Book Review: 'The Sympathizer' By Viet Thanh Nguyen

The analogy is imperfect, but will suffice: The Sympathizer, the remarkable debut novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a terrific bookend to Fire In the Lake, the Frances FitzGerald classic.  While one book is fiction and the other nonfiction, both tell the story of the Vietnam War, its aftermath and legacy from a Vietnamese point of view.  And both, in their genre different but similarly powerful ways, are reminders to believers of the cocked-hat notion the U.S. could have "won" the war if the politicians had only butted out, that it was a fool's errand from start to ignominious finish.  And while there was a surplus of fools on all sides, the biggest were the brass at the American Central Command in Saigon.

The Sympathizer opens on the eve of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, an anniversary which incidentally passed this year with nary a peep from an American news media usually fixated on such milestones.  The city is in chaos as the trusted Captain, the story's narrator and as engaging and unlikely a literary hero I have encountered in quite a while, is sipping American post exchange whiskey with the General as they draw up a list of people who will be given visas obtained via a CIA agent from a bribed bureaucrat for passage aboard one of the last flights out of the country.

The Captain, whose real name is never revealed, had been raised by a dirt-poor Vietnamese mother. His father was an absentee French priest who despite his own amorality infuses in him a sense of morality.  While the Captain suffers the slings and arrows of being considered a cultural mutt, his mother tells him as they squat in their hovel, "Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything."

With this advice as his polestar, the Captain goes on to university in the U.S. and becomes fluent in its language and ways before returning to his homeland ostensibly to fight the Communist cause.  The General, head of the South Vietnamese National Police, his family, the Captain and other compatriots are evacuated and eventually start a new life in Los Angeles after enduring a succession of refugee camps, but the Captain has a secret: he is a Communist sympathizer and spy who secretly observes and reports on the exile group to Man, a higher-up in the Viet Cong, a childhood friend with whom he deeply bonded as a blood brother after Man defended his honor in a schoolyard brawl started by bullies who taunted him for being a half-caste.

Among the greatest lessons imparted in The Sympathizer, which is part spy novel, love story and geopolitical chess game, is that the Vietnam War was not the American struggle we, our authors and filmmakers have taken it to be.  (Same with Fire in the Lake, of course.)  It was a war fought by a people forced to choose between East and West.  The Americans merely supplied bodies and napalm.

It is having to choose between East and West that drives the Captain's odyssey.  Between aiding or betraying the General, between helping or abandoning Bon, who along with Man was a childhood blood brother, when Bon is determined to return to Southeast Asia on a suicide mission to overthrow the Communist regime.

Although The Sympathizer is overwritten in parts, the powerful ​and often darkly comic ​messages underlying ​the Captain's narrative, presented in the form of a confession written in a reeducation camp where the torturer becomes the tortured, more than make up for that.  Near the end of the book, the Captain -- his mind now split like East and West -- asks:

We find ourselves facing more questions, universal and timeless ones that never get tired.  What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power?  What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs?  Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?  And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing?

The Sympathizer is magisterial, and hugely mind expanding in laying bare a core reality of war -- that nothing is as it seems -- which was so adroitly explored by Tim O'Brien in Going After Cacciato, until now the greatest Vietnam War novel by my lights.

The Sympathizer is sure to become a classic of war fiction alongside Cacciato, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and Mark Helprin's A Soldier in the Great War, among others.

Read this marvelous book, but please read it with care.  You will be rewarded.

Book Review: Nguyen's 'Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam And The Memory Of War'

Every American generation, it seems, has its own war.  My grandparents had the Great War, my parents had the Good War, and I had the Vietnam War, with the Forgotten War in between.  My children had the Iraq War and, at the rate things are going, my grandchildren will inherit the War in Afghanistan, which at 15 years and counting, is far and away the U.S.'s longest overseas military adventure. 

This bloody roll call tells you a few things about America: Protestations to the contrary, we are a bellicose people who will never run out of wars because, after all, they're good for business, if not the mortality rates of young men, and remind us of how much better we are than everyone else, especially people who look and dress funny.  Wars also distract us from problems on the home front and help prime the old patriotic pump.   

The narratives we hand down about our wars invariably summon memories of heroism and sacrifice.  After the tide of public opinion turned against LBJ on Vietnam, a popular catchphrase was "Even if you don't support the war, you can support the troops," a semantic trap if ever there was one, and the narratives invariably overlook the enormous suffering of the armies and peoples of the lands we vanquish, which always is for the greater good, of course.  Our greater good.  

