Last night the History Channel ran a long show on Abraham Lincoln, and these comments by Matthew Pinsker, author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary, sort of leaped out at me:
He gains a measure of empathy for people who lose loved ones. You know, this is a president who sends young boys to die in a war, and understands what that means to a family: death and tragedy. And it makes him a far more sympathetic figure as a leader, because I think the general public, through a variety of images and stories and decisions he made, realized that he was a kind of empathetic figure, in a way that they were not used to in the White House. And so it separates him from other people. It’s why he gained this image as Father Abraham.
He’s riding out the the Soldiers’ Home one afternoon in the summer of ’62, and he comes across a train of ambulance wagons that are carrying back bodies of wounded soldiers from the Peninsula Campaign, which was one of the pivotal turning points in the history of the war. And it was a brutal campaign with terrible loss of life and devastation to the Union forces.
Now, the president eagerly went up to them and was anxious to converse with them about the real conditions of affairs. That he reached out to them, risking whatever criticism or complaints they would have, in order to make contact, to talk to them. And some people who aren’t as empathetic don’t want to be exposed to angry widows or disgruntled wounded soldiers or others. Lincoln’s the opposite. And for me that defines his greatness.
Mediocre presidents hide from bad news. Great presidents reach out for it.
Personally, I think Pinsker gives George W. Bush way too much credit, calling him “mediocre.” Mediocrity is beyond this president’s reach.
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