Bija grūti lasīt, gluži tāpat kā Vidala pirmo impērijas stāstu par Āronu Beru, jo autora erudīcija un zināšanas par laikmetu un ASV politiskās vēstures niansēm ir n-tās reizes pārāka par maniem virpusējiem iespaidiem. Vidals lasītāju šajā ziņā netaupa. Romāna darbība simtprocentīgi risinās ASV Pilsoņu kara laikā, bet darba centrā nav ne lielās kaujas, ne cilvēciskās drāmas. Pilsoņu karu lasītājs iepazīst no Vašingtonas varas gaiteņu aizkulisēm un politiskām intringām, kas tolaik galvenajiem varoņiem bija daudz nozīmīgākas nekā mums, par to lasot ar laika distanci.
Vidals rāda, kā uz jaunas, vēl tikai dzimstošas impērijas! fona rodas mīts. Turklāt, pēc viņa droši vien ķecerīgā viedokļa, mīts tiek radīts ļoti apzināti. Ja īsi jāraksturo grāmata, tas ir stāsts par ģēniju, kurš visus piemuļķoja ar savu pieticību, lai ieņemtu pirmo pozīciju, kas savukārt viņam bija vajadzīga nevis personiskā labuma vai varaskāres dēļ, bet gan tāpēc, lai izpildītu misiju, ko, pēc viņa domām, neviens cits nespētu. Piņķerīgi. Bet tāda ir arī pati grāmata.

Gore Vidal's enjoyable and masterly fictional biography of Abraham Lincoln is, according to the author, largely based on fact.

Until I read Lincoln I had a naive belief that he was a modern saint. That he was not. He is portrayed as being a brilliant politician: persistent, both ruthless as well as humane, and pragmatic.

We are introduced to him as the USA was in the process of becoming disunited and was plunging into a deadly civil war. Not only was his country disunited, but also was his Republican party, many of whose senior members had little faith in his ability to win the Civil War. Yet, he pulled it off. Despite mammoth losses of life on the battlefields, incompetent military commanders, and numerous attempts to sabotage his work, Lincoln managed to defeat the Confederates and to prevent the unity of the young USA from becoming permanently disrupted.

I was surprised to learn that 'Honest Abe' was not always in favour of liberating the Black slaves and ending slavery in the USA. It was almost, it seemed to me, for pragmatic reasons that he was gradually won over to these things. The integrity of the USA was in the forefront of his mind. If allowing slavery in states that would have otherwise become disloyal to the union permitted him to keep them as allies, he allowed that even though many of his closest colleagues were in favour of abolishing slavery.

The novel contains a plethora of interesting and well-portrayed characters, all of whom contribute to the suspense that is maintained throughout its more than 600 pages of tiny font.

In this rather massive tome, Vidal successfully gives us the feeling of being in Lincoln’s White House, surrounded by his “team of rivals” and confronted with the South seceding. He is strongest when he highlights the menagerie of people from the era, ranging from the better known, like the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the ambitious Wiliam Seward and Salmon Chase, the timid general George McClellan, or the radical Republicans in congress like Thaddeus Stevens, but also in more obscure figures in Washington D.C. or the army at the time. He clearly did a lot of research here, and one certainly gets the sense for the time and place.

It’s far from a complete list, but random things which stood out for me included Lincoln’s use of the “blue mass” (upwards of 33% mercury) for severe constipation, and President’s Park with its unfinished Washington Monument being the site of the daily slaughter of cattle and pigs, which combined with the odor of a stagnant canal, led to overpowering odor. We also get a nuanced portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, who was a progressive voice in a slave-holding, secessionist family, yet with the fatal flaw of lavish spending, and having seances to speak to her dead son Willie, following his devastating death.

There are various details of the war of course, most of which I believe will be known to those who’ve studied the period, but Vidal does a reasonably good job at bringing them to life. The terrible nearness of the conflict is striking, a couple of times when Washington D.C. is vulnerable to an attack (which really makes one wonder ‘what if’), and when through binoculars Lincoln can see the large Confederate flag hanging at an inn in Alexandria, Virginia, the one that 24-year-old Elmer Ellsworth would die taking down, the first Union officer to die in the war. We also get quite a taste for the supreme difficulty Salmon Chase faced financing the war effort at a time when there was no income tax, in which he established a national banking system, issued paper currency, and sold war bonds to wealthy investors.

The main reason for not liking the book as much as I did when I started reading it, soaking up all of the history as I went, was that unfortunately Vidal repeats some of the falsehoods propagated by Lost Cause historians. It’s like he got lost in the details and missed the critical main points, or that he was so intent on not producing hagiography that he swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Or, perhaps it’s because he grew up in the south, as he mentions in the preface.

The main sins of the book relate to what Vidal writes about the Constitutionality of secession, the reason for the war, the view of Lincoln as a dictator (and one operating without a higher moral cause), and the completely unexamined elephant in the room, the opinions and life in the South at the time.

On the Constitutionality of secession, Vidal goes from this exchange early in the book:
“But the Southern States regard the organization of the Union as a more casual affair. As they entered it of their own free will, so that can leave it.”
“But no provision was ever made in the Constitution for their leaving it.”
“They say that this right is implicit.”
“Nothing so astounding and fundamental would not be spelled out in the Constitution.”

