Then the caption writer is troubled when the dramatization puts a meeting between the President and black leaders in what may or may not be the wrong chronological place, yet he does not dispute the content of what was said at the meeting. In the dramatization Lincoln refers to Seward’s speech at a “Republic convention” but does not say which one, or if he himself was there. “The conflict is irrepressible is what you said.” Lincoln smiled. The first of the troubling errors is that “Lincoln reminisces about the day that Seward…regaled the 1860 Republican National Convention with his provocative ‘irrepressible conflict’ speech.” The caption writer is stern: Seward made the speech two years earlier and Lincoln wasn’t at the convention. Then, serenely unaware of his own blunder, he tells us that he found “troubling” the liberties I took with history. For reasons unknown, the reporter then changed the author of my quotation, Henry Adams, to, of all people, Thoreau! This means that for scholars in the future The New York Times’s error will be used as a primary source to prove that I-not the reporter-did not know Adams from Thoreau. I quoted to him Henry Adams that it was the why of history not the what that interested him.

Several months ago the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era was assigned the bloody task.

This is what happened in the Sunday New York Times of March 20. But wouldn’t that be too little, too late? Why not assign a journalist to make a preemptive strike a week before the television program in order to assure the potential audience that Lincoln was a false portrayal based on a book that had been “faulted by historians,” to put it in Timesese. Richard Nixon’s “the easy way” would be to allow the neoconservative reviewer John Corry to give it a bad review after all, he has even attacked me for my appearance as a guest on the Today show. When my novel Lincoln was recently turned into a miniseries by NBC, I wondered what the fun paper would do to try to kill the project. For forty years The New York Times has, from time to time, put its collective “mind” to work in trying to find ways of coping with my disturbing presence on the American scene.

Lincoln by gore vidal