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which contains 58,000 names of American ward dead, is 150 yards long.  Do you know how long a comparable monument to Vietnamese war dead with a similar density of names would be?  (No, I didn't think you would.) 

It would be nine miles long. 

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Wars are fought twice over -- once on the battlefield and once in our memory -- and that is the subject of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a scholarly, profound and challenging but hugely readable new book by Viet Thanh Nguyen.   

Nguyen cites the works of philosophers, historians, journalists, filmmakers and artists who have plumbed the murky depths of the psychological impact of war on combatants and civilians, but to my mind Nothing Ever Dies is nothing less than the paradigm exploration of the subject as it applies to war in general, but especially my war.   

He writes:

"The problem of war and memory is . . . first and foremost about how to remember the dead, who cannot speak for themselves.  Their unnerving silence compels the living -- tainted, perhaps by, a touch or more of survivor's guilt -- so to speak."

Nothing Ever Dies arguably is the nonfiction underpinning of his magnificent The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  (Click here for my review.)  This debut novel explores the post-Vietnam identity and politics of America through the eyes of a Vietnamese army captain and spy whose loyalties are deeply divided between East and West.   

I wrote: 

"The analogy is imperfect, but will suffice: The Sympathizer . . . is a terrific bookend to Fire In the Lake, the Frances FitzGerald classic.  While one book is fiction and the other nonfiction, both tell the story of the Vietnam War, its aftermath and legacy from a Vietnamese point of view.  And both, in their genre different but similarly powerful ways, are reminders to believers of the cocked-hat notion the U.S. could have 'won' the war if the politicians had only butted out, that it was a fool's errand from start to ignominious finish.  And while there was a surplus of fools on all sides, the biggest were the brass at the American Central Command in Saigon."

Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in the U.S.  He is harshly critical of American conduct in the Vietnam War and the amnesia that has conveniently enabled many of us to forget what a humbling defeat it was for our self-aggrandizing imperialist selves.  But he is no apologist for the Vietnamese, who called the decade-long conflict the American War and considered it a resounding victory, which it was not.  He writes that both countries "have not lived up to their revolutions." 

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In Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen references Apocalypse Now, the epic 1979 Vietnam War film starring Marlon Brando as the insane Special Forces colonel who commands his own Montagnard troops as a sort of demi-god.  The Sympathizer has numerous indirect references to the Francis Ford Coppola masterwork, including the character of a megalomaniacal Hollywood director who hires the captain-spy to critique his war movie and share his expertise during filming in the Philippines, which happens to be where Apocalypse Now was shot.

 

"Apocalypse Now is an important work of art," Nguyen told an interviewer in the run-up to publication of Nothing Ever Dies, "But that doesn't mean that I'm going to bow down before it. I'm going to fight with it because it fought with me," 

Nguyen first saw Apocalypse Now when he was 10, a Vietnamese refugee who spoke fluent English, and says he was devastated.   

"People just like me were being slaughtered," Nguyen told the interviewer.  "I felt violated.  It was an antiwar movie about the war in Vietnam, but the movie was about Americans.  The Vietnamese were silent and erased."   Thus began his scholarly, decades-long pursuit of war and memory.   

He is referencing both the U.S. and Vietnam, and for that matter any other nation, when he writes:

"The problem of how to remember war is central to the identity of the nation, itself almost always founded on the violent conquest of territory and the subjugation of people.  For citizens, garlands of euphemism and a fog of glorious myth shroud this bloody past.  The battles that shaped the nation are most often remembered by the citizenry as defending the country, usually in the service of peace, justice, freedom, or other nobles ideas. Dressed in this way, the wars of the past justify the wars of the present for which the citizen is willing to fight or at least pay taxes, wave flags, cast votes, and carry forth all the duties and rituals that affirm her or his identity as being one with the nation's."

In the end, Nothing Ever Dies is a powerful meditation.  It is a book to be read in small sips and not big gulps.  It is worthwhile alone for revealing the intellectual roots of The Sympathizer, but even more so for confirming in compelling and passionate terms how we choose to remember and how we choose to forget, most notably for me that America is indeed fighting a forever War. 

