elegantly shows, Cicero’s words made him, but could not save his country. Cicero was the consummate politician, but by his time, his country had moved beyond the republican politics of his predecessors. Cicero and Rome would not survive. And for that, we await the conclusion of Harris’s trilogy.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College. He is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review. 

Taylor Branch
The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House
Simon and Schuster, 2009
720 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1847371409

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It’s all there: a drunk Boris Yeltsin, clad only in underwear, yells for a taxi in the middle of the night on Pennsylvania Avenue, explaining to the bewildered Secret Service that he just wanted to get some pizza. Senator Byrd equates allowing gays to openly serve in the military with Caesar’s sinful, bisexual liaisons. Hillary recounts a dream about telling off Henry Kissinger at a dinner party and Chelsea bursts into her father’s study, crestfallen because she cannot fit her essay on Dr Frankenstein onto a single page. We learn of Jacques Chirac’s grandstanding, Jiang Zemin’s intransigence, and John Major’s hopelessness. Gingrich’s rise, Dole’s fall, and Rabin’s assassination, all retold through the words of a great raconteur: William Jefferson Clinton, the last Democrat to win two presidential elections since FDR.

Well, not quite. The Clinton Tapes are a doubly refracted record of those eight years: framed first through the Clinton’s own views on his presidency and then by Taylor Branch, Clinton’s historian-friend, who clandestinely recorded 79 conversations over the two terms. Working at the president’s behest, Branch amassed something approaching a diary in an attempt to give future generations a sense of what it was like to be in the White House in the 90s. Unfortunately, instead of glimpsing Clinton, we get Branch’s recollections of listening to Clinton.

It is no wonder, then, that one recent reviewer called The Clinton Tapes “a curious artifact”. The book is a bizarre piece of history. Some bemoan that all we have are Branch’s notes of the conversations—not the transcripts, let alone the tapes themselves. Others wish Branch had been more of a journalist than a historian, asking tougher questions and directing the conversation rather than letting the president meander, which he does a good deal.

But the tapes will come, eventually. Clinton and Branch agreed that Clinton should be the sole owner of the tapes and, as such, will decide when to release them to his presidential library. Though he recently told the Washington Post that he suspects Clinton will release them “shortly after Hillary retires from active politics“, Branch must know that his book makes the wait for the actual tapes all the more acute. Nevertheless, Tapes gives a previously unseen vision and version of the Clinton odyssey, one that clearly comes from the amazing access Branch enjoyed.

That access stems from the fact that 20 years earlier, he and Clinton had been quite close. In 1972, the George McGovern presidential campaign dispatched the young southerners to Texas to coordinate the Democratic Party’s efforts there. Branch and Clinton lived and worked together for months, parting ways after McGovern’s disastrous defeat. The two men would not reconnect until Clinton’s election two decades later.

By then, Branch had written the first volume of an epic, gut-wrenching, three-volume history of Martin Luther King, Jr, for which he had won the Pulitzer Prize. (Indeed, it is that book that had such a profound effect on the current US president.) Since their time in Texas, then, Branch had written a book worthy of its subject and Clinton had become a subject worthy of a book.

While it is reasonable to regret the losses of translation, Branch’s treatment of the Clinton presidency is worth the read in its own right. For what he gives us is a rollicking and at times penetrating account of a president attempting to heal the world’s wounds at the end of its bloodiest century, to shield himself from vicious opposition and an unforgiving press, and to struggle against his own frailty.

Over a dense 672 pages, Branch’s access and Clinton’s candor combine to create a much-needed corrective to the myths that still plague the Clinton presidency. Perhaps most importantly, Branch reveals a president who prefers to embrace fights, rather than avoid them: Clinton invaded Haiti when only eight percent of the country approved; he bailed out Mexico and Indonesia when the American people were overwhelmingly against it; and he eliminated the deficit for the first time in 50 years. Plus, he did most of it in the face of a Republican Congress so irresponsible that they were willing to play chicken with the federal debt and shut down the federal government, even if it meant closing veterans’ hospitals and radically curtailing income for the elderly. Clinton even thumbed his nose at the gun lobby by passing an assault weapons ban and the Brady Bill—a fight that his Democratic successor has studiously avoided so far.

