Lincoln and the Pressure he Faced
Read this
Jay Winik op-ed from
The Wall Street Journal all the way through. Or should I say, please read this Jay Winik op-ed
from
The Wall Street Journal all the way through. It's just fascinating. Winik reminds us that the pressure on Lincoln was just extraordinary, more extraordinary than any other president ever experienced:
Early on, Lincoln learned that tumult is inherent in governing. Mr.
Obama has already declared that he doesn't want "drama" within his
cabinet and staff, but Lincoln's experience suggests that he should
expect precisely that. From the outset of his administration, Lincoln's
secretary of state, William Seward, a former senator from New York, was
assiduously scheming against his president. Where Lincoln saw civil war
as inevitable, Seward was freelancing, calling for negotiations with
the South and privately telling Confederates that their differences
could be peacefully resolved.
Obama on What a President Must Do to Help Israel
This is from my
May interview with President-Elect Obama on the subject of the Middle East. I hope this means that Obama will sit down with the next Israeli prime minister and talk about the self-destructiveness of settlements, in addition to talking about the destructiveness of Hamas:
Obama: I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now, and that won't lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.
