April 11, 2006
Abraham Lincoln and Iraq Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon and I should probably take this act on the road (maybe a USO tour?). I say ying, he says yang. I say black, he says white. Go, stop. Left, right. Up, down. It makes for a good intellectual exchange—usually. But in his zeal for a spirited argument, Mr. Gordon has waded into some fairly shallow waters. Let’s consider his objections to my prior post comparing the relatively open access accorded to journalists and photographers during the Civil War with the situation in the current war in Iraq, whose human toll the Bush administration has worked overtime to keep hidden from the American public: 1. Mr. Gordon objects to my comparison of Antietam to Iraq on the grounds that the great Civil War battle remains the bloodiest day in American combat history, whereas Operation Iraqi Freedom has been, in his words, “a remarkably low-mortality war.” Point taken, but so what? To a mother who lost her son or daughter in Iraq, or a spouse who lost a husband or wife, or a child who lost a parent, the aggregate number of dead in each conflict is an abstraction. 2. Mr. Gordon counters that Mathew Brady’s famous Civil War photographs were hardly as jarring and dramatic as color photography and film. Again, so what? In fact my point is that, ironically, even given the technological deficiencies of the nineteenth century, Americans living in the 1860s saw more visual imagery of war—and of its human toll—than do Americans living today. At least Mathew Brady and his staff were permitted to roam the fields at Antietam to photograph the dead. Today’s journalists aren’t even permitted to photograph sealed coffins being loaded off of jet planes. 3. Mr. Gordon writes that “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.” First, this is a baseless charge. Can Mr. Gordon prove that the media is “liberal”? And by prove I don’t mean simply saying that it’s so. In any event, I would remind Mr. Gordon that America’s leading liberal journal, The New Republic, supported this war, whereas leading conservatives like Pat Buchanan and neoconservatives like Francis Fukuyama opposed it. The world’s a complex place, and yelling “liberal media” hardly helps to clarify matters. Mr. Gordon’s point is not, however, just intellectually lame. It constitutes a serious and offensive charge. Mr. Gordon confuses dissent with disloyalty. Is it not in the interest of the country to know the full impact of this war? The Bush administration, I would remind Mr. Gordon, has tried on several occasions to slash servicemen’s benefits and to cut funding for the Veterans Administration. The Republican Congress, on almost straight party-line votes, shot down Democratic party proposals to commit $3.6 billion to quality-of-life programs for servicemen and servicewomen and their families, and to provide $1,500 bonuses for each service member in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2004. Our armed forces are bleeding enlisted troops and officers. Unless we start treating our soldiers, airmen, and sailors with more respect, we’ll emerge from this war a decidedly weaker military power. And we won’t start doing right by our troops until the American people are confronted with the realities of the war in Iraq. Sorry, Mr. Gordon. But conservatives have no lock on patriotism. 4. Mr. Gordon writes that “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.” What utter nonsense. Again, Mr. Gordon obtusely confuses criticism with disloyalty. People who write about the trials and tribulations of American servicemen, Mr. Gordon, probably support those same American servicemen. Moreover, let’s try to get our history right. The nineteenth-century press was fiercely partisan. Many of the North’s leading Democratic newspapers, particularly by 1863, were aligned with the party’s Copperhead faction and were sharply critical of the President. So, too, were several leading Republican papers, like the New York Tribune, whose influential editor, Horace Greeley, was a constant thorn in Lincoln’s side. In fact, Lincoln was a deeply unpopular President well into the fall of 1864, and many of his problems owed to miserable press coverage. Did Horace Greeley want the Union to lose? Hardly. Does The New York Times want America to “lose” in Iraq? Does it enjoy seeing America humiliated or hurt? Only in the fantasy world that is Fox News (and, it would seem, John Steele Gordon’s vivid imagination). 5. Mr. Gordon writes, “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.” Again, we could argue that point until we’re blue in the face, but it’s irrelevant. The question I posed was about press access, not the winning strategy in Iraq.
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