Pushback on the whole "Team of Rivals" theme
Betsy's Page
With word that Barack Obama has been inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, and is looking to bring Hillary Clinton into his cabinet to emulate Lincoln's incorporation of his rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination into his cabinet, historians are beginning to reassess the whole premise. Matthew Pinsker pointed out in the Los Angeles Times that this didn't work out as successfully for Abraham Lincoln as the myth-making has made it. One of those men, Simon Cameron, whose support base in Pennsylvania led Lincoln to make him, reluctantly, the Secretary of War, was a terrible administrator and a corrupt man. Lincoln shuffled him off to be Ambassador to Russia and brought in Edwin Stanton, a former Democrat, who turned out to be an excellent administrator and went from contempt of Lincoln to being a strong supporter.
William Seward, who had been the leading candidate for the nomination but was regarded as too radical, became Secretary of State. He spent the first weeks of Lincoln's presidency thinking that he was going to act as a sort of prime minister and even went behind Lincoln's back to assure Southerners that we would not try to supply Fort Sumter. He periodically put forth his cockamamie idea that the way to bring the country back together was to attack another country such as Great Britain or later the French in Mexico.
Seward's free-lancing as Secretary of State is not necessarily the model that President Obama will be hoping that a Secretary of State Clinton would follow.
Salmon P. Chase resented Lincoln and plotted behind his back to try to take the 1864 nomination away from Lincoln. But he was also an excellent Secretary of the Treasury, probably our greatest one next to Alexander Hamilton. Through his efforts the Union was able to fund the war without the ruinous inflation that struck the Confederacy and actually grow its economy during the war. His idea of selling bonds to small investors became the model used in World Wars One and Two.
Another historian, James Oakes, wrote yesterday in the New York Times that inviting defeated rivals into the cabinet was not some new method of leadership but actually was the model at the time. Presidents since John Quincy Adams invited Henry Clay to be Secretary of State had been doing this. And it didn't work particularly well for Lincoln since his "team" didn't work together as a team. There was bitterness and mutual contempt so that several of his officials rarely attended cabinet meetings preferring to meet with Lincoln separately.
<<< There is little doubt that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. But not much of what made him great can be discerned in his appointment of a contentious, envious and often dysfunctional collection of prima donnas to his cabinet. >>>
I'm all for today's leaders learning from history and using Abraham Lincoln as a model. But what made Lincoln great was not whom he chose as his cabinet officers. His choices demonstrated his political skills in working to neutralize his political competitors, but weren't necessarily the choices of the best men for the jobs they were given. Don't assume that this model of cabinet choices is actually a successful model worth emulating.
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