But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  You can walk up the narrow passageway to the box and see with your own eyes what Booth saw. It’s an impressive leap he made after shooting Lincoln, nearly twelve feet. He caught the spur of his boot on one of the flags draped beneath the box and broke his leg when he hit the stage. Donald quotes a witness who described Booth’s motion across the stage as “like the hopping of a bull frog.”

  In the basement of Ford’s is a museum with artifacts: Booth’s .44-caliber single-shot derringer pistol; the knife curators believe is the one Booth plunged into Rathbone’s arm; the Brooks Brothers coat that had been made for Lincoln’s second inauguration, the left sleeve torn away by relic hunters; the boots, size 14, he wore that night; a small bloodstained towel.

  Members of a New York cavalry unit tracked down Booth twelve days later and shot him dead. Four of Booth’s co-conspirators, including Mary Surratt, proprietress of the boardinghouse where they plotted the assassination, were hanged on July 7. The military tribunal that presided over their trial requested a lighter sentence for Surratt, but the request went unheeded.

  Also displayed are the manacles the conspirators wore in prison while awaiting execution. And a replica of the white canvas hoods they were made to wear to prevent them from communicating with one another. Inevitably, one thinks of the Washington summer heat. Next to the hood is a letter from Brevet Major General John F. Hartranft, commandant of the military prison, dated June 6, 1865: “The prisoners are suffering very much from the padded hoods and I would respectfully request that they be removed from all the prisoners, except 195.” That was the number of Lewis Paine, who while Booth was shooting Lincoln attacked Secretary of State William Seward at his home on Lafayette Square, stabbing him terribly in the throat and face. There’s a photograph of Paine in manacles, staring coldly and remorselessly at the photographer. Perhaps it was this stare that made Major General Hartranft decline to remove Paine’s hood.

  We left Ford’s Theatre and crossed the street to the House Where Lincoln Died, now run by the National Park Service. I had been here as a child, and remembered with a child’s morbid fascination the blood-drenched pillow. It is gone now. I asked a ranger what happened to it. “It’s been removed to a secure location,” she said.

  The air inside the house is close and musty. A little sign on a table says simply, “President Lincoln died in this room at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.” Lincoln was six-foot-four. They had to lay him down on the bed diagonally, with his knees slightly bent. He lived for nine hours.

  I went back outside. Pitch was telling the story of Leale, the young Army surgeon. The first doctor to reach the Ford’s Theater box, Leale knew right away the wound was mortal. He removed the clot that had formed, to relieve pressure on the president’s brain. Leale said the ride back to the White House would surely kill him, so Leale, two other physicians, and several soldiers carried him across the street, to the house of William Petersen, a tailor. According to the historian Shelby Foote, Mrs. Lincoln was escorted from the room after she shrieked when she saw Lincoln’s face twitch and an injured eye bulge from its socket.

  Secretary of War Stanton arrived and set up in the adjoining parlor and took statements from witnesses. A man named James Tanner, who was in the crowd outside, volunteered to take notes in shorthand. Tanner had lost both legs at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862 but, wanting to go on contributing to the war effort, had taken up stenography. He worked through the night. Later he recalled: “In fifteen minutes I had enough down to hang John Wilkes Booth.”

  Mrs. Lincoln, having returned to the bedside, kept wailing, “Is he dead? Oh, is he dead?” She shrieked and fainted after the unconscious Lincoln released a loud exhalation when she was by his face. Stanton shouted, “Take that woman out and do not let her in again!”

  Leale, who’d seen many gunshot wounds, knew that a man sometimes regained consciousness just before dying. He held the president’s hand. Lincoln never regained consciousness. When it was over, Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” (Some thought he had said, “to the angels.”)

  Mrs. Surratt’s boardinghouse, where the conspirators hatched their plot, is not far away, near the corner of H and Sixth Streets. It’s now a Chinese-Japanese restaurant called Wok and Roll.

