Given the choice between starting with Abe Lincoln or Dick Morris, I have taken the non-commercial path and gone with Abe.
Bear with me.
For sure, there was an initial tendency toward Morris. The fallen Bill Clinton adviser, dumped (sort of) after being caught with a hooker, was here to hawk a book on his relationship with Clinton. Interrogated by legions of media, he proved there are no limits to his shamelessness or the media’s willingness to shill for even the most odious.
Saints or sinners, it doesn’t matter. Saddam Hussein, Jerry Seinfeld or Dick Morris are all equal candidates for a People magazine cover or a book signing at Borders. And all the better if they’re in a 12-step program for celebrities, most of which includes a stay at “Larry King Live,” a Mayo Clinic for fallen reputations.
But the word is also out that Clinton is scrutinizing second inaugural addresses before making his on Monday. He could not do much better than reading Lincoln’s–perhaps 100 times.
“It’s the greatest, without a doubt. Short, eloquent, very scriptural and establishes an attitude toward Reconstruction before Reconstruction, without getting bogged down in policy details. A lot of people think it’s better than the Gettysburg Address,” said Garry Wills, the historian-journalist at Northwestern University who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on the Gettysburg Address.
Of course, it wouldn’t be that hard to read it 100 times. It was amazingly, wonderfully, concise. I tried it aloud, and it took 2 1/2 to 3 minutes. Clinton probably will spend that much time on tuition tax credits.
So as you read the following, realize that it was written by a guy who hadn’t gone to Oxford and didn’t have a phalanx of strategists, speechwriters, pollsters and direct mail specialists. And it came at the tail end of an awful war.
“Fellow-Countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it–all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war–seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
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“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
“Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered–that of neither has been answered fully.
“The Almighty has His own purposes. `Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so it still must be said, `The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
“With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work where we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan–to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Not bad, eh?
Mea culpa and filthy lucre
As he returned to his hotel Friday afternoon, Dick Morris found a phone message under the door. It was from his wife, who is divorcing him. He called her Paris hotel, but she was out.
It was fitting. Morris is not just peddling a fairly interesting book, “Behind the Oval Office,” with a presumptuous subtitle of “Winning the Presidency in the Nineties” (as if there’s no other way but his). But, with a reported $2.5 million advance, he’s also seeking to “work out” his personal troubles in our midst.
The professional manipulator passed along two anecdotes that “I do not think I have ever told anyone before.” One involved dinner with Sam Donaldson. You are not ill-served by either’s omission here.
He denied that Clinton used polling to alter positions, proceeding to make distinctions without much of a difference on how strategies were calibrated on Bosnia, school prayer and affirmative action.
He scoffed at evidence that Clinton personally circumvented federal election rules through his hands-on involvement in Democratic National Committee “issue ads,” as opposed to candidate-boosting commercials.
I told him that Clinton often strikes me as a cold, calculating, heartless s.o.b. Reading between the lines of his book, I sensed that Morris thinks similarly of Clinton. He denied Clinton was cold and calculating and praised him, but with a laugh said, “I’ll leave the s.o.b. part up to you.”
With his robust, mid-70-ish dad in the room (yes, he’s touring with dad), I noted that once upon a time, the shamed stayed out of public view and rehabbed underground. Why an orchestrated tour, replete with intimate details of his fall?
“I am doing everything I am doing simply because I am doing it for myself as an expression of myself. It’s part of my own process of healing.”
Talking to Sam Donaldson, Larry King, even me, are thus “crucial steps to integrate” his “hidden life (hookers) and real life into one person. They are of a piece with the therapy I have been going through.”
Maybe I should send him a bill.