in cases of older oral histories, it is not really only about survivors themselves, but also about people finding out their own history. it goes both ways. it is a mutual process that is really revealing in a way that is very unique to this particular kind of historical record. delia: thank you very much. naoko: thank you. pleasure to talk to you. announcer: you are watching american history tv, audio and hours of program in on history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter for information about coming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. >> michael kauffman is the author of "american brutus: john

wilkes booth and lincoln conspiracies." he talks about abraham lincoln's legacy in the united states and around the world, talks about john wilkes booth's motors for killing the president and how presidential security has changed. he talks about how political parties have used the memory of lincoln. the lincoln group in the district of columbia hosted this 40 five-minute program. >> let me introduce our next speaker. michael kauffman is one of the leading historians of the lincoln assassination. he is author of "american brutus: john wilkes booth and lincoln conspiracies," which was named by "the new york times" and "the washington post" as one of the best nonfiction books of 2004. there are copies of the paperback version on the registration table that you can purchase after our program is concluded. his other works include "in the footsteps of an assassin "" and a

modern edition of "memoirs of a lincoln conspirator." he has lectured throughout the country, appeared on many television documentaries. civil war historian william c davis once wrote, "no one has that he booth -- studied booth longer or in more depth than michael kauffman, a well-known voice of reason in the field of assassination studies." today, kauffman: --michael kauffman will talk to us about assassination morning and the security of presidents. michael. [applause] kauffman: thank you for that. it is indeed an honor to be

speaking in this place. it's humbling, and i very much appreciate being invited to speak here. the same today -- the theme today is the legacy of abraham lincoln, how he changed the world, and i thought all along what a wonderful opportunity to pick up ideas as i go to these commemorative events. all the sesquicentennial ceremonies. the vigil in front of ford's theater. all these events that have taken place over the last war years -- four years should certainly give plenty of thought and attention to the way that the war, and

specifically the way in which abraham lincoln has changed the u.s. and indeed the world, but it is the modern world, of course. as i stood at the vigil in front of ford's theater on the night of april 14, i took my camera and raised it up above expecting to get a photograph of a sea of mourners. i wanted some insight. but i brought my camera down and looked at the picture, and what i got instead of a sea of mourners was a sea of cell phones of other people taking pictures. i thought, "ok, well i guess to some extent, it is largely these days about the show, not so much about the analysis."

that's ok because there's plenty of material to work with and there is never a shortage of new angles to take on abraham lincoln on his assassination and on the world that all of this left to us. history tells us john wilkes booth was the result of a conspiracy. a plot to capture lincoln that evolved in a -- into a murder plot. he may have been insane. nobody will ever satisfy the whole world about any one theory behind it. the deeper you go into the story, the more complex it becomes, and it's a little bit like anyone who has studied the politics of the war.

when you realize that you start getting into people's motivations, you are not only getting into the complexity of the human mind, but you are talking about many millions of these human minds. what motivates each and every one may depend on individual experience, individual taste and whatever sort of things a person might think makes sense at any given time. as i said, john wilkes booth was said to be a southerner. even that, the most basic statement, about who -- booth and the conspiracy is not quite right. booth came from a place below the mason dixon line, but actually, in an afternoon, you could walk from his house to the pennsylvania state line. he was from a border state, and

that was far more intense emotionally and politically than the war and the experience was maybe a little bit farther to the south. take north carolina for example. in border states, you were surrounded by people who might or might not agree with you on all the political questions of the day. that meant that the intensity of being right around people to fight with -- that amplified your feelings somewhat. border states have not gotten a whole lot of attention in the civil war literature, although that is being remedied. but in hindsight, it kind of makes sense that lincoln was targeted by a person from a border state, especially the one that surrounded washington on three sides.