Branch’s time with Clinton also pokes holes in the swirling misconceptions that surround Clinton’s family life. The two mens’ conversations, most of which occurred late at night, were repeatedly interrupted by staffers, cabinet secretaries, and the president’s family. These moments prove telling: Branch presents a father who is fiercely devoted to his only child and a marriage that is closer to an intimate romance than a crude partnership of ambition and convenience.

Branch also delivers a more nuanced perspective on Clinton’s political skill than we’ve seen. While his uncanny grasp of policy is well-documented, Clinton’s preternatural ability to dissect the motivations and tactics of his fellow heads-of-state is not. Over the years, Clinton developed friendships with world leaders that served him well as he forged a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, helped halt ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and presided over a power-sharing deal in Northern Ireland. Clinton’s impressions of Rabin, Assad, Arafat, Zemin, Blair, and Yeltsin are perhaps the most engrossing passages in the book; we marvel with Branch as Clinton analyzes the domestic pressures and personality quirks that shape these leaders’ attitudes and actions.

Clinton’s statements on fellow American politicians are similarly insightful and amusing. Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning, elected in 1998, is so mean he alienates other Republicans: “I tried to work with him a couple times and he just sent shivers up my spine”, Clinton recalls in a prediction confirmed by Bunning’s planned (some would say, forced) retirement in 2010. In a prelude to last year’s presidential race, Clinton told Branch in 2000 that the John McCain “might make a good president, but he had no idea how to run”. Bob Dole is “wooden”, Harry Reid “the most underrated man in the Senate”, and George W. Bush is “meaner than his dad” and “unqualified” to be president.

Clinton’s insights into foreign policy are equally prophetic—he fears Russia will slide back into authoritarianism if Yeltsin is defeated, and agonizes over the possibility of democracy in more moderate Islamic countries like Turkey and Indonesia in hopes that they might counteract the more fundamentalist elements that threaten Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. Clinton’s attempts at brokering a peace in the Middle East come across as relentless, even heroic.

Sympathetic, The Clinton Tapes might be. Hagiographic, it is not. Tapes is far more critical than Arthur Schlesinger’s royalist write-up of JFK or Edmund Morris’ sycophantic (and at times fictional) tribute to Reagan, both of which sprung from similar access to the Oval Office. We wince with Branch as he displays Clinton’s remarkable capacity for—and repeated lapse into—self-pity, and we feel Branch’s disappointment in Clinton for giving salacious fodder to his political enemies and a prurient press by having an affair in the White House.

Yet, the struggles of Clinton’s presidency, rather than his personal flaws, are what worry the reader. The scrutiny and shortcomings of Clinton’s personal life are no longer a matter of national discussion, but the global fights that characterized his presidency never left. Indeed, they have intensified over the last decade and have every indication of dominating the next: while Northern Ireland and Bosnia enjoy relative tranquility, peace in the Middle East remains elusive. The threat of Islamic fundamentalism has reached the United States and beyond. Inequality and inefficiency plague American healthcare and gun violence continues to claim too many US citizens.

Tapes, then, is both prologue and preview of what Barack Obama’s years in office might look like, minus—we can only hope—the scandals.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College. He is the Executive Editor of the Oxonian Review. He is writing his thesis on the politics of welfare reform under Clinton and Blair.

King Lear
The Young Vic
Directed by Rupert Goold
Running until 28 March 2009

Othello
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Kathryn Hunter
On tour until 7 March 2009

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King Lear and Othello both begin with a daughter’s disobedience and end with a parade of death. Together, one onstage at the Young Vic and the other just finishing a Royal Shakespeare Company tour, they remind us of Shakespeare’s enduring ability to deliver an audience into a shocked state of despair.

The Headlong Theatre’s production of King Lear at the Young Vic, directed by Rupert Goold, is a solid, if flawed staging of the tragedy. Goold’s directorial decisions are an attempt to deliver a grotesque, even campy Lear. The most flagrant example is Cordelia’s bizarre return to England, dressed in a tennis outfit, amid buzzing helicopters and gasmask-wearing soldiers. The Princess herself brandishes a semi-automatic behind a bouquet of daisies, sending us off to intermission in a storm of gunfire.

