April 11, 2006
Re: What Would Lincoln Do Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST Just a few points.
1) The casualties on that single day at Antietam were 10 times the deaths we have suffered in three years in Iraq. It remains to this day the bloodiest single day in American military history. Partly, to be sure, that is due to the infinitely better and more powerful medical care that soldiers receive today. But even so, this has been a remarkably low-mortality war.
2) Mathew Brady photographs, haunting and gut-wrenching as they were, are not 24/7 color footage in your living room, any more than a wind-up gramophone playing 78s is an iPod. 3) Mr. Zeitz, it seems, would like President Bush to hand the media a club with which the media would, without a doubt, proceed to beat him mercilessly. The President is not stupid, and certainly not that stupid. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal and, judging by their actions so far, would put political injury to the President above the interests of the country. Endless pictures of flag-draped coffins would suit them just fine. For instance, Mr. Zeitz mentions the awful New York Times story of the family that was told it could not see their son’s remains, told to them by an ill-informed or incompetent officer. With 2,352 deaths and thus 2,352 instances of an officer with the grim and thankless duty of personally informing the families of the fallen, the chances that one of these visits would be botched is pretty near a certainty. The vast reportorial powers of the Times uncovered this story, but I wonder how much reportorial effort was put by the Times into finding a case where the officer informing the family went above and beyond the call of duty. My bet: not five seconds worth of effort.
Another for instance. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which I watch almost every night and which I feel is pretty “fair and balanced,” to coin a phrase, often ends the show with the pictures, names, home towns, and ages, of the most recent deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. But has the NewsHour reported that battle deaths in Iraq have been falling every month for the last six months and were in March less than a third of those in October? Not that I’ve heard. I would think this trend would be big news: fewer and fewer American soldiers are dying in Iraq. But I have not seen it anywhere, except on a few right-of-center blogs. Why? And this has been a war almost entirely without heroes. Again, why, because there haven’t been any? Of course not. It’s because the media just can’t find the room to report any. 4) I think the either-or of Lincoln’s way or Bush’s way is a false choice. Lincoln, although frequently excoriated by unfriendly papers, also had friendly papers. And all papers reported stories of extraordinary heroism, not just stories of extraordinarily botched operations (of which, heaven knows, the Civil War had its share, starting with Antietam, which should have been a crushing defeat for the Confederacy). Almost all Northern papers wanted the Union to win the war. I am not at all certain that is the case with this war, at least with CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, etc. 5) As for what would Lincoln do, he gave the answer to that in the greatest speech in American—perhaps world—history, the Second Inaugural: He would “with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, . . . strive on to finish the work we are in . . .” That, it seems to me, is what George Bush is trying to do.
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