From Beethoven To Bethlehem: Twenty-Five Great Books For Holiday Gift Giving

Your Faithful Reviewer plowed through a slew of books in the course of 2015, ranging from an 88-year old literary classic to hot-off-the-press offerings. Here are the best 25 of the bunch.  All are great holiday gifts for a literary inclined spouse, other family member or friend, and all are available online in paperback.

BEETHOVEN: ANGUISH AND TRIUMPH (Jan Swofford, 2014) The great virtue of this doorstop of a tome is that it strips away the theories, postures and myths about this profoundly influential composer,

who was the crucial figure in the transition from the Classical to Romantic eras in Western music.  Swofford keeps interpretation to a minimum in telling the story of Beethoven's life ("the most astonishing thing about him is that he survived the burdens of being Beethoven," he writes) and parks out the finer points of musical theory in a handy appendix, a relief to readers like myself who are not classically trained.

BONITA AVENUE: A Novel (Peter Buwalda, 2015) From the outside, brilliant math professor Siem Sigerius, his wife, children and future son-in-law are bourgeois normalcy itself, but lies, deceptions and twists of fate reveal the family to be profoundly dysfunctional.   Propelled by three distinctively different narrative voices, this spectacular debut novel is darkly humorous, suspenseful, entertaining and addictive as we are taken from the Netherlands to California and back, through literal and figurative pyrotechnics, and ultimately into the heart of madness.  

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS: A Novel (Marlon James, 2014) The too often violent history of post-colonial Jamaica has fascinated and revulsed this longtime lover of Bob Marley's music in particular and ska and reggae in general.  A Brief

History more or less revolves around the 1976 politically-motivated assassination attempt on Marley, and the author's cast of rastas, gunmen, drug traffickers and CIA agents, rendered with a sublime inventiveness, casts a gripping light on that event and the tremors from it, which reverberated all the way to New York in the form of the crack epidemic, and well into the 1990s.

CATALOGING THE WORLD: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information World (Alex Wright, 2014) Some 25 years before the first microchip, 40 years before the first personal computer, and 50 years before the first Web browser, Belgian librarian Paul Otlet envisioned something very much like today's Internet.  This led to his great achievement: Construction of the Mundaneum, a mechanical collective brain that would house and disseminate everything ever committed to paper.  A fascinating and fast-paced history of a regretably obscure visionary and creative genius.

THE CORRECTIONS: A Novel (Jonathan Franzen, 2001) The dysfunctional family as novelistic

gist is well-trod ground, but Franzen covers new ground in this complex but beautifully written, biting but ultimately sensitive satire.  The five members of

the troubled Lambert family, each in their own very different way, are walking commentaries on social issues ranging from laissez-faire parenting to sexuality and homosexuality to U.S.-Third World relations.  The climactic Christmas homecoming goes awry, of course, but is deeply moving as the large-heartedness of this kooky clan prevails.

THE DINOSAUR FEATHER (S.J. Gavan, 2008) Too many of the characters in this weird but engrossing Danish murder mystery have anger-management problems which tend to gum up a plot that can seem needlessly complicated because everybody lies and has something to hide.  But this is a worthy addition to the top shelf of Actic Noir and the back story -- fossil trench warfare waged by scientists over whether birds are descended from dinosaurs -- is the improbable glue that keeps the journey from murder to murder interesting even if the ending is more or less predictable.

ELEPHANT COMPANY: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals WhoHelped Him Save Lives in World War II (Vicki Croke, 2014) We all know that elephants are pretty damned smart, but Croke's wonderful story of

Billy Williams is a revelation. Mesmerized by the great beasts' intelligence, character, courage and humor, Williams became a gifted "elephant wallah" deeply skilled at understanding the beasts, as well as treating their maladies.  In return, the elephants made him a better man, and in the process saved countless lives as the Japanese overran Southeast Asia.

FACTORY MAN: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town (Beth Macy, 2014) A cautionary tale about the dark side of globalization and the Bassett Furniture Company, which once was the world's largest wood furniture manufacturer.  Enter the Chinese, who decimated much of the domestic industry. The few holdouts included the indomitable if patriarchal John Bassett III, who through smarts, loyalty to his workers and sheer cunning, beat the Chinese at their own game and saved his business and the town of Galax, Virginia. 

IN COLD BLOOD (Truman Capote, 1966) I first read this true-crime masterpiece about the quadruple murder of Kansas farmer Herbert Clutter and his family in 1970 or so and very much liked it.  But it was more compelling the second time around and more

obvious to me that it actually was a "non-fiction novel" because of the liberties Capote took in telling the story, including weaving in factual discrepancies when it helped the flow.  Critics howled, but so what?  It's art, and the psychological relationship between murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith is especially fascinating.