that is what maryland was, the place where troop movement at the beginning of the war had been obstructed by marylanders. because of that, abraham lincoln declared martial law first in maryland. and that first impression stayed with a lot of people, including john wilkes booth. it's just the way they thought, the way their minds work. because of martial law, because troops worsened into southern maryland, they were sort of pseudo-occupation troops -- because troops were sent into southern maryland, people started saying that lincoln was somewhat tyrannical. every so often, the name of caesar came up. for a person with a classical education, as booth had, for a

person who knew all about julius caesar, as booth did, this had a special resonance. booth had played in the shakespearean drama of "julius caesar." it was one of the last plays he was ever involved in, and he had what he thought was a pretty good working memory and understanding of the plot against caesar led by brutus. and as it so happened, booth from a theatrical background was also from a political background. his father was born in london. his uncle was algernon sidney booth. when you start naming your children after political heroes all of a certain stripe, you know there is something going on there. not just like every child in

london was named algernon sydney something. it was odd. this is the way the family was. with their classical education they had read all of milton who said that if you kill somebody that's murder, but if the person you killed was a tyrant, that's not murder. booth's father had performed in a play called "killing no murder" that came from the titus oates letter to the same effect. john wilkes booth sees all of this, and this is part of what would later be called evidence of insanity. but he knew things that other people did not know about the past and about all the cases in antiquity where people had dealt with extraordinary powers of centralized government. he saw modern day as a parallel

and he started to plot. some people believe that he was plotting to capture abraham lincoln. i personally -- i cannot read his mind, but i have a healing that all along -- i have a feeling that all along it was going to be murder. what booth did was he consciously imitated the earlier case. he ritualized. he planned meticulously. he tried to gather people around him because it had to be a conspiracy. if he is doing it all alone, that's the one lone nut theory as we call it today. he had to appear to have plenty of support. the more time he spent in maryland, particularly baltimore -- violence in baltimore -- it just keeps coming up, doesn't it ? by the way, if you are interested, there's a wonderful book called "hanging henry

gambrell," which describes in detail the political violence in baltimore in the 18th if these -- 1850's, and it was incredible -- there's a wonderful book called "hanging henry gambrill ."\ even such a benign character as james buchanan coming just across the state line through baltimore on his way to become president of the united states -- he was beaten up why mobs in baltimore -- by mobs in baltimore. well, i guess that was just the way they welcomed people in those days. i must confess, i'm not too eager to go back up there any time in the near future. but when john wilkes booth who had grown up in this culture because he spent much of his time in baltimore -- they had a

house right over near the shot tower, where it is now -- he saw a good deal of this violence, and ensure he took it in as being just kind of what politics is all about. he believed somewhat in fate. he wanted to head off the fate that was in store for himself as he started to plot against lincoln. as he looked back, he knew that marcus brutus said, "we need to make this clean. we need to make it public. we need to do it on a stage. we need to make sure that everybody knows this is above board. it is a ritual killing. we are doing it in a ceremonial way. we are letting everybody know who is doing this and why, and we cannot let anybody think of it as plain, old, cold-blooded murder for selfish reasons.

there's nothing in it for us. it's for love of country." and so when booth planned out -- and by the way, this is a different lecture, but, he used a lot of shakespearean tricks to manipulate people into getting into this conspiracy and keeping them quiet and so forth, and that is a fascinating tale in and of itself. but it was brutus' downfall that he let mark antony live -- mark antony stepped up and gave this speech. shakespeare knows that crowds are very able. you can see it in any number of players -- plays.

they are all ready to kill candidate a, and in a few minutes, you can have them ready to praise candidate a and kill candidate be with the power of words. the power of words was very potent. booth knew that. he thought nevertheless, there was probably someone out there who probably would serve the same function that mark antony served for caesar. "i think that will be william seward." seward and lincoln had been somewhat in political lockstep throughout the war and seward, of course, agreed in all major points with abraham lincoln. he was his right-hand man. if you are going to kill lincoln and leave seward standing, so to speak -- he was in his sick bed