To this load of crap at the end of the book:
“You see, the Southern states had every Constitutional right to go out of the Union. But Lincoln said, no. Lincoln said, this Union can never be broken.”

Vidal fails to mention that secession was illegal per the Constitution, for the clause that allowed it in the earlier Articles of Confederation had been removed, and as Lincoln put it, because no government provides for its own dissolution. He does not mention that Southern states agreed that secession was not a right in 1814, when New Englanders talked about doing so because of the War of 1812, or that Andrew Jackson opposed South Carolina’s threatened secession in 1832. He presents a view that it is Lincoln and Lincoln alone who has come up with this view, that everyone else would have let the South go.

Related to this, through a conversation between John Hay and newspaper editor Charles Eames, Vidal also regurgitates the Lost Cause falsehood about the reason for war. He has Hay aimlessly wondering what the war was about, that it was “like the fever; it came for no reason and left for no reason.” Eames then puts the war on Lincoln to preserve the Union, that only after the fighting did he “shift over to the slavery side,” and that the South was just “fighting for independence.” While it’s true that Lincoln’s motivation was to preserve the Union, what’s ridiculous in this dialogue is that it fails to mention that the South seceded for no other reason that slavery, which Southerners fully realized at the time, as evidenced in a myriad of their founding documents and articles from their leaders.

A page later he mentions a mulatto waiter “as loyal to the Confederacy as his employer,” and then a chapter later writes this: “Like most natives of Washington, David had been amazed by the Union soldiers’ hatred of all Negroes. By and large, Southerners got on well with them. After all, they grew up with their niggers; and they liked – even loved – the ones who kept their place. … After all, wasn’t that what the war was supposed to be about? How the institution of slavery gave the South an advantage over the North’s so-called free, if ill-paid, labor.”

Good grief. And this snippet may be the only place in the book where Southern life is mentioned at all. While there are references to Lincoln’s often contradictory views as he tried to navigate a moderate position within the progressive party of the period, there is never a single mention of the absolutely vile viewpoints of the South and how that mattered to what was going on. Instead we get a far from flattering view of the radical Republicans in Congress, men who were true heroes to the country in pushing progress before and after the war.

Vidal closes part two with William Seward mouthing the Southern viewpoint, that Lincoln had made himself into an “absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer.” Later while Lincoln and Seward discuss the phrasing “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” he has Seward wondering what “of the people” meant when it’s obviously a reference to not having a king, and then has Lincoln murmur that a “race of eagles,” e.g. an elite group, an alpha – like himself, like Bismarck – could suffice. Nothing could be farther from Lincoln’s views or the spirits of his writings.

Along these lines, Vidal overstates Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus as evidence of his wielding dictatorial power. The Constitution explicitly provides that “in cases of rebellion” that it may be suspended, a bar the secession clearly met, yet you’d never know it from the way Lincoln and his cabinet members talk about it. The Lincoln presented here is upholding the Union for the Union’s sake, damn the Constitution, and out of his own aggressive statesmanship, not because of his fidelity to its having a higher moral purpose, its dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. Conveniently Vidal does not go into any depth on Lincoln’s efforts after the war to get the 13th Amendment passed.

In trying to build this into a type of Shakespearean tragedy, Vidal begins swaying more into things he imagines or wishes were true, vs. actual history. There are assassination attempts on Lincoln as he rides his horse at night, resulting in a bullet hole through his top hat not once but twice. He implies that Lincoln’s real grandfather was the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, which was shaky at the time, and which has been refuted by DNA testing. It leads to a terrible final chapter that includes the insane (and highly melodramatic) view that Lincoln had “in some mysterious fashion, willed his own murder as a form of atonement for the great and terrible thing that he had done.” Good lord, this was perhaps the worst ending to a book I’ve ever read, let alone a historical drama.

Perhaps there is nothing more damning than the exchange between Herbert Mitgang and Vidal. Mitgang commented that Vidal had accepted the rather outrageous revisionist belief that "Lincoln really wanted the Civil War, with its 600,000 casualties, in order to eclipse the Founding Fathers and insure his own place in the pantheon of great presidents." In response to his, Vidal wrote, "Yes, that is pretty much what I came to believe."

If you’re interested in reading about Lincoln and want historical accuracy, I’d suggest Doris Kearn’s Goodwin’s Team of Rivals instead. If you’d like something poetic, but which captures the humanism of Lincoln far better than what Vidal did here, I’d recommend George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. While the details contained within Vidal’s writing are seductive, his overall conclusions and messages are insidious, and dangerously wrong.

Gore Vidal prefers his "inventions" to his historical novels, and I do too -- especially Myron, Myra Breckenridge, and Kalki. But I enjoy the Narratives of Empire series for the sheer villainy of the political intrigue, the characterizations, and the breadth of research that obviously underlies the series. Vidal's cynicism seems even more pronounced in Lincoln, although I'm not sure why I have this reaction. I didn't find the characterizations as compelling in Lincoln. In particular, Vidal excels with female characters, and both of the female characers here (Mary Todd Lincoln, Kate Chase) were one-dimensional and static. Still, this is an intriguing and enigmatic portrait of Lincoln's presidency, and a fun read.