The Lincoln Memorial
Kent State
Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon announced an expansion of the Vietnam War. The President who, two years before ran on a “secret” peace plan, was now expanding the war zone into Cambodia, bombing North Vietnamese bases and supplies. Reaction on American college campuses was swift and dramatic. Throughout the nation, students poured onto the campus greens, demanding an end to the war.
At Kent State University there were days of demonstration. Ohio’s Governor James Rhoades sent in the National Guard. It was an odd confrontation, the college kids demanding that the US end the war, and the Guard, many kids the same age as the demonstrators, facing them down.
The National Guard had tear gas, and they had the shear force of their bodies and equipment. They established lines to contain and control the demonstrators, and while they took incoming rocks and bottles, they held the line. But someone in the chain of command ordered live ammunition dispersed among the troops. And someone else in that chain gave an order to fire. Twelve students were hit, some not even in the demonstration. Four were killed. William Schroeder, on a ROTC Scholarship, was walking between classes.
Unfortunately Kent State wasn’t the only student shootings that month. Police in Jackson, Mississippi fired shots into a demonstration at Jackson State University. Two were killed, twelve wounded then.
Nixon Talks
Students marched on Washington, D.C. Spokesmen for the President, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, derided the demonstrators as “effete snobs” and “lazy elitists”. But Nixon tried to talk to them. The demonstrators were on the Mall, by the reflecting pool; the area just at the bottom of the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon drove the block from the White House, and with Secret Service hovering close by, spent two hours with the demonstrators trying to talk. But there was no healing of wounds. Nothing changed.
Today’s President
On Sunday, the current President of the United States used the Memorial to stage a “town hall” with Fox News. It’s an election year, and while the Memorial is supposed to be “off limits” for these kinds of events, it’s a surprise to no one that the Secretary of the Interior waved the rules, and allowed the President to use it.
It’s a political consultant’s dream; the view of the candidate, sitting in sight of Lincoln. It doesn’t even take a great “eye” to realize that the “shot” is the “Presidential view” with Lincoln’s statue observing in the background the current leader. So when the “town hall” was staged literally at Lincoln’s feet, it was just bad staging.
The message that President Trump was attempting to send is obvious. He is leading a nation in crisis, economically decimated and in literal fear for its life. Just like Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was re-elected to the Presidency at one of the toughest points in the Civil War. His phrase at the time was:
“An old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”
Trump is trying to convince a nation that he is the horse to get us across the stream of the COVID-19 and economic crisis. That’s why President Lincoln is sitting in the background.
But instead, President Trump took the opportunity to whine:
“They always said, ‘Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
Lincoln
Of course, Lincoln was assassinated. Guess Trump can’t top that.
And the President still refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of the crisis. Instead, he continued his campaign of blaming China. He even refused to back his own plan for re-opening America, instead saying about demonstrators in many states:
“They just want to go back. You see it every day. You see demonstrations all over the country and those are meaningful demonstrations. It’s big stuff.”
If only the President had looked beyond the Fox interviewers, and read the writing on the wall behind them. Engraved on the wall are the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural speech. Those words helped change Lincoln’s world, and they still apply today.
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
We know Abraham Lincoln. And regardless of the location, we all know:
Donald Trump is no Abraham Lincoln.