THE INDIAN BRIDE (Karin Fossum, 2001).  The success of the Arctic Noir murder mystery genre has spawned imitators who simply don't have the chops of a Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson, which makes reading any book in Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer series a delight.  The Indian Bride is typical of Fossum's masterful plot construction, but it is her psychological portrait of the residents of a provincial Norwegian village rocked by a brutal murder and Sejer's understated but methodical quest to find the killer that makes this book such a terrific read.

JONI MITCHELL: In Her Own Words (With Malka Marom, 2014)  I have written that being young is to love Joni Mitchell's music and  growing older is to understand why you do. I am convinced of that even more after reading this anthology of recorded

interviews with the singer-songwriter from 1973, 1979 and 2012, by which time Mitchell had stopped recording and touring.  Mitchell's musings on her collaborations with other artists, notably jazz legend Charles Mingus, and her creative processes are riveting and make her greatest music -- reverentially covered by so many contemporary musicians -- seem even greater.

THE LAST GOOD KISS (James Crumley, 1978) Having pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel for Arctic Noir thrillers, my thirst for the well-crafted detective story took me to Crumley and three overwritten and ultimately unsatisfying offerings in his C.W. Sughrue series.  But The Last Good Kiss clicked, probably because it predated the three others.  The prose flowed beautifully, cliches were kept in check, and Dashielle Hammett would have approved of the story line in this debut of Sughrue, a Vietnam veteran turned hard-boiled gumshoe with a fondness for the bottle and a slim but enduring and endearing hope for mankind.

MAN IN PROFILE: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (Thomas Kunkel, 2015) If The Sympathizer was the best book of fiction I read this year, Kunkel's biography of one of the giants of long-form journalism is the best non-fiction entry.

Sadly, upon his death in 1996 at age 87, Mitchell was less known for his extraordinarily elegant writing than a decades-long case of writers block. Mitchell arguably was the progenitor of New Journalism (a term he loathed), and as John McPhee has written, "When New Journalists came ashore, Joe Mitchell was there on the beach to greet them."  (Click HERE for a full-length review.)

NICA'S DREAM: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness (David Kastin, 2011) Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter had it all: Wealth, a title and influence of one of the most powerful families in the world.  But then she heard a recording of Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," fell deeply in love with jazz and began an extraordinary three-decade rein as the legendary jazz baroness of New York City because of her close and loving relationships with dozens of jazz greats, not the least of whom was Monk himself.  A great bio for jazz lovers and a worthy addition to the history of the genre.

ROSCOE: A Novel (William Kennedy, 2002)  This comic masterpiece is the most accessible of Kennedy's Albany books (his Ironweed was one of my selections last year) and Roscoe Conway, second in command of the New York capital city's notorious political

machine, is perhaps his most likeable character, which is saying a heap because Kennedy imparts even his homicidal mobsters with charm.  Roscoe decides to quit politics as the book opens, but of course that is easier said than done as he overcomes obstacles, scandals and disasters small and large that all seem to lead back to the loss of his true love.

THE SHORT AND TRAGIC LIFE OF ROBERT PEACE: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy League (Jeff Hobbs, 2014) People have been writing books about their college roommates for years, but this one is very different and very special because the roommate was not a famous novelist or scientist in the making, but rather Robert Peace, who against formidable odds escaped the mean streets of Newark, New Jersey for Yale.  Hobbs's biography is a must-read: Painstakingly researched, painfully honest, and like the title says, ultimately tragic.

THE SILKWORM (Robert Galbraith, 2014) J.K. Rowling built a literary empire with the Harry Potter series and she's well on her way to doing it again with the first two Cormoran Strike detective novels written under the name of Robert Galbraith.  The initial

offering, The Cuckoo's Calling, which introduced Strike and secretary Robin Ellacott (think Holmes and Watson), was good, but The Silkworm is better still with a labyrinthine plot based on a controversial bestseller-to-be and its uncomfortable place in the shark-infested waters of the British book publishing business.  Is Galbraith/Rowling sending a message here?  You betcha.

SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM (Joan Didion, 1968) Great writing -- or in this case great journalism -- is never passé. This collection of 20 magazine essays, most on 1960s California, is so rich and Didion's observations so pungent that they still leap off the page 50 years on.  Favorites include being on location with John Wayne in Mexico, the Hawaii of fact and fantasy, a musing in the Santa Ana Winds, and an encounter with a preschool-age child who is given LSD by her hippie parents in Haight Ashbury.

STEPHEN CRANE: A Life of Fire (Paul Sorrento, 2014) Next to Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, no other 19th century American writer was as romanticized in his lifetime.  But while Crane may have "opened the gates to modern American

literature," as this biographer puts it, it's a wonder that he accomplished anything.  Preternaturally shy and a spendthrift who repeatedly undercut and double-crossed editors and friends alike, his one redeeming quality seems to have been a deep humanity evident in his greatest and most impressionistic works, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. 

STEPPENWOLF (Herman Hesse, 1927) I read this classic in the late 1960s when I was first exploring inner worlds, which in turn led me to examine spirituality, but four-plus decades on, rereading it was a revelation.  Who can't -- and shouldn't -- relate to Harry Haller, a joyless and lonely intellectual (who Hesse has said mirrored himself at the time he wrote the book) who struggles to reconcile the man and the beast within, only to fall in love on the path to liberation and then fall further into the surreal "Magic Theater - For Madmen Only!" where his fate is finally determined.

THE STORY OF ALICE: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland  (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2015) Has there ever been a more peculiar relationship in life and fiction than that between Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (Carroll) and

Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the enduringly popular Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass?  Douglas-Fairhurst is a fine biographer and plumbs the inevitable questions about Carroll's sexuality, as well as less controversial aspects of his life and place in the shifting cultural landscape of Victorian society, all to fascinating and witty effect.

THE SYMPATHIZER (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015) This remarkable debut novel is hands down the best book of fiction I read this year and is bound to become a classic of war fiction.  The Captain, the story's narrator, leaves South Vietnam to go to university in the U.S. and becomes fluent in its language and ways before returning to his war-torn homeland ostensibly to fight the Communist cause.  But he has a secret: he is a Communist sympathizer and spy.  Among the greatest lessons imparted in this marvelous book is that the Vietnam War was not an American struggle; we merely supplied bodies and napalm. (Click HERE for a full-length review.)

TIBETAN PEACH PIE (Tom Robbins, 2014) The author of the great Only Cowgirls Get the Blues, as well as a bunch of other "seriocomedies," as he calls his novels, says this book is neither an autobio nor a memoir, but it is both.  I had tired of Robbins, as

great as his shtick could be, because it had become shopworn from too-thin material.  But Tibetan Peach Pie is a delightful reminder of a heyday when his prose, with its interwoven social and philosophical undercurrents, was magical. His observations here about LSD and his personal exploration of that deeply misunderstood drug are among the most acute that I've read.

A TOWN LIKE ALICE (Neville Shute, 1950) War romances are not my cup of tea, but the author of On the Beach won me over with his engagingly written tale of Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman who endures a death march in the jungles of Malaya during World War II to improbably end up in the remote and rugged Australian outback where she is reunited with a man who nearly lost his life to save hers.  Paget faces the challenge of her life, as well as ossified gender and racial stereotypes -- in trying to turn the tiny community where she decides to live into "a town like Alice" -- the outback "oasis" of Alice Springs.

THE WEATHER EXPERIMENT: The Pioneers Who Sought To See the Future (Peter Moore, 2015) For anyone who loves observing the weather, as well as marveling how often forecasters still get it wrong, this book is a delight.  This group biography reveals how pioneering 19th century researchers -- with nothing more than thermometers, barometers and hygrometers their disposal -- succeeded in cracking the weather's code by observing, inventing and observing some more despite a so-called scientific establishment that continued to cling to ancient, church-sanctioned views of meteorology.

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Meanwhile, here are my lists for 2014 and 2013, as well as a 2o12 post of the books that have most influenced me.

The Assassination Of Lincoln: Justice For The Conspirators Comes Fast & Hard

LAST OF THREE PARTS

John Wilkes Booth had hoped that the simultaneous assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and two possible successors would throw the U.S. government into disarray and give the Confederacy a new lease on life. The president did indeed perish, although the other two attempts fell short or failed to come off, but the Union held and a massive dragnet brought Booth and his co-conspirators to bay. Booth himself was killed, while most of the others were strung up and hung 12 weeks later after a controversial trial.

