![]() ![]() 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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