To the editor:

Once upon a time, a man who had been enjoying success in his field decided to run for president. He was a little-known Republican, going against a very well-known and hard-campaigning Democrat who was more and more confident that the election was in the bag. Many of those who saw and heard more of him believed his failure was a certainty. They didn’t like the way he talked; they didn’t even like the way he looked. Many were vehemently opposed to his ideas, and as time progressed even members of his own party disowned him. He was widely vilified, and at least one newspaper published lies they attributed to him. Yet somehow, though he received less than half of the popular vote, he won a decisive electoral vote.

All the way from election to inauguration and beyond, there were howls of disgust, anger, even riots and death threats from those who maintained that he was not their president! Those with self-serving agendas for how the country should be run, the sanctimonious, the extreme, the politicians and military men who knew they were better than him, even members of his own administration made a practically impossible job far more difficult as he took over from a predecessor who had done little if anything productive toward solving the nation’s problems.

But with preserving the the United States and its Constitution his unwavering and only object, he was ultimately successful. As his biographer stated, “At home and abroad judgments came oftener that America had at last a president who was all-American. He embodied his country in that he … was not one more individual of a continuing tradition, with the dominant lines of the mold already cast for him by chief magistrates who had gone before.” In the end he was considered to have been a pretty good leader.

The foregoing may sound familiar, though it is not really directly comparable to current events — or is it? This is simply to illustrate that neither we nor more recognized pundits can accurately predict a bad final outcome just because we don’t get what we expected. Give the man a chance. At least now there is a chance.

For the whole account, see Carl Sandburg’s “Abraham Lincoln,” first published 1925.

Lew Diehl

Houston