The blinding of Gloucester borders on torture porn. Cornwall and Regan are visibly aroused by the act. Regan does not remove Gloucester’s eye with her fingers, but with her teeth, spitting the severed orb out for all to see. We are more disgusted with Regan and Cornwall than we are despairing for Gloucester.

Goold’s production also features a continuous rain shower falling on Lear as he is expelled from Regan’s castle. The rain is a nice effect, but it is diminished by a distracting interpretative song and dance by the rest of the cast as Lear, Kent and the fool battle the storm. You’ve never seen such a crowded heath.

Perhaps Goold is trying to chart a new course for productions of the tragedy. There is no doubt that this show stands in stark contrast to the high drama that most Lear stagings follow. In a sense, Goold emphasises the theatricality of the pain induced in the performance—whether that is the stylised blinding of Gloucester, the song and dance of banishment or the brotherly brawl between Edmund and Edgar that begins with toy swords and ends with an affectionate, albeit murderous embrace. But this interpretation only serves to distract us from the bleak vision of the play.

In spite of the directorial decisions, Pete Postlethwaite and the cast achieve the pathos the text demands. Postlethwaite, as the title character, is better at playing Lear as madman than Lear as King, and, as such, improves as the hours pass. The actor, nearly two decades younger than the King he is portraying, is convincingly feeble, to the point that we get no glimpse of the man who inspired such loyalty in Kent and such love in Cordelia. Once Lear is abandoned by his daughters and thrown out into the storm, however, Postlethwaite breathes a sympathetic, sometimes humorous portrayal into the man.

The Fool, played by Forbes Masson, is the King’s aggressive partisan, giving him an edge not found in most productions. Tobias Menzies is a stirring Edgar, whose decision to disguise himself as an insane beggar is at first one of necessity but becomes a way to hide his horror at seeing his father beaten and blinded.

One cannot be as kind to Jonjo O’Neill who plays Edgar’s brother, Edmund. This Edmund seems more interested in eliciting laughs than in scheming against the rest of the characters. His performance leaves the production without the Iago-like villain that the text demands. After all, this is the man who betrays his brother to banishment, his father to torture, and sends Lear and Cordelia to their deaths.

The most interesting interpretation is that of Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter. In the opening scene, Goneril seems as pained as Cordelia in professing her love to her father. What’s more, she’s pregnant. Very pregnant. She gives birth just before Lear enters the heath. The decision to depict Goneril with child might have served simply to make Lear’s famous curse of barrenness even more horrifying, but it also puts another character onstage.

The child in swaddling clothes is a fixture through the rest of the production, its cry the last thing the audience hears from Lear’s world. The baby’s scream is a coda to the awkward rhyming couplet that ends the play. Depending on the version of the text, either Edgar or Albany declares that those who remain must speak as they feel and not as they ought to say. The child’s cry of pain is the articulated emotion—a more fitting statement than the words that finish the play.

The play ends with those who survive, amid the bodies of the rest of the cast, huddled together just as Lear and his ragged friends huddled earlier in the hovel. Cordelia lies lifeless in Lear’s dead arms. Goneril’s newly-born and now motherless child cries out as the lights fade to black. Those who are left are merely voices watering a stony place.

While the Lear production’s static set evokes the Beckett-like barrenness of human existence, the RSC’s touring production of Othello is a stormy one. You never forget how close you are to the sea. Othello’s squall-filled voyage from Venice to Cyprus is represented with typical seafaring theatrics. Atypically, Iago, played by Michael Gould, is the person who stands above the storm, directing the tempest. However, in this production, he does not need the powers of Prospero to stir up a squall. It rages in spite of his machinations.

Any production of Othello must give the audience one or even several answers as to why Othello believes Iago that Desdemona is unfaithful. Does Othello believe Iago’s slanders because Othello is paranoid? Too trusting? Or is Iago just that good at being bad? Kathryn Hunter’s production offers an alternative explanation—that in a society as misogynistic as Venice, men believe it when other men tell them that their wives are whores.

