Lincoln’s legacy on 200th birthday

Fascination with the life and times of Abraham Lincoln is not new: Only Jesus Christ, after all, has had more books published about him.

But in an angst-ridden era of terrorism, war and financial meltdown, the country has taken to the 16th president - born 200 years ago Thursday - like a depressive to a pint of ice cream.

“There’s always been a peculiar fascination with Lincoln, not only by Americans but throughout the world,” said Harry V. Jaffa, a Lincoln scholar whose acclaimed 1959 book on the Lincoln-Douglas debates is still in print. “He would have been amazed.”

Mr. Jaffa cites Lincoln’s affability, accessibility and eloquence as sources of the abiding interest. “He is the kind of person you could sit down with and talk to; he was always yarning,” he said.

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Jay Winik, the best-selling presidential historian and author of “April 1865: The Month That Saved America,” said Lincoln’s legacy has been towering higher because Americans instinctively know where to turn in a pinch.

“The fact is, Lincoln remains one of two of our greatest presidents,” Mr. Winik said (George Washington being the other indispensable chief executive). “There’s no better president than Lincoln to look at as a model of leadership in crisis.”

Lincoln has survived reams of historical revisionism painting him as a presidential-power-aggrandizing, habeus-corpus-suspending tyrant, a bigot and even a closeted homosexual.

Yet the man has proved he can take it on the reputational chin.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and author of the astonishingly successful “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” (which director Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner are adapting into a feature film), said Lincoln’s “reputation has always been pretty solid, despite all these arrows being thrown in.”

“There are legitimate criticisms that can be made of Lincoln,” said Mr. Winik, “but there’s no need to whitewash his record: Even with these not insignificant blemishes, he still shines as a remarkable president and leader.”

Now Lincoln is being celebrated anew with scores of books, documentaries, lectures, conferences, exhibitions - you name it - in the bicentennial year of his birth.

The symbolism of the anniversary began noticeably with the inauguration of Barack Obama and his Lincolnesque assembly of a “team of rivals” administration - including vanquished opponents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Hillary Rodham Clinton as vice president and secretary of state.

Not to be outshone, Michael S. Steele, the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, has laid claim to the 16th president’s legacy, calling his win “just one more bold step the party of Lincoln has taken since its founding.”

“The timing has been electric,” Mrs. Goodwin said of the confluence of politics and history.

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