Commentary - Robert Cox: Make room on Mount Rushmore for another face

Skimming the pages of a particular tome, we find a person of some significant wealth using his high-tech fortune to underwrite one of the leading anti-war groups in the country, publicly deriding the president as an “obscene clown” and a “baboon.”

The nation’s chief executive is dismissed as “ignorant,” “illiterate” and “without brains” by anti-war partisans. No doubt, a leading New York newspaper was right when it editorialized that the “war issue dwarfed all others,” but should that excuse such vile, ad hominem attacks on the commander in chief during a time of war?

Skipping across several chapters, we find Monday morning quarterbacks in plentiful supply among politicians, editorial writers and leading pundits, many of whom proclaim the war “unnecessary” and boldly assert that “compromise measures” could have prevented the war.

A leading New York politician, playing to anti-war Democrats, echoes the call for an end to the “incompetents” in Washington. The same politician claims the president violated the Constitution and suggests the president is seeking to bring about military despotism under the guise of eavesdropping on private conversations and denying habeas corpus to the supposed enemies in our midst.

All this against a backdrop of a raging debate on “what the Constitution meant in saying ‘the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in case of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.’ ”

Men of good faith on either side of the war issue were asking “ ‘had the president alone the power to suspend the writ, or did he need Congress to tell him when?’” A constitutional crisis was averted only when Congress passed a law which “both made it clear that control over the habeas corpus writ rested with Congress, yet directly authorized the president to suspend the writ.”

But with that matter newly settled, opponents of the president begin to seize upon fragments of his utterances and hurl them back as insults. These same antagonists mock the president’s progressive change in language and tone over the years in order accuse him of being “weak” and “vacillating.”

Some even go so far to call for the ouster of the president, saying “the impeachment of the president at the opening of the next session of Congress … the crimes committed by the executive … have furnished ample grounds for his impeachment.”

As the president brings in new commanders to carry out new strategies and battlefield tactics, his popularity sinks so that eventually it is lower than “any time since he had become president.”

With his popularity fading and a presidential election on the horizon, the president is faced with a revolt in his own party. We read how “denunciations of the president by his own party … flowed on, mixed with clamor and sniping criticism. The press had caught up and re-echoed the clamor.”

Republicans were quoted saying “the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the president. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters.”

The New York politician? Horatio Seymour, elected governor of New York in 1862.

The wealthy financier? Samuel Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph and founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge.

The book? Carl Sandburg’s one-volume biography “Abraham Lincoln — The Prairie Years and the War Years.”

Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln was routinely pilloried in the press, by Democratic opponents, by his political enemies and even among those who supported his election in 1860.

Faint-hearted Republicans and other erstwhile supporters of the president’s decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein would do well to heed the lessons of history Sandburg offers.

A member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors, Robert Cox is president of the Media Bloggers Association.