Iago’s slandering of Desdemona and Othello’s credulity occurs in an ocean of prejudice. Having quickly defeated the Turks in Cyprus, Othello’s troops pass the time with grotesque entertainment. The clown, played by RSC stalwart Miltos Yerolemou, appears in blackface, using a wedding-gowned, life-sized doll of Desdemona to give birth—to the horror of his soldier audience—to a black child. Othello and Desdemona, played by Patrice Naiambana and Natalia Tena, happen upon this repugnant performance and must stomach it. Hunter’s production seems to suggest that the constant barrage of racism thrown at Othello, both from the nobles in Venice and his soldiers in Cyprus, make him more suspicious of any attempt to dishonour him.

The vile vaudeville returns later in the play with a rendition of the Al Jolson standard “You Made Me Love You”, causing the one black soldier in the chorus to leave in disgust. Iago follows this scene with a soliloquy relating his evil plans, while he manhandles and smears with pitch the very doll the clown used to portray Desdemona. The connection between Iago’s crime and the soldiers’ hate is clear.

Iago’s case is thin, but Othello is all too willing to believe it. Naiambana’s Othello is an exceedingly violent one. He throws furniture, shoves soldiers and manages to put nearly every major character into a chokehold with his whip at some point in the production. Before he murders his wife, Othello berates her, slaps her and tortures her in front of his fellow soldiers. As her husband, he is her self-appointed judge and executioner. Even after he realizes that Desdemona was nothing but true to him, Othello cannot admit the nature of his crime. Asked what should be said of him, Othello responds, “An honourable murderer, if you will/ For nought I did in hate, but all in honour.”

The mistrust of wives, the vilification of women and the hatred of blacks are Iago’s greatest allies. Othello’s crime is not solely his own, nor is it Iago’s. In this production, the crime is symptomatic of a world that treats women and blacks as something less than human—a world not unlike our own.

Where the Young Vic’s Lear ends with a child’s cry, the RSC’s Othello concludes with Iago’s cackle. But in both productions, our thoughts are not with the living, but those who lie lifeless on the stage. Even an audience as desensitised to the representation of violence as today’s cannot help but be horrified at the destruction.

We are like Edgar who, having just proclaimed his ability to brave all the winds of the world, watches as his own father stumbles on stage, the old man’s eyes ripped from his face, blinded and bleeding, hoping to find a cliff from which to jump. We ask as Lear did: “Is man no more than this?” After all that carnage, we are left with a child’s cry and a madman’s laugh—both images of that horror.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Senior Editor at the Oxonian Review.

Photograph of Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear © Stephen Vaughan

James McPherson
Tried by War: Lincoln as Commander-In-Chief
Penguin Press, 2008
284 pages
£24.19
ISBN 978-1594201912

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Towards the end of the American Civil War, Confederate General Jubal Early led a surprise attack on Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln walked down to the fortifications along the Potomac to support his troops and survey those of the enemy. Peeking over the parapet with his trademark stovepipe hat, America’s tallest Commander in Chief was a tempting target to sharpshooters, causing one soldier to yell, “Get down you fool!”

The soldier was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would go on to become one of the most revered Justices of the US Supreme Court. The man he had reprimanded and failed to recognise was, of course, the President of the United States.

Holmes was not the first officer to scold Lincoln over the course of his presidency. Many had called Lincoln worse things than “fool”—and they had not insulted him out of care for his safety. George B. McClellan, the commanding Union officer at the beginning of the war, called Lincoln “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon” and “the original gorilla”. Nathaniel Banks, a Major General who owed his commission to Lincoln, once sent his wife to the White House to berate Lincoln for pressuring him to attack. On the eve of the doomed Peninsula Campaign, Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, paid a visit to McClellan’s home to discuss the upcoming military campaign. The butler politely informed them that McClellan would not meet with them.

The press was no better. Horace Greeley, the abolitionist leader and mercurial editor of the New York Herald, excoriated Lincoln for being too moderate in 1862, and then criticised him two years later for rejecting a negotiated peace that would have left slavery intact.

Lincoln’s own party thought about dropping him in 1864 in favour of a candidate who would draw support from Democrats. They made plans to usher in Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, who welcomed the chance to unseat his boss, and even approached Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln’s commanding general at the time.

