Generally Lincoln

Somebody’s got to tell the general. Somebody has to pluck enough courage and ask for another televised address...

Somebody’s got to tell the general. Somebody has to pluck enough courage and ask for another televised address so we can understand why he ditched Ataturk for Abe. General Pervez Musharraf’s address soon after he, in his capacity as chief of army staff, proclaimed a state of emergency in Pakistan was just as we have been accustomed to expect. On Saturday night, there was only the faintest carryover of the hesitation of that first time when he leveled with his country and the world, just after he had acquired power in a military coup in October 1999. Now, there was bravado, of a piece with his other most famous televised address, on January 12, 2002, when he pledged to contain extremism on Pakistani soil.

There was also, against that absolutely incongruous powder blue backdrop, the irony that he was using the electronic media to send forth to the world his explanation for actions that had in the early hours of emergency curtailed the freedom of independent channels to transmit programming to many parts of Pakistan.

And as he switched to English to speak to “our friends in United States, European Union and the Commonwealth” and explain to them the impossibility of expecting their levels of democracy in a country still learning its ways and processes, he invoked a famous letter by Abraham Lincoln.

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It is not clear whether the long Lincoln quote — no doubt, to profess his own devotion to the national interest, and nothing but — came from a simple leap of logic. Emergency was being proclaimed in the name of fighting civil war-like conditions in parts of Pakistan because of extremist activity. So what better way of conveying this to American listeners the necessity of extreme measures to preserve unity than by reminding them of their own Union’s difficult hour?

Or, from a man normally given to references to his personal hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, could the Lincolnian bit have come from a careful reading of shifts in popular attitudes? Ataturk’s legacy is facing some challenge in Turkey. The lady of the house at Cankaya, the presidential home in Ankara with deep and resonant links with Ataturk’s life, has taken the headscarf. Headgear was an important way of showing Ataturk’s modernising agenda, and Orhan Pamuk, recipient of last year’s Nobel prize for literature, took the headscarf motif to show the clash between the secular and religious worldviews.

In the United States, however, a Lincoln revival is on. In a broadbased survey of intellectuals late last year, the influential Atlantic Monthly found enough of a groundswell to hail him as the most influential American ever.

Another indicator of popular interest too weighs in in Lincoln’s support. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin has topped the bestseller lists for long stretches in the past two years. This study of Lincoln’s cabinet shows him less as a melancholy figure, and more as an astute reader of the mood of his times to carry along the widest possible cross-section of elite and society. Coming against the backdrop of the divisions amongst American policy and opinionmakers on Iraq, the book also feeds into a yearning for enlightened leadership.

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Team of Rivals gathers in the early pages the tussle for the Republican nomination in 1960 between four men. Lincoln was by no means the frontrunner, but it is believed that the keenness of the rivalry amongst the other three led to his unexpected victory. And upon winning the presidency, Lincoln himself conceded the amazing quality of the other three’s candidatures.

In fact, he inducted those very — by all accounts, bitter — men into his cabinet. Goodwin shows how Lincoln carried them along by his shrewdness in reading the public mood and his self-honesty in prioritising the requirements of his office.

As for the quote Musharraf used in his TV address, it comes from Lincoln’s famous “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” letter justifying the recruitment of slaves as soldiers in the army. General Musharraf’s own bestselling memoir, In the Line of Fire, had long passages on Ataturk. May we expect the sequel to clarify the Lincoln shift?