  Only a few blocks from the House Where Lincoln Died is the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. There you’ll find a plaster cast of Lincoln’s hands made in 1860, after he won his party’s nomination. A caption notes, “Lincoln’s right hand was still swollen from shaking hands with congratulating supporters.” Then there’s one of the museum’s “most treasured icons,” Lincoln’s top hat, worn to the theater the night he was assassinated. Here, too, is the bloodstained sleeve cuff of Laura Keene, star of Our American Cousin, who, according to legend, cradled Lincoln’s head after he was shot.

  No tour of Lincoln’s Washington is complete without his memorial, on the Potomac River about a mile west of the museum. It wasn’t finished until 1922, built over a filled-in swamp in an area so desolate that it seemed an insult to put it there. In the early 1900s, the Speaker of the House, “Uncle Joe” Cannon, harrumphed, “I’ll never let a memorial to Abraham Lincoln be erected in that God damned swamp.” There’s something reassuring about thwarted congressional asseverations.

  Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln, who had witnessed Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, and who was at his father’s side when he died six days later, attended the memorial’s dedication. Robert was seventy-eight now, looking distinguished in spectacles and white whiskers. You can see from a photograph of the occasion that he had his father’s signature large ears. (He served as ambassador to Great Britain and died a successful businessman in 1926.)

  Also present at the memorial’s dedication was Dr. Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute, who delivered the commemorative speech but who still was required nonetheless to sit in the “Colored” section of the segregated audience. The karma in this insult to the memory of Abraham Lincoln was finally exorcised forty-one years later when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the memorial steps in front of 200,000 people and said, “I have a dream.”

  Inside the memorial, graven on the walls, are the only two speeches in American history that surpass in magnificence Dr. King’s: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. It takes only about seven minutes to recite both of these. Edward Everett, who also spoke at Gettysburg that day, wrote Lincoln afterward to say, “I should flatter myself if I could come to the heart of the occasion in two hours in what you did in two minutes.”

  Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the statue of Lincoln that stares out on the Reflecting Pool, studied a cast of Lincoln’s life mask. You can see it in the basement of the memorial, and it is hard to look upon the serenity of Lincoln’s features without being moved. Embarking from Springfield, Illinois, in 1861 to begin his first term as president, Lincoln said, “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” When I first read that speech as a schoolboy, I thought that it sounded immodest. I don’t now.

  —Smithsonian, April 2003

  GET OUT THE PITCHFORKS

  You can’t turn on the TV these days without being sprayed with spittle by someone outraged over (a) vampire AIG executives, (b) Wall Street hyena-jackals, (c) capitalism in general, and (d) office-redecorating bankers. If my computer didn’t give the current year as 2009, I’d swear it was 1789. (See “Revolution, French.”)

  A few weeks ago, the villain du jour was John Thaine—he of the relatively modest $1 million office redo. Now we have Vikram Pandit “the Bandit” and his $10 million office renovation. It’s enough to make you yearn for the good old days of Dennis Kozlowski and his relatively monastic $6,000 shower curtain.

  The current issue of ForbesLife carries an article about Plumber Manor, the charming English manor-resort where last fall the notorious American International Group executives threw themselv
es a bang-up pheasant shooting party just as the U.S. taxpayer was being asked to bail out their company. (Good timing, boys.)

  As the author of the article, I worried that the outrage over AIG might have dissipated by the time it appeared. Not a problem, as it turned out. No, the bonus fiasco at AIG—as opposed to the pheasant-shoot fiasco—has kept public outrage piping hot. The last time the word bonus caused this much trouble was in 1932 when the World War I veterans marched on Washington.

  There is anger in the land. If you are (a) an AIG employee, (b) a banker, (c) a capitalist, look out your window. See all those shiny metallic things glinting in the sunlight? Those, my friends, are the tines of a thousand pitchforks. A thousand points of spite. Now you know what it felt like to be Dr. Frankenstein.

