Category: doris kearns goodwin

The Devil Wears Nankeen Breeches

Pity the once buttoned-up historian who, fresh from a harrowing plagiarism scandal, returns to the shelf with a little cleavage and some saucy shoptalk. This is Doris Kearns Goodwin on her latest biography:

"[Lincoln] looks vital, alive, even sexy. I dont want to sound embarassing, but he looks sensual. It's more the Lincoln I came to know and love.

Those are Doris's italics, and that's her hand on your knee. She's describing a photograph taken of the 16th president in 1857, wherein he appears beardless (in more ways than one, as Gore Vidal might say) and with rugged-gangly good looks.

In case you were wondering, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln has already been optioned for film. The director is Spielberg and the star is that "towering sequoia of sex" Liam Neeson, playing the original lob cabin Republican. We kid. This Lincoln is an Absolute 0 on the Kinsey scale.

(Goodwin finds no evidence he was gay, unlike C.A. Tripp, author of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, published earlier this year.)

Uh oh. You know what that means: Four more years of George Bush. --MICHAEL WEISS

Getting Intimate with Lincoln [USA Today]
Was Lincoln Bisexual? [Vanity Fair]

READ MORE: US presidents , abraham lincoln , doris kearns goodwin , gay , new books

Daily Briefing -- Katrina: A 'Besieged White House'

• Rove and Bartlett devised plan to shift blame to Louisiana and to ignore Democrats' attacks; many Bush advisors spent weekend at Nicole Devenish's wedding in Greece. Chertoff's talking point: "We will have time to go back and do an after-action report, but the time right now is to look at what the enormous tasks ahead are." [NYT]
• Officials point fingers over failures in Gulf Coast. Nagin: "We're still fighting over authority." Hillary calls for independent commission to analyze response. [NYT, WT]
• "Besieged White House" forced to balance problems on the Gulf Coast, complexity of Supreme Court drama, and ongoing challenges in Iraq. [WP, WT]
• High death toll anticipated. Michael Leavitt: "I think it's evident it's in the thousands." Chertoff: "We need to prepare the country for what's coming." [WP, NYT, LAT]

• Bush to revisit Louisiana today. Doris Kearns Goodwin: "These are the kinds of moments when a president gives voice to the country. They're remembered forever, if it's done right." [NYT]
• Years of budget cuts and bureaucratic shuffling have left FEMA unprepared. Former official: "They've taken emergency management away from the emergency managers. These operations are being run by people who are amateurs at what they are doing." [LAT]
• Howard Kurtz: "For once, reporters were acting like concerned citizens, not passive observers. . . Maybe, just maybe, journalism needs to bring more passion to the table -- and not just when cable shows are obsessing on the latest missing white woman." [WP]

READ MORE: Media , cable news , dan bartlett , doris kearns goodwin , fema , george w. bush , hillary clinton , howard kurtz , karl rove , katrina , louisiana , michael chertoff , michael leavitt , nicole devenish , ray nagin

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