The picture any President presents to the public is unlikely to be the picture he himself sees. It may not even be the picture seen by those who are closest to him. Neither the camera nor the typewriter is apt to make a wholly accurate portrayal—partly, no doubt, because the White House is inevitably a distorting glass whose images are always subject to a certain amount of retouching, and partly too because any human being, whether he be President of the United States or the humblest voter in a remote precinct, is always a good deal more complex than is commonly realized.
Anyway, it is hard to feel sure that we are seeing any President as he really was, and the amount of exposure a President gets does not help very much. By design or by accident, an image is created, usually fairly early in the game, and what comes later tends to conform to it. We ourselves, as spectators, even help make it conform; we have our own notion of the man, and we are likely to cling to it, discarding bits of evidence that do not fit our preconceived pattern.
There is available now a remarkable collection of pictures of one of the best-known of all American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln in Photographs, compiled by Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf and containing, as far as the authors are able to determine—and they have spent years in careful search—every existing photograph of the man. In all, 119 separate photographs of Lincoln are reproduced here; good pictures and poor ones, pictures wholly familiar and pictures nobody but specialists ever saw before, the sum total actually providing something of a new look at the man. It is of course possible that other pictures do exist somewhere, and from time to time one or another of them may come to light, but at the moment this is the most complete collection there is, and succeeding years are not likely to add much to it.
It goes without saying that the book is wholly fascinating, and it contains a few minor surprises.
It is a little surprising, for instance, to see how many photographs of Lincoln there actually are. The camera was a fairly new device when he was in the White House, and it was cumbersome. There was no corps of White House news photographers because news photographers in the modern sense did not exist. No man could take a snapshot then; every picture was a time exposure, and most pictures were taken in the studio, carefully posed and lighted. Today a President can hardly put his head out of the front door without being photographed, but it was very different in the 1860’s. Indeed, one of the minor surprises here is the comparatively large number of pictures made out of doors, some of them entirely unposed.
Most of the pictures, of course, are studio shots, and some of the less familiar of these are extremely interesting. The best of them tend to come before Lincoln got into the White House; the public image had not been wholly developed, and there was less compulsion on the photographer’s part to make the man look like what he was supposed to look like. There is, for example, a photograph made apparently in Decatur, Illinois, in the spring of 1860, showing a clean-shaven man looking into the camera, and this picture does not give us the legendary Lincoln. This one shows a very hard man indeed, a man who could be ruthless and tough, using other men and then discarding them once they had served his purpose. The “real” Lincoln? Well, part of him: the trouble is there were so many real Lincolns that it is hard to pin one down.
Now and then the retouchers got to work, with disastrous results. One virtue of this book is that here and there it shows an original photograph alongside the retouched version, proving clearly that the Madison Avenue gambit was known in the sixties even though Madison Avenue then had not really been invented.
The earlier pictures, in short, tend to show a man who came up the hard way, a veteran of Illinois politics and of prairie life who carried on his face the relief map printed by what he had been, done, and lived through. It becomes easy to understand the remark of a London newspaperman who looked at an 1860 picture and said that it showed “an honest old lawyer, with a face half Roman, half Indian, wasted by climate, scarred by a life’s struggle.”
Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose, by Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf. University of Oklahoma Press. 409 pp. $19.50.
The biggest struggle, of course, lay ahead, and many of the pictures made after Lincoln got into the White House are oddly disappointing. The “hard lines in his face,” mentioned by an old-time friend, tend to vanish; what we too often get is a picture that conforms to the legend of the brooding, kindly, love-everybody President. One reason for this is fairly simple: it took time to make a picture then, and the man who was being photographed had to hold a fixed expression, sometimes for as much as a minute. As a result, a man who was being photographed posed. He had to pose; there was no other way to do it; but the picture was apt to show the pose rather than the man.
Mrs. Lincoln, as the authors of this book point out, once remarked that when Lincoln went to the studio he put on his “photographer’s face,” not because he was trying to strike an attitude but simply because that was the way the camera worked then. So something essential is missing. We have no picture of Lincoln laughing, although laughter was a vital part of him; we have nothing that catches him unaware, and we think of him as one always melancholy, sad, with features set in a mold. An acquaintance called the turn on this: “His large bony face when in repose was unspeakably sad and as unreadable as that of a sphinx, his eyes were as expressionless as those of a dead fish; but when he smiled or laughed at one of his own stories or that of another then everything about him changed; his figure became alert, a lightning change came over his countenance, his eyes scintillated and I thought he had the most expressive features I had ever seen on the face of a man.”