James McPherson’s recent book, the 2009 Lincoln Prize Winner Tried by War, attempts to tell how Lincoln, despite all these obstacles, won the war. McPherson wrote what many consider to be the best single volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom. He also has the distinction of being the first historian to unearth and examine systematically hundreds of thousands of extant letters written by soldiers during the war. That time-consuming effort led to his remarkable book, For Cause and Comrades, which used soldiers’ own words to understand why they decided to enlist and fight in the Civil War.

The disappointment, then, is even more acute when McPherson fails to give us the engrossing portrait that the subject and the rabid Lincoln readership demand. Tried by War is long on narrative and short on analysis. What we get is little more than a correspondence log between Lincoln and his generals. The story of Lincoln’s relationship with his Generals has been told before and is reiterated here at the expense of more interesting and fertile topics.

McPherson could have written about how Lincoln taught himself military strategy, just as our great autodidact-in-chief taught himself Euclidean geometry and the law before. While McPherson does mention this effort in the introduction, we do not know what Lincoln read nor do we see the homework play out over the course of the war.

Nor does McPherson explore Lincoln’s championing of new technology—hot air balloons for observation, repeating rifles and ships made of iron. Some of these technologies were foolhardy, but others, like the rifles and the ships, were decisive throughout the war.

McPherson fails to defend Lincoln’s unconstitutional acts, such as his suspension of habeas corpus, his jailing of political opponents and his marshalling of recruits and supplies before Congress approved them. The author gives us an honest account of these acts, but not a historian’s evaluation. Anyone writing on Lincoln’s wartime record has to assess other historians’ criticisms of Lincoln’s violation of civil liberties and executive overreach. McPherson does not.

Nor does McPherson explain why he thinks it was Lincoln’s military leadership and not that of Ulysses S. Grant that brought the war to an end. This blind spot is particularly striking, considering the book’s content illustrates the indispensable role that Grant played. As Grant was given command of armies further and further east, and thus closer and closer to the main theatre of war, the Union met with more and more success. Before Grant, Lincoln lacked a commanding general worthy of his soldiers—a fact that Lincoln often admitted. Grant’s tenacity, as much as Lincoln’s, won the war.

The same is true for Lincoln’s other generals in the second half of the war. Would Lincoln agree with McPherson that he—and not his generals—provided the leadership necessary to win the war? William Tecumseh Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, Philip Sheridan’s victories in the Shenandoah and George Henry Thomas’s progress in Tennessee in the summer of 1864 all helped Lincoln win the election later that year. Before his generals’ victories, Lincoln said: “I am going to be beaten and, unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.” As McPherson admits, Sherman marched to the sea in spite of Lincoln’s doubts.

Lincoln’s hagiographers do him a disservice. For Garry Wills, the author of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln created modern American political rhetoric. For many, Lincoln freed the slaves. Now, thanks to McPherson, America’s 16th president single-handedly won the war. Lincoln’s legacy does not need these inflated claims to flourish. One does not need to airbrush Abraham Lincoln to make him look good. Few contest that Lincoln conducted the war with considerable political acumen, military foresight and personal fortitude, but Lincoln himself would recoil at the idea that it was he, and not the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians who, like him, fought and died to renew the country’s freedom.

While Lincoln’s contemporaries criticised him, subsequent generations often have failed to see him for who he truly was. Our Lincoln is obscured by the contingencies of contemporary historiography and the unending publication frenzy. These days, historians want to shrink Lincoln’s brain. Others want to shrink his stature. Hagiographers want to canonise him anew.

That is why there is a glut of Lincoln books and a dearth of Lincoln scholarship. If McPherson had explored the innovative ways Lincoln used his war-making powers, assessed the fair criticisms of the Lincoln administration and rendered the vital roles played by Lincoln’s generals and others, Tried by War would have helped correct that imbalance.

Instead, McPherson has unwittingly written a book that is a cautionary tale for those who will one day write about Lincoln. To remove Lincoln from his time—rob him of his innovation, omit those who helped him and ignore those who criticised him—is to distort him beyond recognition. Then, like the young Oliver Wendell Holmes, we see someone, but not the man he was, nor the time that made him.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Senior Editor at the Oxonian Review.