-- but he could step right into that vacuum. so booth said, "we will take care of seward, too, because i'm not going to make the mistake that was made in the past." well, it did not work out that way. booth lost control of this from the very beginning. he had assigned a man named lewis thornton powell to assassinate seward. powell botched the job and ended up brutally hacking five people in the seward household. it was unbelievably gory. and for all of booth's effort and planning to make this whole thing seem like a sanitary ritual regime change, to do as brutus had said "this is a

sacrifice. this is not carry and for the hounds -- this is not carrion for the hounds." but lewis powell messed up. looking at the carnage from that night, washingtonians were terrified. this was an act of terror, and everybody wondered -- what is next yet the we had teen of attacks at the same time. we all lived through 9/11. we all know the first plane goes into the tower, we think "what a terrible accident. i'm not sure how that happened." but the second plane goes into the other tower, and right away, we all know. and so it was on the night of april 14 that everybody knew. there was not only the shooting of abraham lincoln, but there was the attack on william seward

. this made it an entirely different thing. well booth miscalculated. just a monstrous miscalculation on so many levels. he chose the wrong people to be with him. he was absolutely wrong about the way the nation was going to take all of this. they had been told again and again, "these are temporary war measures. martial law is temporary. when the war is over, it will all go back." he says, "sure that's what we heard in the case of caesar, and they start offering him crowns." every time, he gets a little more reluctant, and nobody seemed to be doubting that some day, caesar would make himself permanent dictator, and that is when they struck caesar.

so before lincoln can make himself permanent dictator, i think we should get him now." but the timing was everything. booth had planned to do everything that would recall the earlier case, including attacking lincoln on the 13th of april. that was the day general grant came into town after appomattox and everybody was going to celebrate the grand illumination . it would take place that night and grant would travel around town with the lincolns. only, lincoln did not show up. first of all, he had a lot more work to do. the war was not really over yet. secondly, he had a headache, so he stayed home that night. booth was kind of counting on making the attack on that night because in the ancient roman

calendar, the 13th in april was the ides. and there you get that other parallel. but no worries. we are still in town. he will get the next opportunity, as it turned out, the following day. timing is everything because the next day happened to be good friday. it did not make lincoln look like caesar. in the minds of some, in the outpouring of grief and mourning that came after, lincoln looks like christ. there was some kind of deification in the mourning period. there was some kind of, i would say, secular sainthood mentioned . certainly, one of the dominant themes throughout the north was lincoln's martyrdom. but the truth is reactions to

the assassination were incredibly varied. even in the north it did not always depend on how one had cited -- sided during the war, how one had felt politically about lincoln. it was a lot more, dated -- complicated than that. john wilkes booth found out himself as he was escaping, first through southern maryland, his home state and the most rabidly pro-southern part of the state. he found people willing to help him out. even people who knew what he had done. some of those people claimed at first that they approved of the assassination, but on second thought, later on, they sort of

cooled to the idea and started to realize what so many people south of the mason-dixon line had also realized. "now, we've got andrew johnson. by comparison, abraham lincoln was ou. we should not be gloating or happy about this at all. it was ill considered, ill-conceived, just a bad idea." as booth escaped through maryland, he had planned out this whole julius caesar reenactment, but all anybody could think about was not shakespeare's julius caesar. it was shakespeare's "macbeth," the bloodiest, goriest, darkest play written by shakespeare. the play about regime change.

the play in which the whole plan goes completely awry. it's all about guild and torment -- guilt and torment. the play in which the word "assassination" appears in writing the first time. as booth's escaping into virginia, he was in for a real shock because virginia was not his home state, and they did not deal -- feel the same way at all as the people of maryland did. the first person he encounters over there tells him to get lost . and the next person, "get lost." and the next person, "get lost." one of the people he encountered said to him, "what were you thinking? the war was over. everybody is going to blame us for this.

the raft is going to come down -- the raft is going to come down on us -- the wrath is going to come down on us. nobody elected you to change presidents." that's the smart person thinking. that is nine days later on the president's birth and coming from a descendent of a person for whom "macbeth" was written. not that anybody brought it up but when booth wrote a nasty note to that man, he was complaining about the hospitality that was grudgingly received. he quotes "macbeth."

