Time for Obama’s History Lesson

I first became aware of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s celebrated political biography, Team of Rivals, which has just been published in Britain (Penguin £10.99), towards the end of 2006 when Robert Harris chose it as his book of the year for the Observer

Harris, who had been touring Bush’s America for his novel Imperium, reported that he had assuaged the routine of book promotion by sneaking back to this massive (920 pages) volume. “Goodwin’s approach,” he wrote, “enables her to paint both an intimate portrait of Lincoln and a vast panorama of the Civil War. I have not enjoyed a history book as much for years: to escape, if only for a few hours a day… to Lincoln’s sublime rhetoric and magnanimity was a pure delight.”

At that moment in US politics, Lincoln offered the distant prospect of a golden age. Bush was unpopular, the Democrats were in disarray and Hillary Clinton was the clear frontrunner in a lackluster field. While the future was obscure, Team of Rivals was just another book about two timeless American themes, the War Between the States and Honest Abe.

Then the junior senator from Illinois launched his presidential campaign in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill, invoking Lincoln’s name and everything began to change. Soon after this, the would-be president read Team of Rivals and began telling people about it, because its story had extraordinary resonances for his own “improbable candidacy”.

Two narratives began to merge. First, Obama’s campaign started to identify with Goodwin’s portrait of Lincoln. Who could not warm to the lanky, engaging outsider who repeated risqué stories, loved Shakespeare and the Bible, took on the political establishment and, through sheer force of oratory, carried the day? Just as Obama became empowered by association with the magic of Lincoln, so Doris Kearns Goodwin was redeemed by Obama. Team of Rivals has now sold more than a million copies, but a few years before, its author had known much darker times when her career as a historian seemed shattered beyond repair.

In January 2002, the Weekly Standard, a polemical, right-wing magazine, convincingly demonstrated that Goodwin’s bestseller, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, had been plagiarised from three other Kennedy books. Worse, she had paid a substantial “private settlement” to one of the authors involved. When, in August 2002, more accusations of plagiarism in another of her books surfaced in the Los Angeles Times, Goodwin seemed to be ruined professionally.

But the professor was lucky. The parallels between William Henry Seward and Hillary Clinton, the shoo-in nominees of their respective parties, are uncanny. The way in which Lincoln and Obama, both underdogs, outmanoeuvred their complacent opponents made Team of Rivals required reading in the summer of 2008. This time, there could be no question of bad scholarship.

Once Obama had secured the nomination and was heading for victory in the polls, his campaign’s invocation of the past became deafening. America, then and now, was in crisis, and the Republic in danger. The frontrunner hinted he might have the self-confidence to appoint “a team of rivals” to his cabinet, as Lincoln had done. But would it happen? For weeks, Clinton and Obama played peekaboo with the press.

Finally, the apotheosis of history, past and present, occurred when Obama invited Goodwin to discuss her book with him in Washington. For many, it was a relief that the new president was not obsessed with Churchill, as Bush had been.

So the story of “the book that inspired Barack Obama” is compelling on many levels. More than an enthralling, well-turned narrative, it is also a brilliant portrait of a man, and a country, on the brink of greatness. Civil War America was full of risk, passion, argument and hope. Lincoln had no Lincoln to look back to. Everything was being done for the first time.

Reading Team of Rivals in the shadow of Obama’s first 100 days, it is hard to forget Marx’s aside that history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce. Right now, Lincoln’s tragic fate has been overshadowed by a world crisis that seems anything but farcical. President Obama will have to find another model.

Tags: History, Lesson, Obama's, Time