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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Former Gov. Mario Cuomo, author of a book on the "wisest" president, speculates about what Lincoln's position would have been on preemptive war, stem cell research, restriction of civil liberties.
Jul 3, 2004 | Mario Cuomo has long been an amateur scholar of Abraham Lincoln. But the former New York governor resisted offers to publish a book on the 16th president because he didn't feel he could contribute anything from his experience to the story. That changed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when, in Cuomo's view, Lincoln became more relevant than ever, in that not since the Civil War has the country been under such direct threat. Combining insights from his own years in politics and government -- and his knowledge of Lincoln's writings and life -- Cuomo finally published a book this year, "Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever."
Elected governor in 1982, the progressive Democrat left Albany after 12 years and now practices law in New York. He spoke with Salon on the eve of the July 4 holiday weekend.
What is the origin of this book?
It happened because Solidarity asked me to lecture in Poland in 1989, and I said, "Let me instead get Lincoln's works on democracy and I'll have them translated into Polish and have them sent over there." But when I went to the collected works of Lincoln and looked in the index, the word "democracy" did not appear. So Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, and I arranged to have some of the nation's best Lincoln scholars put together a collection of Lincoln's writings on democracy. After that I was asked frequently to write a book on Lincoln, but I declined because I felt I needed something more relevant to my own experience. Then, a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, there was the memorial service for the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, and a reporter from the New York Times called me and asked if I had still been governor, what I would have said. "Now there's a daunting challenge," I thought. "You need to interpret this event, why did it happen? How are we to react to it?" At the service, [former New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani and [New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg didn't speak a word of their own. Instead, they read Lincoln. I said to myself, "If Lincoln is relevant enough for you to read him instead of giving your own interpretations of 9/11, then we should inquire of him more deeply on other current subjects."
Would Lincoln have had anything to say about President Bush's doctrine of preemptive war?
Yes. He specifically condemned preventive war on the grounds it would allow a leader to start a war cynically or unwisely. He thought it better to allow constitutional devices to work, which means going to Congress and obtaining a declaration of war. Lincoln also made it clear that you should avoid at all costs doing two wars at once. During the course of the Civil War, he was tempted by everyone around him to intervene with the British on the Trent affair [sparked by the Union's capture of two Confederate diplomats aboard a British mail steamer] and with the Mexicans [who were fending off a French attack aimed at installing a puppet government]. But he avoided it, saying we needed to concentrate our effort, which is precisely the critique that [Florida Sen.] Bob Graham was making of Bush during the Democratic primary elections.
What would Lincoln have said about Bush's appeals to religious conservatives? Implicit in these appeals seems to be the notion that if you really believe in God, you'll vote Republican.
Lincoln spoke constantly of the Bible. He referred to God as the creator, but he really spoke more like the Declaration of Independence than does Bush. The Declaration of Independence never says God. It says "nature's God." He spoke of a kind of natural law that does not depend on a deity specifically or on a deity with a personality. He relies only on intelligence, not on revelation or faith. So I see differences. President Bush is a man of faith -- he says he is, and I'm sure he is. Lincoln was not a man of faith in the sense that he would accept something on faith that could not be proven intellectually. He wouldn't, for example, say, "Life beings at conception because I believe life begins at conception." He would never say that.
So do you think Lincoln would have supported embryonic stem cell research? Bush has refused to because it involves the destruction of human embryos.
I think Lincoln would have asked, "Who says when life has begun?" Confronted with the stem cell situation, he would not establish a rule on the basis of a proposition that hasn't been proved by science. When does life begin? It's not established in the Constitution or by science. And Lincoln would have said, "As long as it's not established this way, I cannot use this as the starting point of my reason" -- which is what President Bush does.
But does that mean Lincoln wasn't religious? Then as now, I have a hard time imagining America electing a president who claims to have no belief in God.
A congressman once asked him, "Mr. President, you talk about the Bible a great deal. Do you belong to any particular religion?" Lincoln said "No." The congressman countered, "Mr. President, you purchased a pew at the Baptist church." And Lincoln said, "Yes, but only my wife uses it." And the congressman said, "Why, then, are you not a member of any specific religion?" And Lincoln said, "Because they all appear to have prohibitions, admonitions and proffered truths which cannot be established as a matter of intellect or natural law, which is reason -- simple reason -- unattended by revelation of faith. Most of them insist that you believe in certain things not because you can prove absolutely that they are so, but because you want to believe in them." Then he said, "Give me a church or a religion that has one principle: Love one another as you love yourself, and I will belong to that church."
