You, sir, are no Abe Lincoln

Bush may wish he measured up to the Great Emancipator. But he does stack up quite nicely against Andrew Johnson.

By Garrett Epps

Read more: George W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln, Opinion, Civil War, Iraq War

Aug. 23, 2006 | News reports about President Bush's tragically short and recently concluded Crawford vacation were dominated by the bizarre information that the president's aprhs-brush-clearing reading included "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. But lost amid the resulting snark was another item on the president's alleged summer reading list: "Lincoln" by Richard J. Carwardine. It would be pleasant to believe that Bush was learning about this great leader in an attempt to upgrade his own modest executive skills. It seems more likely, however, that Bush is attempting to console himself by imagining ways that he is like the Great Emancipator. Alas, those similarities are either superficial or illusory. If anything, Bush is the anti-Lincoln; he bears far more resemblance to another 19th century statesman, Lincoln's inept successor Andrew Johnson.

Every president, of course, tries at some point, in the words of Lincoln biographer David H. Donald, "to get right with Lincoln." We can be glad that the current president has apparently not yet begun to speak directly to Lincoln's portraits, the way Richard Nixon did during his waning hours in the White House. But Bush and his supporters have tried to claim the mantle of Lincoln's greatness.

"In a small way, I can relate to the rail-splitter from out West because he had a way of speaking that was not always appreciated by the newspapers back East," Bush said in 2005. On the eve of the 2004 election, former Bush speechwriter and loyal supporter David Frum quietly altered a famous Lincoln quote to support a more elaborate comparison. "Lincoln was the last US president to seek re-election in the middle of a big war whose outcome remained uncertain," he wrote in the Financial Times. "He was disliked in Europe because he too was seen -- and correctly seen -- as a disturbing and destabilizing force in the world, who spurned peace in favor of victory. And he was, finally, the author of the words that best sum up how millions upon millions of Americans feel about the 43rd president: 'We cannot spare this man. He fights.'"

Last month, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, author of many of the Bush administration's now-infamous torture memos, extended the analogy. The Hamdan case, he suggested, was the equivalent of obstacles placed in Lincoln's way by a pro-slavery Supreme Court. "If the commander in chief couldn't have taken wartime actions on his own," he explained in the Los Angeles Times, "then the slaves would have remained Confederate property during the Civil War."

It's easy to see why an unpopular president and his beleaguered supporters would find similarities between Bush and Lincoln. Like Bush, Lincoln before his election was an obscure, inexperienced provincial figure with an at-best shaky military record. (Lincoln served nearly three months in the militia during a flare-up of hostilities with the Indians. Though he never saw combat, he recalled, "I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes, and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry." )

Like Bush, Lincoln found himself leading the nation in a war he didn't anticipate. He was reviled by much of the public as a buffoon, and was mocked even by members of his official family. Many professional soldiers were withering in their criticism of his decisions. He pushed executive authority to extremes never before imagined; he created the first "national security" apparatus since the Alien and Sedition Acts fiasco of 1798; he showed no hesitation about curtailing civil liberties, aggressively used military commissions to try American citizens for aiding the enemy or even speaking against the war effort, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and maintained his own system of extra-legal executive prisons, including one that stood on the site of the present Supreme Court building.

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