But Enough About You: Essays (24 page)

So what do you think of your new first lady? I picked Moronia—what’s your name, honey? Melania, right. Great name. I just picked Melania here from a very wide selection of possibilities—not just because the sex is incredible but because this nation wants and deserves a trophy first lady. When everyone sees our first lady standing next to some other first lady of another country, the wife of a premier or whatever, they’ll want to go to bed with our first lady, not the other one. So the American people no longer have to worry on that score. And if they get tired of her, not a problem, because chances are I’ll be tired
of her before they are. And we’ll get a new first lady. Trying to keep North Korea from getting the bomb, maybe that’s a problem. Finding a new first lady? Trust me, not a problem.

Policy-wise? I’m going to be very hands-on. If a situation comes up, like inflation, or a union beef, or Mike Tyson beats up another motorist, I’m going to be on it. It’s going to be fixed. There was a skating rink in New York City in Central Park. There were problems with it. Then I got involved. Now people can skate on it. Again, it’s not rocket science.

Foreign-policy-wise? Same. I’m a businessman. Other countries want to do business with us, I’m all for it. Trade, great. I have no problems with people trading with us. But it’s going to be fair trade, by which I mean
we
come out on top. They have a problem with that, they can sell their TVs and cheese and whatever to someone else. Maybe North Korea. It’s just not complicated. Missiles? Very simple—you aim one at us, I fire a hundred at you. So don’t go there. Turning a country into a radioactive parking lot does not bother me. I sleep fine. Ask Melanomia. And finally on the foreign front, I have something to say to Fidel Castro.
Adios
, pal. This time, we’re going to nationalize
your
hotels and casinos.

That about covers it. I have to go, because important senators and congressmen are giving me a lavish luncheon in the Rotunda behind me here. I understand they’re serving a lot of jumbo shrimp. Basically they’re trying to impress me so I won’t cancel their highway projects and ethanol subsidies. I know how they do things. Now they’re going to find out how I do things.

By the way, I’ve directed the Treasury to issue a couple billion extra in hundred-dollar chips. Enjoy yourselves. This is the dawn of a great, great era.

—
The Wall Street Journal

On the 137th anniversary of the day Mr. Lincoln was shot, I joined a tour in Lafayette Square, on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the White House, conducted by Anthony Pitch, a spry man wearing a floppy hat and carrying a MiniVox loudspeaker. Pitch is a former British subject, and the author of an informative book,
The Burning of Washington
, about the British torching of the city on August 24, 1814. Pitch has seen, in the basement of the White House, the scorch marks left over from the incident. But for a thunderstorm that must have seemed heaven-sent, many of the city’s public buildings might have burned completely to the ground. It’s often said the presidential residence was first painted to cover up the charred exterior, but official White House historians say that isn’t so, and point out that the building of pinkish sandstone was first whitewashed in 1798 and was known informally as “the White House” before the British ever set it aflame. Theodore Roosevelt made the name official in 1901 when he put “The White House” on the stationery.

But today Pitch’s theme is Lincoln. His enthusiasm is little short of idolatrous. “He was one of the most amazing people who ever walked the earth,” he says. “He was self-taught and never took umbrage at insults. That such a man was shot in the back of the head is one of the most monstrous insults that ever happened.”

We crossed the street and peered through the White House fence at the North Portico. He pointed out the center window on the second floor. (You can see it on a twenty-dollar bill.) On April 11, 1865, he said, Abraham Lincoln appeared there and gave a speech.

“It was the first time he had said in public that blacks should get the vote,” Pitch explained. A twenty-six-year-old actor named John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd outside, along with a man named Lewis Paine (born Powell). Booth had been stalking Lincoln for
weeks. Booth growled, “That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make. . . . By God, I’ll put him through.”

Another man in the crowd that day was a twenty-three-year-old physician, Charles Leale, who a few days later would be the first to come to the aid of the mortally wounded president. Pitch pointed out another window, three over to the right. “That room was called the Prince of Wales Room. That’s where they did the autopsy and the embalming.”