and he wanted this to be "julius caesar." the protagonist in "macbeth" is not a hero to anybody. he's a cold-blooded murderer. as booth lay dying in the searing glow of a burning tobacco barn 12 days after the shooting, i cannot help but think he had in mind those very nihilistic words near the end of "macbeth" when he has discovered that his wife has tied and nothing has gone as he had planned. he regretted his reliance on the past for guidance, and he realized there would be no glory, that he would not get any monuments are statues named after him and that most people would come to say john wilkes booth had gotten what he deserved. he had come to accept this with

the utmost sense of depression and he may have thought of those lines "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays of lighted, the way to dusty death. out, out, brief candle life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets upon the stage and then is heard no more as a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing." you can't get any more depressing than that. as i said, some people thought "well, that's appropriate. look what he did." booth did have his mourners, but the best they could ever do for

him was to say that he must have been insane. insane people are not really responsible. who, but a lunatic, would underestimate so drastically the effect his act would have on the nation? who would miscalculate so badly the whole political situation? again, if he had killed lincoln at any other time, his place in history might have been different, but timing is everything. just like the difference between the ides and good friday. he happened to kill lincoln right after lincoln had made this statement about his plans for reconstruction, what he felt should happen -- a gradual move toward racial equality was implied in that last little speech that lincoln gave. and then lincoln said, "i will tell you a little bit more. i don't want to just dribble it all out right here." we have that but not much else

when it came to lincoln's ideas. after the shock, the initial stun of the assassination and things started to settle down people in the north started thinking "how is this going to play out in future?" people in the south are probably thinking the same thing and dreading it, and they want to lie low and act tried because they now have a president who has quite famously been saying that treason must be made odious and traders must be punished -- traitors must be punished. they think he is going to be a hardliner. it did not work out quite that way. andrew johnson started feeling "it's kind of interesting rubbing elbows with these

people." he has always hated the plantar classes. slave power. he hates them from the bottom of his soul, and i think because they had always looked down on him, that very poor, semi literate taylor from the mountains of eastern tennessee -- semi literate tailor from the mountains of eastern tennessee and now he has got them where he wants them. in some respects, that was probably enough for him. he was a southerner. he shared their feelings of racial superiority over people of color. and frankly, he looked at abraham lincoln and, like almost all politicians of his day, he starts analyzing, "ok, what am i

going to do to take over this mourning this feeling of grief, this very powerful emotion? take this way than write it -- take this wave and ride it and say you are doing what lincoln would have done." it's hard to contradict you if in fact lincoln has not been all that clear up to that point about what he was going to do. as it happened, andrew johnson decided to go with leniency. he surprised a lot of people. people in the south had perfectly legitimate fears. they were terrified that johnson would live up to his reputation. but ink about almost 4 million

people who had been slaves. think about what they must have an feeling at that point, the sense of betrayal, the sense of fear for the future. as we heard, they expected some of this land that sherman and others had given them and said "here, take it, it's abandoned." and now it is being taken away. what else? are we going to go back to slavery? their sense of grief for lincoln because after all, he was their protector, the race of emancipation, the person who led the drive -- the face of emancipation. talk all you want about the 13th amendment, which had not been passed yet, talk all you want about the other committees and the people who had been involved, but for the rank and file all over the u.s., north and south that was abraham

lincoln's baby, and now lincoln was gone, replaced by people who, quite frankly, were not anywhere near as interested in the plight of african-americans as lincoln probably would have then -- have been. andrew johnson was a southerner and showed little interest over time over the welfare of lax. he said basically he hoped that southern states would do right by them. that will just have to do for now. there were institutions warming -- forming, the freedmen's bureau and the pseudo-occupation of 20,000 troops in southern states protecting them, but there was very little protection, and all of the signals coming out of washington in the months after the assassination, there was very

little of this to give hope to people who had once lived in bondage. because so many things still needed urgent attention in april of 1865. the war had yet to be one, really and there was a serious though largely forgotten debate about if we were seeking peace or military victory. if you have not thought about that, it's an enormous difference between the two. peace means let's just stop at all right now, pull the troops out of the south, and get on with our lives. that seems to be what andrew johnson wanted. now, those troops, who had protected the former slaves -- are they going to be gone?

