From Lincoln to Obama

“The great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night / I mourn’d and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
--Whitman in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” on Lincoln’s death

As a young man I idolized Napoleon. He reverenced knowledge and learning. He sailed to war in Egypt with an entourage of scientists, mathematicians, inventors, artists, writers and other savants.
He studied the lives of conquerors and famous men of antiquity, “in search of his own image,” as one of his biographers put it. Moreover, Napoleon was a brilliant, front-line general.
But the truth of Napoleon soon dawned on me: he was a monstrous killer, depleting the blood of France and Europe for his own egomaniacal glorification and empire-building.
In contrast, I never tire of reading about Lincoln. He was the greatest president the nation ever had. Indeed, it could be argued that Lincoln is the greatest man America ever produced.
In 11 days the nation will celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. Just 13 days ago America inaugurated its first black president. The symbolism is magnificent. Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Obama the black White House liberator.
The day after the inauguration the New York Times reported that aides of G. W. Bush found the inaugural address ungracious. Au contraire. It was far too gracious. Obama thanked Bush “for his service to our nation.” Actually, Bush did a great disservice to America and the world for eight interminable years.
One of the great things about Lincoln was his character. The word has fallen into disuse. But oldtimers will know what it means: integrity, honesty, compassion, sensitivity, kindness and decency. Lincoln had a powerful conscience with a fervor for justice.
Another great attribute of Lincoln was his magnanimity, a quality that Doris Kearns Goodwin found in her “Team of Rivals.” She called it unprecedented “to incorporate his eminent rivals” into his cabinet and cited it as evidence of a profound self-confidence.
Eric Foner, Columbia University historian, calls Lincoln “the politician whose greatness lay in his capacity for growth.” Lincoln opposed abolition until well into the Civil War. But he finally adopted the positions the abolitionists had staked out much earlier.
I have sought my own image in the life of Lincoln. Countless stories have been told about him, some of them probably untrue in fact but true in spirit. The Lincoln stories, like those of Jesus in the New Testament, instruct us on how to live.
One of my favorite Lincoln stories is of him clerking in a grocery store in New Salem, Ill. He overcharged a customer a few cents and hiked miles to return the overcharge. True or not, the lesson is exemplary.
Then you have Lincoln reading by firelight the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, both with rich cadences that find echoes in Lincoln’s marvelous speeches.
Obama showed his own self-confidence by choosing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. That confidence was evident from the very start of his first 100 days.
He issued a flurry of executive orders overturning heinous Bush policies: closing the notorious Guantanamo Star Chamber, shuttering CIA secret black site prisons, halting “extraordinary rendition” of detainees for torture, and prohibiting the torture of waterboarding. (Portia says in “The Merchant of Venice”: “Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack / Where men enforced do speak anything.”)
Obama halted the baleful secrecy of the Bush administration, ordering transparency in government. He directed federal regulators to apply California’s strict standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency. He reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose abortion. He lifted the odious gag that Bush put on international family planning groups. He abolished four Bush anti-union directives.
Obama restored science to its exalted place over ideology. He will sign a children’s insurance bill twice vetoed by Bush. He signed a fair pay law to overrule a frightening decision by Supreme Court reactionaries approving sex discrimination. He allowed populist anger to burst through his cool façade at the obsceneness of Wall Streeters getting $18 billion bonuses after a bailout.
Above all, Obama has forever removed the second-class citizenship of blacks. They now can realistically aspire to the presidency.
As a black woman from Atlanta exulted at the inauguration: “Today we become Americans for the first time…All the dignity, all the respect and all that comes with being a U.S. citizen.”
For a century and a half hundreds of Americans, black and white, battled magnificently for black civil rights. Among them: King and Malcolm, Douglass and Garrison, Thoreau and Paine, Thurgood Marshall and John Brown, Robeson and Robinson, Du Bois and Garvey, Tubman and Sojourner, Lincoln and LBJ, Jackson and Booker T.
President Obama has achieved King’s dream.