My mind went back twenty years, when I was a speech writer for then Vice President George H. W. Bush, to a night I dined in that room seated at a small table with President Reagan and two authentic royal princesses, both of them daughters of American actresses (Rita Hayworth and Grace Kelly). I mention this for a reason. At one point during the meal, President Reagan turned to one of the princesses and remarked that his Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Rex, would always start to bark whenever he came into this room. There was no explaining it, Reagan said. Then he told about Lincoln being embalmed here, and suddenly the president of the United States and the two princesses were swapping personal ghost stories.

For two years, I had a White House pass that allowed me to wander about freely. One day I heard that Jimmy Cagney was about to get the Medal of Freedom in the East Room, where Abigail Adams once hung out her wash to dry and where Lincoln’s body lay in state. Another time, I sat in that room behind Joan Collins of
Dynasty
fame as she and her husband (number four, I think it was) groped each other voraciously while Andy Williams crooned “Moon River.” I rushed over from my office in the Old Executive Office Building just in time to see President Reagan pin the medal on the man who had tap-danced “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Mr. Cagney was now a crumpled, speechless figure in a wheelchair. Reagan put his hand on Cagney’s shoulder and said how generous he had been “many years ago to a young contract player on the Warner Brothers lot.”

During the administration of George H. W. Bush, I was invited to the State Dining Room for a talk about Lincoln’s time at the White House by Professor David Herbert Donald, author of a much-praised biography
Lincoln
. I sat directly behind Colin Powell, then
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and remember that for an hour General Powell did not move one centimeter. What I also remember of the evening was Professor Donald’s stories about Mary Todd Lincoln’s extravagances. Mrs. Lincoln was the Imelda Marcos of her day. This woman
shopped
. Among her purchases was the enormous rosewood bed known as the Lincoln Bed, even though her husband never spent a night in it. By 1864, Mary Todd Lincoln had run up a monumental bill. While Civil War commanders were shouting “Charge!” Mrs. Lincoln was saying, “Charge it!”

Professor Donald ended his quite riveting talk by looking rather wistfully at the front door. He noted that Mr. Lincoln hadn’t wanted to go to the theater that night, but the newspaper had said he would, so he felt he had to attend
Our American Cousin
.

“And so,” said Professor Donald, “they left the White House together for the last time.”

We’re standing in Lafayette Square in front of a red brick building, 712 Jackson Place. The plaque notes that it’s now the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, the one-year government internship program. But in April 1865 it was the residence of a young Army major named Henry Rathbone, who was engaged to his stepsister Clara, daughter of a New York senator.

As Professor Donald recounts in his biography, April 14, 1865, was Good Friday, not a big night to go out, traditionally. It’s hard to imagine today, when an invitation from the president of the United States is tantamount to a subpoena, but the Lincolns had a hard time finding anyone to join them at the theater that night.

His own secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, declined. (Mrs. Stanton couldn’t stand Mrs. Lincoln.) General Grant also begged off. (Mrs. Grant couldn’t stand Mrs. Lincoln, either.) Lincoln was subsequently turned down by a governor, another general, the Detroit postmaster, another governor (of the Idaho Territory), and the chief of the telegraph bureau at the War Department, an Army major named Thomas Eckert.

Finally the president turned to another Army major, Henry
Rathbone, who accepted. The image of the president pleading with an Army major to sit in the president’s box is perhaps the final tragicomic vignette we have of Lincoln, of a piece with his humanity and humility.

After Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone lunged for Booth. Booth sank a viciously sharp seven-inch blade into his arm, opening a wound from elbow to shoulder. Rathbone survived, but the emotional wound went deeper. One day eighteen years later, now U.S. consul general in Hanover, Germany, he shot his wife dead. Rathbone himself died in 1911 in an asylum for the criminally insane. “He was one of the many people,” Pitch said, “whose lives were broken that night.”

I’d last been to Ford’s Theatre two decades before, to see a play. It was a comedy, but even as I chuckled, I kept looking up at Lincoln’s box. I don’t know how any actor can manage to get through a play here. The negative energy didn’t end with April 14, 1865. Ford’s Theater later became a government office building, and one day in 1893, all three floors collapsed, killing twenty-two people.

You can walk up the narrow passageway to the box and see with your own eyes what Booth saw. It’s an impressive leap he made after shooting Lincoln, nearly twelve feet. He caught the spur of his boot on one of the flags draped beneath the box and broke his leg when he hit the stage. Donald quotes a witness who described Booth’s motion across the stage as “like the hopping of a bull frog.”