  In the midst of this fury, the one relatively calm voice, oddly, is the president’s. His normal modulated tone became borderline snippy only when a reporter pressed him as to why he had not ordered Seal Team Six summarily to execute the AIG bonus bandits. Mr. Obama replied rather coolly that he generally prefers to know what he’s talking about before he sounds off on an issue. You could almost hear the reporters in the East Room going, Woooo—Dad’s mad!

  Outrage is cardio-aerobics for the soul. It’s fun, lets off steam, and leaves you nice and sweaty afterward and wanting a hot shower. This is different from asserting that it is wise and productive. Outrage run amok leads to the kind of spectacle we saw in the U.S. Congress—328 Captain Renaults shouting, We’re shocked, shocked!—while passing an almost certainly unconstitutional 90 percent tax bill intended to confiscate the toxic bonuses. Congress did this, mind, even as it was merrily assenting to Mr. Obama’s spendthrift budget. To paraphrase Churchill, seldom in human history have so many people given so little thought to so much.

  One of my personal favorite historical figures is Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a leader of the French Revolution of 1848 (whatever it was about). One evening, hearing a mob outside his window, he looked out and hurriedly began dressing. Asked what he was doing, he relied, “There go the people. I must follow them. I am their leader.”

  Today, his words echo through the corridors of the Congress, as our own “leaders” fall over one another to get in front of the mob. The voice of the people—vox populi—must be heard and obeyed. The phrase, which is at the very heart of the concept of “populism,” is erroneously attributed to the twelfth-century William of Malmesbury. (“The voice of the people [is] the voice of God.”) In fact, it goes back further, to the scholar and theologian Alcuin of York, who in 789 wrote to Charlemagne: “And those people should not [emphasis mine] be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”

  To be a card-carrying “populist” is perforce to be “anti-elitist.” A recent New Yorker cartoon depicts the king looking out over the parapets at a sea of pitchforks and torches. A courtier tells him, “I think, Your Majesty, that you are perceived as an elitist.”

  Anti-elitism is deeply rooted in American DNA. Our system of government was born of revolution, but many if not most of our founders were themselves very much among the “elite” of their day. (Thank God.) America has always had a love-hate relationship with its elites: equal parts fascination, envy, and contempt. The dichotomous American icons are the heroic cowboy and the villainous railroad baron.

  The phrase “The Best and the Brightest” has been pejorative since 1972, when David Halberstam published his trenchant book about the very smart Harvard and Yale and other elite academy graduates who got us into Vietnam. Our adventure in Iraq was brought to us by Bush (Yale/Harvard), Rumsfeld (Princeton), Paul Bremer (Yale/Harvard). Bush and Bremer share another shiny credential: Andover.

  What is the solution, other than not letting Andover graduates near foreign policy? But Bush’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush, also went to Andover, so scratch that idea.

  As I head to the garden shed to retrieve my pitchfork, seething with righteous indignation over the deflation of my 401(k) and stock portfolio, I pause to reflect that, as the president told those bankers on Friday, “We are all in this together.”

  I took that to mean We are all complicit. We—the People—did not complain when we were offered no-money-down mortgages, a plethora of credit cards, unbelievable returns on our hedge funds as we watched the national deficit skyrocket into the ionosphere. American capitalism has become a Tom Wolfe novel minus the satire. And now the satire is asserting itself, and the laughs are on us, elitist and populist alike.

  Now where did I put the pitchfork?

  —Forbes, April 2009

  THE SECRETARY OF HISTORY

  (And Other Desperately Needed New Cabinet Positions)

  As I was chomping on a truly superb BLT sandwich at the old Knickerbocker, the waitress swung by and said with excitement, “Did you hear the news?” I thought in a Dorothy Parker vein: What fresh hell is this? Whereupon she announced, in a stop-the-presses tone of voice: “Dashley’s in at Health and Urban Services.”

