ON THE RECORD: Garry Wills discusses history, politics

Facing an audience of administrators, faculty and some of the University's best and brightest students, historian Garry Wills presented the 15th annual School of Arts and Sciences Dean's Forum Lecture Tuesday afternoon in the University Museum. Wills, 63, followed the likes of author Toni Morrison, playwright Arthur Miller and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in delivering the annual address as part of a ceremony presenting awards to the 20 SAS Dean's Scholars. Wills -- praised by SAS Dean Samuel Preston as "one of America's most distinguished intellectual figures" -- spoke for 40 minutes on "Public Support for the Humanities." He is the author of more than 20 books on subjects including the Civil War, the civil rights movement and public figures from Jack Ruby to Ronald Reagan. He is also a nationally syndicated columnist and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Before his speech, Wills sat down with The Daily Pennsylvanian for a 30-minute interview to discuss politics, the humanities, the state of American society and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg -- this year's text for the Penn Reading Project. Lincoln at Gettysburg DP: Most people at Penn know you as the author of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the text for this year's Penn Reading Project. How did you come to write a 300-page book about a 272-word speech? Wills: I had written a book about the Declaration of Independence and there I had talked a little bit about the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. I am also an admirer of Lincoln as a rhetorician. I was trained as a classical rhetorician; my doctorate is in classical studies. The address has always been something that I admired and wanted to analyze a bit more. So I put those two together -- the ideological content and the rhetorical structure -- and it finally occurred to me that this is a kind of funeral oration of the sort that Thucydides gave. And it reflected its culture, especially the cemetery movement of that time -- how charged up it was, how important cemetery dedications were -- and transcendentalist values about judging one's own life by the testimony of the dead. So even though it's a short speech, it's kind of a keyhole into a whole culture. What surprises is not that it took 300 pages but that I stopped then. There are some things now I wish I had put in -- it would have been a longer book. DP: How relevant is this to students today? Why should we be studying this? Wills: Because Lincoln, more than anybody else, committed the nation to the proposition that all men are created equal. That's a challenge we still have to live up to. DP: This book was distributed to nearly 2,400 freshman here at Penn. What do you hope that the students who read it acquired from it? Wills: Well, it would depend on what they're interested in. It has been taught in rhetoric courses and in English courses for an interest in Lincoln as a master stylist, which is an important thing. Words do matter -- saying things well can affect history. That's an important thing to take from it. An admiration for Lincoln himself is an important thing to take from it. In the confusion of war, he had the mental discipline to sort issues out and define why people were fighting. The meaning of the Civil War is the meaning he imposed on it, by his whole presidency but especially by that one speech. I've been asked by students if Lincoln realized he was going to present this momentous speech, and I said, "No," because he thought he was going to live, that he would have many speeches to deliver. The fact that he was cut off made this in a way a kind of dying request. It certainly added to the power of the speech through our subsequent history. The Clinton Saga DP: You've also been an outspoken critic of contemporary American politics, including the current President Clinton scandals and congressional politics. How do you think this is affecting people's faith in government? Wills: I think people have a much more resilient faith in government than they are often given credit for. It's a very unfortunate time -- I think it's going to be seen as that in retrospect. At the time of Watergate, people said, "Everyone's going to be disillusioned in politics now." That passes. What's happening now, that's interesting. I think everyone will come out of this thing regretting it. The Supreme Court decision [to allow the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton to proceed while he remains in office] was probably a bad one that will distract from his presidency. I think Kenneth Starr himself is going to regret that he ever got into this. I think Linda Tripp is. I think Monica Lewinsky is. I think everybody is going to go away saying, "This is not what I wanted. It's hurt me and it's diminished me." In that way it will be a sort of mutual cancelling out. DP: A lot has been made in the press of President Clinton's seeming obsession with his place in history. How will history look back on the Clinton presidency? Wills: I don't know. It is so hard to predict. One of the advantages of history is to be able to see the lack of "fit" between what people thought at the time and what turned out to be the case. People thought during Eisenhower's presidency that he was not much of a president. They thought that about Truman. It turns out in retrospect a lot of people have a very high regard for both men. We are in a time of tremendous transition. The end of the Cold War, the eruption of a lot of domestic concerns that have been delayed or suppressed -- gay rights, women's rights, affirmative action, drugs -- when you look at it, every president up to Bill Clinton had been a World War II veteran. A whole world disappeared when Clinton became the first Baby Boomer president -- the first one who was not a World War II veteran, the first one who grew up with a lot of his formation in the '60s. A whole new generation has come along. Most of the politicians coming into prominence now on both sides, Republican and Democrat, had trouble with the draft or experimented with drugs. This is a hinge in which one world rapidly dropped out of being and a whole new world has come before us with a very confusing complex, new moral orientations. In that sense it will be a social-transition presidency. Whether we look on that as happy or disastrous or perhaps just necessary, who knows? Historians should never predict. Historians know enough history to know that predictions are always wrong. DP: You've written that you were on Nixon's "enemies list" in the 1970s and you've described Kenneth Starr's probe as "inquisitorial." Is this an example of history repeating itself? Wills: Well, the enemies list is all not that big a deal, I must say. I think I was on the enemies list because Pat Buchanan resented very much all the things I wrote about Nixon. But that was a secret list for social exclusion -- "don't have anything to do with these guys." And that's quite different from having the subpoena power of a Kenneth Starr and saying things like "The First Amendment is about truth, it doesn't allow distortion." Any first-year law student knows that that's horrible constitutional doctrine. To have the subpoena power behind doctrines like that, there is no comparison. DP: Do you think that the current independent investigations are a corruption of the Constitution? Wills: Well, I would say it's a mistake. What do we got now, six independent counsels out there? And they're all fishing. The idea of giving a man an indefinite mandate to use any amount of money to investigate anything, which is essentially what it is, has really become ridiculous and I believe most people are beginning to realize that. We are not more noticeably more corrupt than the Grant administration or the Teapot Dome period. So to have an investigation into a person going into subpoenaing and prosecuting people in entirely unrelated cases, which has happened with the independent counsels, is absurd. Now and Then DP: With conflicting moral values, political strife and basic uncertainty, how does this time in history compare with Lincoln's? Wills: Lincoln's was much worse, of course. We're not on the verge of civil war. There was at that time. We don't have slavery. What we had in his time was an institution rooted in our history, rooted in our Constitution, which was immensely evil, which had posed tremendous problems up to that point, and debating over whether slavery would be extended in the West had broken compromise after compromise after compromise. And so you had seven states declaring war on the government and waging war and killing people. We don't have anything like that today.

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