Or, from a man normally given to references to his personal hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, could the Lincolnian bit have come from a careful reading of shifts in popular attitudes? Ataturk’s legacy is facing some challenge in Turkey. The lady of the house at Cankaya, the presidential home in Ankara with deep and resonant links with Ataturk’s life, has taken the headscarf. Headgear was an important way of showing Ataturk’s modernising agenda, and Orhan Pamuk, recipient of last year’s Nobel prize for literature, took the headscarf motif to show the clash between the secular and religious worldviews.

In the United States, however, a Lincoln revival is on. In a broadbased survey of intellectuals late last year, the influential Atlantic Monthly found enough of a groundswell to hail him as the most influential American ever.

Another indicator of popular interest too weighs in in Lincoln’s support. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin has topped the bestseller lists for long stretches in the past two years. This study of Lincoln’s cabinet shows him less as a melancholy figure, and more as an astute reader of the mood of his times to carry along the widest possible cross-section of elite and society. Coming against the backdrop of the divisions amongst American policy and opinionmakers on Iraq, the book also feeds into a yearning for enlightened leadership.

Team of Rivals gathers in the early pages the tussle for the Republican nomination in 1960 between four men. Lincoln was by no means the frontrunner, but it is believed that the keenness of the rivalry amongst the other three led to his unexpected victory. And upon winning the presidency, Lincoln himself conceded the amazing quality of the other three’s candidatures.

... contd.