Viktor Yushchenko—Ukraine’s Lincoln

After this last night, it is impossible not to compare Viktor Yushchenko to Abraham Lincoln.

“The President is an excellent man, and, in the main wise, but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear he, has not the power to command.”

“Nearly everybody thought the President was honest and well meaning, and almost everyone who met him liked him… But few thought he was up to his job.”

“Both generals failed him. He was still too insecure to play the role of military commander. He offered “views” he hoped would be “respectfully considered” rather than orders, and the generals felt free to dispute or ignore them.”

“From his fatalism derived some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes.”

“…people around him who were inclined to think that the President had no principles either.”

“...his reluctance to take the initiative and make bold plans; he preferred to respond to the actions of others.”

After victory in the Civil War, President Lincoln’s determination to abolish slavery and to unify the country encountered tremendous opposition among both the Confederates in the South and his allies in the North. The Confederates began to plan a forced removal from power, not to allow the possibility that blacks might be given the same rights as whites. His allies rejected out of hand any possible compromise with the defeated Confederates.

“Along with foot-dragging from the Confederates, Lincoln had to deal with opposition in the North. Radicals overwhelmingly rejected the compromises he had offered in his April 11 speech. One of Sumner’s abolitionist correspondents in Boston thought that it again demonstrated Lincoln’s “backwardness” and argued that “it will be wicked and blasphemous for us as a nation to allow any distinction of color whatever in the reconstructed states.”

“When Lincoln brought the question of Virginia reconstruction before the cabinet, nobody favored his plan. After both Stanton and Speed had private interviews with the President in order to express their marked dissatisfaction and irritation with the proposal.”

“Allowing the rebel legislature to assemble, or the rebel organizations to have any participation whatever in the business of reorganization would put the Government in the hands of its enemies; that it would surely bring trouble with Congress; [and] that people would not sustain him.”

This is what encyclopedias say about Lincoln today: The most famous American president. Won the Civil War, abolished slavery, and reunited the war-torn country.

All quotes from David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995, pp 14, 15, 328, 329, 589, 600.