He had the guile and charm of the savviest operator and the instincts of a political predator. “I am the master here,” Lincoln says with a wry, wolfish grin as he walks one of his vanquished guests toward the door.īold, clever, and in command - meet Gore Vidal’s Lincoln. It was a political masterstroke that neither Chase nor the senators ever saw coming and a hit so well-sprung that it sunk whatever intra-party putsch the conspirators had cooking. Lincoln saw through the scheme and ended Chase’s presidential bid by making a fool of the former governor and all his friends at a carefully orchestrated Cabinet meeting. For weeks Chase had been duplicitously back-channeling with his friends in the Senate, setting in motion his own plan to unseat Lincoln and run for president as the Republican nominee in 1864. Chase, an accomplished former governor of Ohio, who served as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury. ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH his 1984 novel Lincoln, Gore Vidal has the notoriously long-legged and honest US president spring an all-timer of a trap.
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