there is not anybody down there. you cannot change their hearts overnight down there. and it was congress applying pressure to keep them down there . all of this played into the morning and grief -- the mourning and grief that came out of abraham lincoln's death and the fact that it came at that moment when it did when people could still say, "can would have done this -- "l would have done this -- " lincolnlincoln would have done this," and everyone was using his character as a stepping stone for their own political ends. ironically, it was democrats who played up his saintly qualities the ones who said he was so forgiving, conciliatory. he used the pardon quite

liberally. and i think anybody who wants to be on lincoln's level would pardon us, too. you can see how that works right? the radicals would have none of that. they cited lincoln's kindness too, but they said his gentle nature, his essential goodness served him well for a time, but he was just too good, and it got him killed. his work as the great emancipator and savior of the nation was done. it was god's will that he go to his reward and leave to us the task remaining before us. we know how to hand out justice. we are not going to be soft, as lincoln would have been.

this is the dynamic that comes out of using abraham lincoln. again, it's sort of flips the world -- it sort of flips the world upside down. his own party is saying it's a good thing he's gone in kind of a gentle way, but this is what they are doing. of course, there was a bit of a disagreement. you may have heard of the impeachment controversy. all of the political haggling and things that came through the andrew johnson administration. there was almost nothing else that anybody remembers about johnson these days. but johnson thought that he was following in the steps of his predecessor. there's just one thing though -- he was in such a hurry to declare peace and not victory. in a time of peace nothing

further could be done to impose the federal will on a defeated south. abraham lincoln would not have thought that way. abraham lincoln considered emancipation one of his great achievements, and that was a large number of people affected by that. he would never have declared victory without taking steps to guarantee the permanence of the strides made for civil rights. he would never let slavery return under a different name. for johnson and for a nepali number of people, north and south, they just did not seem to care -- for johnson and four and -- for johnson and for an appalling number of people

north and south, they just did not seem to care as i think lincoln would have cared. with the danger passing, the emergency past. all those emergency measures were no longer necessary. one of those emergency measures, as everyone kept saying, was emancipation, and the fruits of that, what's going to happen there, was a very important question. you would be surprised looking back. you would love to say that abraham lincoln changed the world in all ways, but he died too soon to have made those changes permanent. what he really did was he planted the seed. he made sure that these people were now free. you already let that out, you cannot take it back. not as a practical matter, and people certainly tried, but it would be another 100 years

before african-americans would get something like legal equality some meaningful protection from the federal government. 100 years. that would not have happened if booth had killed lincoln after the next speech, after the next political measure, after the congress came into session in december. who knows when, but after everybody would know exactly where lincoln stood on these matters. in all of the criticisms that came out about lincoln and all of the weird upside down statements made about lincoln he was roundly criticized for neglecting his own personal safety. well, it's impossible for us to

imagine today, but after lincoln came through baltimore to become president in 1861, he had taken the advice of certain people to come through the city ahead of schedule because there was supposedly a plan to kill him and the critics were merciless. they portrayed him in this ridiculous disguise, sneaking like a coward through baltimore in the middle of the night. you have all seen the picture with the cat. he did not want to look that way again. no president had been protected before, and lincoln had decided "no matter what's going on -- we may be surrounded by the enemy but it's still going to be business as usual to whatever extent possible."

people accepted that. nobody forced any guards on him. the idea of keeping the president away from the people was unthinkable. by the way, the white house was a public building, and its owners, the citizens, had every right to visit it whenever they wanted. shut those people out? it was unthinkable. it's impossible to imagine now. ordinary people could walk right into the white house and visit the president in his office, in the cabinet room, in his bedroom and ask him for favors, for some kind of legal redress. probably more commonly to ask him for an autograph. that's what i would have done. lincoln enjoyed none of the privacy that an ordinary person would expect in his own home because his home was not really his own. it belonged to everybody, and he

respected that. the government toward the end of the war finally provided police protection. they assigned 4 police officers to protect the white house, not the president. you see, souvenir hunters were carving up the drapes and carpet and running away with silverware . there's a long trail of correspondence about that. the commissioner of public buildings had had enough. he could not keep up with the added expense of replenishing these things and fixing these things, and he persuaded the police department to give him at his own expense out of his own budget 4 men who would then become white house guards. as we all know, years after the war, decades after the war, when everybody wanted to say, "i was lincoln's best friend. i knew lincoln so well."

