It is odd to see Lincoln presented in such a way - not because he wasn’t an expert politician and able strategist, but because most of us have only ever been acquainted with old honest Abe of myth and legend. Rarely do readers ever escape the parlors of Washington, and the constant intrigue and gamesmanship carries the story all the way to the only place it could end - a blood-stained box-suite in the upper balcony of Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. The second installment in the author’s “Narratives of Empire” series, Lincoln is a 600-plus-page testament to the artful craft of politics.

The novel is filled with similar scenes of Lincoln unleashing the full breadth of his political prowess. His ruining of Chase and the Republican Senate cabal may have been the crowning moment of the narrative, but it was only one example among many of him outmaneuvering foes and entrenching his power, something most doubted the humble and unassuming Illinoisan was capable of. He had the guile and charm of the savviest operator and the instincts of a political predator.

“I am the master here,” Lincoln says with a wry, wolfish grin as he walks one of his vanquished guests toward the door.īold, clever, and in command - meet Gore Vidal’s Lincoln. It was a political masterstroke that neither Chase nor the senators ever saw coming and a hit so well-sprung that it sunk whatever intra-party putsch the conspirators had cooking. Lincoln saw through the scheme and ended Chase’s presidential bid by making a fool of the former governor and all his friends at a carefully orchestrated Cabinet meeting. For weeks Chase had been duplicitously back-channeling with his friends in the Senate, setting in motion his own plan to unseat Lincoln and run for president as the Republican nominee in 1864. Chase, an accomplished former governor of Ohio, who served as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury. ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH his 1984 novel Lincoln, Gore Vidal has the notoriously long-legged and honest US president spring an all-timer of a trap.

Lincoln a novel by gore vidal