Word: stanton
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Abraham Lincoln died shortly after 7 a.m. on April 15, 1865. "Now he belongs to the ages," Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, said at the President's deathbed. It was a prescient thought, because it suggested not only the long cultural presence ahead for Lincoln but also the fact that generations would possess...
...hindsight of history, we can see that Stanton knew what he was talking about. But how was it that Lincoln turned out to be so exceptional a writer and that it was so little apparent to his contemporaries? Studying Lincoln's writing over the years has convinced me that most of the factors that contributed to Lincoln's extraordinary literary achievement were invisible to his public and were even contrary to its general sense of who he was. As a child, he was fascinated with words and meanings and obsessed with clarity, both in understanding and in being understood...
...know from the manuscript that his chief contribution--a more conciliatory ending--was brilliantly rewritten by Lincoln. The Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, was sometimes thought to be responsible for Lincoln's best work, and occasionally it was credited to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. But when approached with such a suggestion by a friend, Stanton told him bluntly, "Lincoln wrote it--every word of it. And he is capable of more than that...
That line does not square with the memory of many CBS veterans, who considered Stanton one of the network's bulwarks of integrity. Fred Friendly, Murrow's longtime associate, admits that "the relationship between Murrow and Stanton was strained" but asserts that the CBS president later became one of the news division's firmest defenders: "He was willing to go to prison rather than submit outtakes of [the CBS documentary] The Selling of the Pentagon. " Stanton, who retired from CBS in 1971, has not seen the movie but says that, in general, "I feel negatively about docudramas." Despite the unflattering...
...white hats are clearly marked. Indeed, Murrow's dramatic liberties are less egregious than those of many other recent TV docudramas, among them CBS's own The Atlanta Child Murders. The problem with Murrow is that its chief black hat is attached to a real-life figure, Frank Stanton, who is still widely admired. As always, the toughest audience for television's fact-based dramas is the people who actually remember the facts. --By Richard Zoglin. Reported by Kathleen Brady/New York and Patricia Delaney/Washington