some of these people started saying, "nobody knew him better than i did. i was his bodyguard. i remember little tad when i broke the news about his father's death." all of these stories embellished beyond reason became part of the folklore, and hardly a word of it is supported in any contemporary records. lincoln himself disdained the whole idea of becoming the first chief magistrate to take on the regional trappings of a security detachment. it had never been done before, and even in the most outrageous national emergency, it was not done then, either, and i think everybody who has talked about lincoln and his greatness and his accomplishments -- i think

-- i have always said this -- i think they are cheating him. when you ignore these things you make it look easy. you make it look safe. abraham lincoln knew every day of his life, everything that he wrote, every proclamation to a widow could have then his death sentence -- could have been his death sentence. when we talk about his greatness, we must add to that his physical courage because he always sensed that his time was coming. he just did not know from which direction. well, the idea of presidential security did not change after lincoln's death. the president was still not protected, not even in the impeachment controversy. i remember reading in august 1965 the front page -- somebody in "the washington star" said "i cannot believe what i just

saw yesterday. i was out in the woods northeast of the capital, and a man came toward me on a horse all alone and it was general grant." you would think he would have someone around to protect him, but he was like lincoln, a no-nonsense guy. that was how people work. they thought that the danger was temporary and was now past and that booth, being the crazy man, was an aberration. you know what? old ways die hard. localism was back in full force after the war. civil rights -- nah not interested. most of us fail to appreciate how fundamentally conservative and resistant to change the public was in those days.

there was a whole lot still left to do in the spring of 1865. lincoln's death took from us the only leader who appreciated what lincoln had done, and he was not going to give that up. he had made forward progress, momentum. he was looking to the future. not everybody was doing that. it was easy to see the distant past when everything by comparison seemed so peaceful. let's go back to that happy place. that was the easy way out, and that was what so many politicians wanted to do in the postwar years. lincoln's legacy was in or miss, but in many years, it lay dormant for a full century almost exactly.

while the cult of lincoln grew, it was based mostly on his personality. just like today, all of these commemorations tend to be more about the show. something that is not really as deep as it ought to be, but if we want to appreciate the legacy of abraham lincoln what we really need to do is go back and compare him and his skills and his accomplishments with those of all the people who followed. thank you. [applause] announcer: here are some of our featured programs this weekend on the c-span networks. on c-span tonight at 8:00 eastern, we will look at the government and culture of iran its relationship with the u.s., and its nuclear ambitions. sunday night, profile interviews

with two presidential candidates. kentucky senator rand paul and then vermont independent senator bernie sanders. on c-span2 tonight at 10:00 eastern, author nelson dennis -- denis on the history of puerto rico and its turbulent relationship with the united states. sunday night a historian or comes the life and political career of america's 40th president, ronald reagan. tonight, a little bit after 9:00, commemorating the 800th anniversary of the magna carta on c-span3 and how the document influenced the rights of liberty and property and limits on executive power. sunday night on 6:00, a french sailing ship brought its representative to america in 1780, and we were in yorktown, virginia to cover the welcoming

ceremony of the replica of that french ship. get our complete schedule at www.c-span.org. >> am not one of those who believes in the psychiatric's examination of people, you know? i believe that most of these people these historians should be on the couch themselves, rather than psychoanalyze people they have never met. on the other hand, when i meet people, i do not judge them in terms of if they have a firm handshake or have i contact, but i listen to what they say. you don't learn anything when you are talking. you learn a great deal when they are talking. >> one of the main tragedies of richard nixon, although he was very self-conscious, he was not very self-aware. in list ironies -- nixon did have a psychiatrist. an internist, not technically a

psychiatrist. he was careful not to have nixon think he was analyzing him, but in excellent to him because he had psychosomatic illnesses in even though he went to one, he hated psychiatrists. he was afraid in a way of looking at himself in a realistic way. he would say i do not carry grudges. hello? richard nixon was one of the great grudge carriers of all time. he could be very un-se lf-reflective. >> evan thomas talks about the victory and a seat and entered for mortal of richard nixon -- and defeat and inner turmoil of richard nixon. sunday night on q&a.