In the basement of Ford’s is a museum with artifacts: Booth’s .44-caliber single-shot derringer pistol; the knife curators believe is the one Booth plunged into Rathbone’s arm; the Brooks Brothers coat that had been made for Lincoln’s second inauguration, the left sleeve torn away by relic hunters; the boots, size 14, he wore that night; a small bloodstained towel.

Members of a New York cavalry unit tracked down Booth twelve days later and shot him dead. Four of Booth’s co-conspirators, including Mary Surratt, proprietress of the boardinghouse where they plotted the assassination, were hanged on July 7. The military tribunal that presided over their trial requested a lighter sentence for Surratt, but the request went unheeded.

Also displayed are the manacles the conspirators wore in prison while awaiting execution. And a replica of the white canvas hoods they were made to wear to prevent them from communicating with one another. Inevitably, one thinks of the Washington summer heat. Next to the hood is a letter from Brevet Major General John F. Hartranft, commandant of the military prison, dated June 6, 1865: “The prisoners are suffering very much from the padded hoods and I would respectfully request that they be removed from all the prisoners, except 195.” That was the number of Lewis Paine, who while Booth was shooting Lincoln attacked Secretary of State William Seward at his home on Lafayette Square, stabbing him terribly in the throat and face. There’s a photograph of Paine in manacles, staring coldly and remorselessly at the photographer. Perhaps it was this stare that made Major General Hartranft decline to remove Paine’s hood.

We left Ford’s Theatre and crossed the street to the House Where Lincoln Died, now run by the National Park Service. I had been here as a child, and remembered with a child’s morbid fascination the blood-drenched pillow. It is gone now. I asked a ranger what happened to it. “It’s been removed to a secure location,” she said.

The air inside the house is close and musty. A little sign on a table says simply, “President Lincoln died in this room at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.” Lincoln was six-foot-four. They had to lay him down on the bed diagonally, with his knees slightly bent. He lived for nine hours.

I went back outside. Pitch was telling the story of Leale, the young Army surgeon. The first doctor to reach the Ford’s Theater box, Leale knew right away the wound was mortal. He removed the clot that had formed, to relieve pressure on the president’s brain. Leale said the ride back to the White House would surely kill him, so Leale, two other physicians, and several soldiers carried him across the street, to the house of William Petersen, a tailor. According to the historian Shelby Foote, Mrs. Lincoln was escorted from the room after she shrieked when she saw Lincoln’s face twitch and an injured eye bulge from its socket.

Secretary of War Stanton arrived and set up in the adjoining parlor and took statements from witnesses. A man named James Tanner,
who was in the crowd outside, volunteered to take notes in shorthand. Tanner had lost both legs at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862 but, wanting to go on contributing to the war effort, had taken up stenography. He worked through the night. Later he recalled: “In fifteen minutes I had enough down to hang John Wilkes Booth.”

Mrs. Lincoln, having returned to the bedside, kept wailing, “Is he dead? Oh, is he dead?” She shrieked and fainted after the unconscious Lincoln released a loud exhalation when she was by his face. Stanton shouted, “Take that woman out and do not let her in again!”

Leale, who’d seen many gunshot wounds, knew that a man sometimes regained consciousness just before dying. He held the president’s hand. Lincoln never regained consciousness. When it was over, Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” (Some thought he had said, “to the angels.”)

Mrs. Surratt’s boardinghouse, where the conspirators hatched their plot, is not far away, near the corner of H and Sixth Streets. It’s now a Chinese-Japanese restaurant called Wok and Roll.

Only a few blocks from the House Where Lincoln Died is the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. There you’ll find a plaster cast of Lincoln’s hands made in 1860, after he won his party’s nomination. A caption notes, “Lincoln’s right hand was still swollen from shaking hands with congratulating supporters.” Then there’s one of the museum’s “most treasured icons,” Lincoln’s top hat, worn to the theater the night he was assassinated. Here, too, is the bloodstained sleeve cuff of Laura Keene, star of
Our American Cousin
, who, according to legend, cradled Lincoln’s head after he was shot.