That Lincoln the camera never caught, and we are the poorer for it. There are some pictures, however, which seem to have something a little different. There are a few full-length pictures, and some that show the man seated in a straight-backed chair, which give us a new view: a long, lanky man, muscular, craggy of features, with long legs, knobby knees, and big feet, a man who down within was as hard as all the rocks in the western mountains, tenaciously pulling the nation along to victory in spite of all the odds.
Yet by and large one finishes an inspection of these pictures—as one finishes his study of almost everything the man’s contemporaries wrote about him—wishing that one knew what Lincoln really looked like. The legend wins. We have this simulacrum of Lincoln, built up by the writings of worshipful men, sustained by innumerable photographs of the kindly, sad, warmhearted President, and we look at and for someone who was not always there. Where is the Lincoln we do not really know? Here and there, in this wonderful collection, there is a hint, but it is never much more than a hint. Perhaps the Presidency itself puts a veil over a man. Perhaps we never can be sure that we understand the man in the White House.
By the President Himself
Indeed, the exact picture may lie forever out of our reach. Even the searching portrayal of television can hardly remove the veil; perhaps the Presidency must always hide the man. No President was ever subjected to such intense, intimate, friendly portrayal as John F. Kennedy received during the weekend following his assassination—and yet in the end we really know just about what we had known before. We did come to learn a good deal about ourselves, and the knowledge undoubtedly was good for us, but our picture of Mr. Kennedy remains just what it always was, ennobled by the memory of solemn ceremonies, flagdraped casket, and immense silent crowds, but still essentially unchanged. Perhaps any man who lives in the White House inevitably steps just a little out of clear focus.
Even the man who has himself been a President cannot always paint a clear portrait. A man who survives his time in the White House and sits down in the pleasant twilight of life to tell what he did and what he meant can fail just as the cameras of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner failed.
One man who lived in the White House in time of immense crisis was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who won in the hearts of the people a place almost as warm and abiding as Lincoln’s. Now General Eisenhower has given us his own portrayal of his career as President, and his new book, Mandate for Change, is oddly similar to this book of Lincoln pictures: interesting, heart-warming, and somewhat baffling.
Undertaking to tell us all, General Eisenhower actually tells us very little. He describes, to be sure, the acts he did in order to get into the White House, and he goes into detail on the acts done after he got there, and to the best of his ability, presumably, he tells us what was on his mind when he did these things and how it all looks to him now that he is the squire of sunny acres at Gettysburg. Yet something is missing. It is as if General Eisenhower did what Mrs. Lincoln said that earlier President did: he put on his photographer’s face when he got into the studio. Out of it we get an excellent picture of a man deservedly admired and revered, but we retain the haunting feeling that somewhere, somehow, an essential part of the picture got left out.
Here was a man, clearly, who knew how to be tough, a man used to command who could be ruthless, a leader who hewed to a chosen line so tenaciously that the country found itself following without quite understanding what had happened to it. Taking office as the leader of the political opposition, he managed to conserve most of the important things built by the men he had opposed—which is to say that he clung to collective security, NATO, the Marshall Plan, the concept of the United Nations as a force for peace, the broad idea of firmness in defense of America’s vital interests which could still go hand in hand with a determination to keep the world from erupting into a new war. He took the country with him on these matters, and the danger that a resurgence of old-time isolationism might cause us to repeat the mistakes of the 1920’s was averted. Obviously, it took a good man to do this, and it took some struggles.
Mandate for Change, 1953–1956, by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Doubleday & Company. 650 pp. $6.95.
Yet as we read about all of this we get the odd feeling that the General was nothing more than a friendly, kindly man who simply followed his country’s conscience without kicking anyone in the shins or stirring up any particular antagonisms. Obviously, this picture is as misleading as the comparable picture of the gentle, compassionate, always kindly Lincoln.
