[Bilge_Rat]

Abraham Lincoln, the One President All of Them Want to Be More Like

While confronting Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Harry S. Truman sent an aide to the Library of Congress to research Lincoln’s firing of Gen. George B. McClellan. Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a set of Lincoln’s collected works in the Oval Office and painted a portrait of him that hung in the Cabinet Room.

Sitting in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson looked up at a picture and said, “I sure hope I have better generals than he did.” Richard M. Nixon, at age 12, was given a picture of Lincoln that hung over his bed. During his own Vietnam trials, he made a spontaneous nighttime visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Ronald Reagan reported a couple of instances when his dog, Rex, acted oddly, which “nearly made me join the believers” that Lincoln’s ghost haunted the mansion. Bill Clinton, of course, got in trouble for inviting political donors to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, but once told Mr. Winik that he wanted to write his own Lincoln biography.

Few presidents revered Lincoln more than George W. Bush, who read 14 biographies of him while president and still has two paintings of Lincoln in his office in Dallas. “There was more of an affinity, or looking to Lincoln, than other presidents because Bush was a wartime president,” said Peter H. Wehner, who as an aide to Mr. Bush organized a meeting for him with Lincoln scholars like Mr. Winik.

They sit in the second-floor bedroom named for him. They stare at his picture on the walls or his bust in the Oval Office. They study his speeches, read his letters, glance at the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation under glass. Some have even wondered if they saw or felt his ghost. In their darkest moments, especially during war or crisis, they ask themselves what Lincoln would do. Some find an answer; others do not.

“He remains an inspiration for presidents whether they’re Republican or Democrat,” said Jay Winik, author of “April 1865,” a book about the final days of the Civil War. “When they look at him, he almost defies explanation. He sort of lives somewhere in the stratosphere.”

Mark K. Updegrove, director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, said Lincoln remained a touchstone for those who followed. “There’s no president I’ve interviewed — Ford, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 — who hasn’t said that it was Lincoln that they thought of first and foremost as an inspiration during the most trying days of their presidencies,” Mr. Updegrove said. “He is unquestionably the standard.”

not a bad standard to have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/us...like.html?_r=0