  A number of things made Tammy’s remark delightful. First, that it took place in Greenwich Village, where appointments to the less sexy cabinet agencies are typically not of the Are you sitting down? variety. Second, her charming mispronunciation of Mr. Daschle’s admittedly tricky surname. And finally, her elision of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (But come to think of it, why not merge them?) I thought it wonderful that a waitress in lower Manhattan should be so excited about a cabinet appointment.

  It was odd that neither of the presidential candidates proposed a new cabinet-level agency during the campaign. They almost always do, since a new cabinet-level agency is assumed to be the answer to an intractable problem. Whereas appointing a “czar”—energy, Iraq, whatever—is now generally conceded to be an admission that there is absolutely nothing to be done about it.

  During the 2004 campaign, Senator Kerry boldly proposed that he would create a “Department of Wellness.” (Really. I wrote it down.) This would mean having a secretary of wellness. Secretary of wellness. What a great title!

  I see the secretary of wellness sitting at the cabinet table, probably well past the salt, toking on medical marijuana. The president would ask, “Mr. Secretary, is the nation well?” And the SOW (unfortunate acronym) would reply, “Phhhhhuppp, very well, sir. Everything is—phhhhupp—totally excellent.”

  The only part that worries me is where would the secretary of wellness rank in the presidential line of succession? If Washington, D.C., were reduced to rubble in a spectacular, Tom Clancy thermonuclear wet dream, and it fell to the secretary of wellness to lead the nation . . . well, you see the problem.

  Ever since Mr. Bush took us into our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, I’ve thought that what we really need is a secretary of history. If there had been one in 2003, when Mr. Bush announced his nation-building intentions in Mesopotamia, the secretary of history, sitting at the cabinet table, would have coughed softly, like Jeeves.

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary?”

  “If I might, sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The British tried that, in the nineteenth century and in the 1920s.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “It did not meet with what could be called an unqualified success, sir.”

  If it did come to a Tom Clancy Armageddon scenario, the secretary of history would be qualified to show us the way back to the future. He or she would have perspective. We’d certainly better off with a secretary of history than with a secretary of wellness, who’d still be shaking his head, going, “Whoa. What was that about?”

  Some further cabinet-level agencies for our times:

  SECRETARY OF INDIGNATION

  Job description: To register indignation—righteously, should the occasion require—on behalf of the American people. The SOI would speak for the nation when the price of oil goes above $100 a barrel or the Dow Jones falls below 10
,000, or when a CEO receives an $18 million bonus for bankrupting the shareholders. He/she would speak from a podium with a “Department of Indignation—Washington” sign behind.

  Requirements: Ability to pound the podium while shouting, “This will not stand!”

  Ideal physical type: Dr. Everett Koop, President Reagan’s surgeon general and scariest-looking high government official in memory.

  SECRETARY OF BAILOUT

  Job description: SOB to coordinate ongoing nationalization of U.S. industries, as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” continues to bitch-slap the U.S. economy.

  Requirements: Ability to shrug, rub forehead, sigh, occasionally groan, and quote Gresham’s Law; evince spluttering fury over CEOs flying into Washington aboard lavish corporate jets to plead for public money. Denunciations to be coordinated with Department of Indignation.

  SECRETARY OF WIND

  Job description: T. Boone Pickens.

  Requirements: Texan accent, trophy wife, and ability to stand up to National Audubon Society and other candy-ass bird-hugging groups who claim that giant wind turbines have only one purpose, namely to puree rare, migratory birds.

  Finally, and most pressingly, it is time that we had a

  SECRETARY OF HYSTERIA

  Job description: To make matters worse.

  Requirements: Ability to crawl under the cabinet table during meetings and bite the ankles of others while shrieking, “We’re all going to die! We’re all going to die!”

  Rank in presidential line of succession: Probably best near the bottom.

  —The Daily Beast, November 2008