As President, he exercised the virtue of restraint. Given the circumstances under which he took office, this was wise and proper. But now, with office behind him, with no obligation upon him except to speak his own mind, the virtue of restraint is still dominant. General Eisenhower rarely lets us see the man who held the presidential office. In speaking of the Quemoy-Matsu problem, during which his administration met and passed a test which might easily have led to an all-out war, he remarks: “The hard way is to have the courage to be patient.” True enough: but it would be interesting now to know just whom he had to be most patient with, and what he thought about the people involved, and how he sustained himself in his exercise of patience. This sort of thing we do not get.
Any man, obviously, whether he is a former President or a man who once served as county commissioner, is entitled to write his memoirs in his own way, and it is hardly fair to quarrel with him for the things he refuses to say. But Mandate for Change remains singularly like Lincoln in Photographs. It tells us some things we did not know, casts a bit of light here and there on matters not previously illuminated, and presents a series of fascinating first-hand portraits; yet somehow it leaves us with the feeling that we still do not quite have the full picture. The live, passionate, interesting man who was President during those fateful years remains behind a mist of vague generalities and happy expressions of good feeling for almost everybody.
Concluding his summary of the achievements of his first term, General Eisenhower writes:
“We had converted the United States of America from a nation at war to a nation at peace, productive and happy. We had wrought the giant military structures which, coiled for war, would safeguard that peace. We had ringed the globe by signed agreements with our allies. And hour by hour we had made clear to friend and foe our determination to safeguard freedom in those areas where freedom was prized, and we had given hope for a better life to many millions who, unless backed by our strength, would almost certainly lose the freedom and economic opportunities that they now could devote their full energies to achieve.”
That statement, which fairly well stands the test of comparison with the record, is a statement of genuine achievement not easily gained. But it cannot all have been done in an atmosphere of sweetness, light, and good-fellowship. Telling about it, the General somehow donned his photographer’s face. We miss the sense of strain, struggle, and devotion that undoubtedly lay back of the achievement.
It really is hard to get a truly realistic portrait of a President.
ALBERT B. COREY 1898—1963
Abert B. Corey was a gifted historian who believed that true history is of the people, by the people, and for the people.
As he saw it, history is basically the record of things done by ordinary, everyday folk who try to earn a living, to get a little fun out of life, and to serve their ideals and fellow men as best they can. They contribute the faith and quiet courage which make possible the bright deeds of their famous leaders; out of what they want and do and believe in come the great, seemingly impersonal forces and movements that make up the formal story of historic events. They not only make history: they are ultimately the ones to whom history’s story has to be directed.
Dr. Corey was State Historian of New York; as someone aptly remarked, he was thus a sort of “family historian” to millions of citizens who wanted to know more about their immediate backgrounds. He was also, from 1950 to 1954, president of the American Association for State and Local History, which gave him a broader field in which to perform the same function. He was intensely interested in the quarterly publication which the Association had begun in 1949—a modest but distinctive little magazine called American Heritage, which tried to tell people about their past in terms of the homely, familiar deeds and events that lie at the bottom of all human achievement.
During the latter part of his term as Association president Dr. Corey realized that the publication needed a firmer base and a larger audience. The Association could no longer carry it, because it could not reach very far beyond its own membership. The little magazine must either get new resources or go out of existence.
Dr. Corey wanted it to live and grow. He believed that it could do this as a commercial enterprise, because he believed that the general public would support it in such a way that it could realize its full potential. When it was proposed, early in 1954, that ownership of the magazine be transferred to a new publishing corporation that would put this matter to the test, he welcomed the proposal and supported it vigorously.
As a result, the American Heritage Publishing Company came into being, and AMERICAN HERITAGE Magazine was transformed into the publication that now exists. Its experience has shown that Dr. Corey’s confidence was justified. During the difficult period of transition from a small, specialized magazine to one that reaches a large audience, Dr. Corey’s wise advice, counsel, and assistance were invaluable.
If it had not been for Albert B. Corey, this magazine today would not exist. His untimely death on November 9, 1963, from an automobile accident robbed us of a valued counsellor and an even more deeply valued friend. These lines are written in tribute to a man to whom we are profoundly indebted.
