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Reexamining the life, and death, of Lincoln
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Lincoln's bicentennial will be marked by documentaries, one of which focuses on his assassination by John Wilkes Booth.
You can never have too much Abraham Lincoln. Adams, yes, Jefferson, yes, but not Lincoln. He remains the most elusive of presidents. If Jefferson was the Sage of Monticello, Lincoln was the Sphinx of Springfield.
It is no surprise that the bicentennial of his Feb. 12 birth this week brings us fresh offerings on the man. There are new books, joining more than 14,000 already written about him. Steven Spielberg is making a movie about Lincoln. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner is writing the screenplay for it. PBS has produced a pair of documentaries about him. It goes on.
The first documentary, which airs tonight, is "The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln," a solid "American Experience" piece that expands our knowledge about the infamous event.
On Wednesday comes the more interesting of the two, "Looking for Lincoln," hosted by Henry Louis Gates, the celebrity Harvard professor and one-man multimedia engine. (He has formed his own production company, Inkwell, to produce films about the African-American experience.)
Gates attempts to deconstruct for himself the myth of Lincoln, rail-splitter and great emancipator. He displays his gift as a synthesizer of history, collecting a roster of superb historians along with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who emit air.
At issue is the gap between the myth and the man. Gates does a good job presenting to us the whole man - the crafty politician exquisitely aware of his image, the man of his times ambivalent about the roles of blacks in America.
New York, NY |
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