The documentary film "Looking for Lincoln" (which OETA -- not wanting to distract from its scheduled orgy of fund-raising reruns it calls "Festival" -- is airing at about 1 a.m. Thursday morning and 2 a.m. Friday morning) is an intriguing look at the myths and realities of Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday is Thursday, 12 Februrary.
One of things Henry Louis Gates Jr., the show's writer and presenter, discovered in his study was that people tend to embrace the image of Lincoln that matters the most to them, regardless of what the facts might say about him.
That extends to the two former presidents Gates interviewed in the course of the show.
Bill Clinton talks about the literary, political and philosophical marvel that is the Gettysburg Address, that how “in a couple hundred words, he described how Americans were feeling or should be feeling” about the Civil War, while George W. Bush talks about his admiration of Lincoln’s “moral clarity” in waging an unpopular war.
Bush also says that, when it comes to the media and the court of popular opinion, “I got it so easy compared to Lincoln.”
That desire to find a personal connection with Lincoln -- which we wrote about in the story that ran in the 8 February Tulsa World -- is the reason for all the mythologizing about our 16th President. It is an activity that began, some say, at the very moment of his death, when Edward Stanton, one of Lincoln's Cabinet members, said, "Now he belongs to the ages" (or "to the angels" -- that's another one of those fact that remain in dispute).
But, as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said, “The real man is more extraordinary than the myth.”
Some of the facts that are presented in "Looking for Lincoln" may come as a surprise to those who know only a cursory history of the man — how his disapproval of the institution of slavery, for example, did not mean that Lincoln believed in racial equality.
But they reveal Lincoln to be both truly a man of time, and a man for all times — and at all times, simply a man.
