January 2011

On a shelf near our office-supply cabinet sit three little steel boxes that are, in effect, the magazine’s memory. The five-by-seven cards they contain catalogue the name of every author who has ever written for us, the titles of the articles, the dates when they ran, and what we paid for them. They’re filed alphabetically, so it’s not until you get to the third box that you come across a wad of half a dozen cards, paper-clipped together. This packet charts the career of our most prolific contributor: Weisberger, Bernard A.

The scene was faintly outrageous. Purists turned their heads away in disgust, the unintiated gaped, and a few of the anointed smiled. There, on the immaculate fairways of the Pebble Beach golf course, among the most elegant thoroughbreds in the automotive world—the Bugattis, the Fierce-Arrows, the Ferraris, the Hispano-Sui/as, the Duesenbergs, and the Rolls-Royces—were parked no less than nine cut-down, chopped and channeled, nosed and decked, flatheacl-powered “hot rods.” There they were, bad-boy junkyard dogs, intruding on the precincts of one of the world’s most prestigious automotive Concours d’Elegance, sitting in blocky defiance among the prim and polished esoterica.

Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s big movie of 1998, prefaces its plot with the very moving reading of a famous letter of condolence written by Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a widow in Boston who had lost five sons in the Civil War. The letter, dated November 21,1864, says: “I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

“I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I hesitated adding my own “how I met Lincoln” story; by comparison, it seems mundane. But in the spirit of disclosure, here it is: I drew Lincoln’s name from a hat for a random “how to write a biography” assignment in fifth grade. Turning to the school library, I encountered my first (and still my favorite) biography, The Lincoln Nobody Knows by Richard N. Current.

I never would have guessed that thirty-five years later I would know not only Lincoln but also the still-thriving dean of all Lincoln scholars, eighty-six-year-old Richard Current himself. What an honor it has been to share Lincoln with all these people—if for altogether different, highly personal, and until now rather elusive reasons.

One day, when I was a young man in high school in New York, I walked by the gallery of an autograph dealer on Fifth Avenue—Walter Benjamin Autographs. I wasn’t a fan of Lincoln. I just wanted an autograph. So I bought my first: a little cut signature of Abraham Lincoln.

After that I became more and more interested in history, and more and more interested in Lincoln. I began reading everything about him. When people in my business would complain to me about how tough things were, I’d say: “Wait a minute! You got it easy, kid! Try to grow up in a lean-to, like Lincoln. Try to grow up in the life of Lincoln!” Talk about perseverance. He ran for office five times and lost, and then he became President.

As a freshman in high school (adolescence is the perfect time for this task), I read through Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln volumes. That of itself would not have hooked me—I read Walter Scott in those days too—but in the midst of Sandburg’s goo, which I confess I still like, I came across Lincoln’s own words from the 1838 Lyceum speech: “what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done.” Wow, I thought, “the silent artillery of time.” This President could write better than his poet-biographer. It was an impression that has been strengthening in me ever since.

My name begins with W , so when I started sixth grade, I was placed in the last seat in the last row, right beneath a large print of Abraham Lincoln. Years before, my mother had read aloud to me a Lincoln entry from a children’s encyclopedia, so I was already prepared. Now I was inspired. I began using my lunch money to buy Lincoln books. In 1951 twenty-five cents could buy used copies of Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years or Dale Carnegie’s Lincoln the Unknown , two of my earliest purchases. At first I would bring them into the house secretly. We weren’t a collecting family.

My obsession began in a typical way for an actor. Somebody began talking to me about a job, and I owe that job to Gore Vidai, because without his bestseller, there wouldn’t have been a job for me to be interested in.

What followed was an innocent and unplanned visit to the Library of Congress, which began with my asking a completely idiotic question about whether they had anything on Lincoln there. Treating me like a madman, the library people asked, “Why are you interested?” I responded, “Because I’m going to play him in a mini-series.” They all sort of blanched at my lack of knowledge, but they showed me around the collections as fast as they could.

For me it was Love is Eternal by Irving Stone. I read the book when my children were babies and I was home with them. And then I wanted to know all about Lincoln’s descendants: Did they marry, did they have children, were any alive? My quest took me to the Huntmgton Library, where I met a collector named Justin Turner. He was an elderly man thrilled that someone really young wanted to learn about Lincoln.

He took me under his wing, and I started doing research, learning about rare books and manuscripts. I got a job working for his son-in-law, who owned a manuscript gallery in Beverly Hills called the Scriptorium. They put a dollar value on my hours and paid me in manuscripts. In my first year I got my first Lincoln manuscript and a Thomas Edison eulogy on Lincoln.

My father grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and to his dying day he believed that the two greatest Americans were “Old Bob” La Follette and Abraham Lincoln. I caught the interest from him. But the more I read about Lincoln and his personal struggles and his efforts for the less fortunate—and his greatness of spirit—the more fascinated I became.