Booth had made for the Navy Yard Bridge after mortally wounding Lincoln and galloping away from Ford's Theater, while David Herold crossed the span about an hour later after attempting but failing to kill Secretary of State William Seward.

They reunited at a tavern in Surattsville where co-conspirator Mary Surratt had stashed weapons for them and then went to the home of Samuel Mudd, a doctor, who determined that Booth's left leg was broken (when he jumped from the presidential box to the theater stage) and set the leg in a cast.

Mudd's exact role in the conspiracy remains murky (see sidebar below), but in any event Booth and Herold spent April 14, 1865, and part of the next day resting in the doctor's house and then hired a local man to guide them to the home of Confederate sympathizer Samuel Cox. Cox in turn led them to sympathizer Thomas Jones, who hid them in a swamp near his house for five days until they could cross the Potomac River, ironically well after Union troops had begun combing northern Virginia for the men.

On April 21, ferryman Willie Jett took Booth and Herold across the river. Neither man made any effort to hide his identify, and Herold boldly declared, "We are the assassinators of the president. Yonder is J. Wilkes Booth, the man who killed Lincoln."

Five days later, investigators pulled Jett from his bed and he told them the men had been enroute to Port Royal and the home of "Mr. Garretts."

On April 26, Union soldiers tracked Booth and Herold to farm belonging to Richard Garrett, who had locked the men in his barn. Garrett at first claimed the men had "gone to the woods," but when investigator Everton Conger threw a rope over a tree and threatened to hang the farmer, one of his sons blurted out, "Don't hurt the old man; he is scared; I will tell you where the men are -- in the barn."

Conger gave the men five minutes to come out. Herold quickly surrendered, but Booth refused to give himself up. The soldiers then set fire to the barn and Sergeant Boston Corbett crept to within firing range and shot booth in the neck, paralyzing him.

The assassin was dragged out on to the steps of the barn where a soldier dribbled water into his mouth. "Tell my mother I died for my country," he whispered. Booth died two hours later on the porch of the Garrett farmhouse.

Meanwhile, Lewis Powell, who had led Herold to Seward's house before panicking and riding off, wandered the streets of Washington for three days before finding his way back to Mary Surratt's house in the capital on April 17. Military investigators were waiting for Powell and although Surratt denied knowing him, both were arrested.

George Atzerodt, who had gotten cold feet after being tasked with assassinating Vice President Johnson, hid out on a farm in Georgetown, but was tracked down and arrested on April 20, while with one exception the rest of the conspirators were arrested before the end of the month. The lone holdout was Confederate courier John Surratt, Mary's son, who made his way to Europe and Africa before he was finally apprehended in November 1866.

* * * * *

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had set up an office in the back parlor of the boarding house where Lincoln was taken to run the government and begin the dragnet for the conspirators even before he drew his last breath.

In the ensuing turmoil, dozens of people with only the most tangential ties to Booth and Herold were arrested and thrown into prison.

They included Louis J. Weichmann, who was a boarder at Mary Surrat's house and had informed the War Department of an earlier kidnapping plot against Lincoln. He was released and became an important prosecution witness. Booth's brother and theater owner John T. Ford also were apprehended but were released.

The suspects held for trial eventually were narrowed down to eight: Atzerodt, Herold, Mudd, Mary Surratt, Powell, Samuel Arnold and Michael O'Laughlen (both of whom were involved in the kidnapping plot) and Edmund Spangler (who worked at Ford's Theater).

Mudd and Surrat were imprisoned at the Old Capitol Prison and the others on the ironclad vessels Montauk and Saugus, and then moved to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, where the trial was to be held.

The eight were tried not in a civil court but by a nine-officer military tribunal, which was advocated by Stanton and had become a favorite if controversial method of dispensing justice of the late president's, as well as an echo of the imprisonment of alleged terrorists during the Bush administration. All but Mudd and Surratt were made to wear canvas hoods for the duration of their pre-trial incarceration.

The odds were well stacked against the defendants because of rules that required only a simple majority of the officer jury for a guilty verdict and a two-thirds majority for a death sentence. The defendants could not appeal to anyone other than President Johnson.

In an effort to implicate President Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders in the assassination, the prosecution suppressed some evidence and intentionally obscured the fact that there were two Lincoln conspiracies -- the kidnap plot hatched in 1864 with the support of top Confederate leadership that fell through when the president canceled plans to attend a play at a military hospital on the outskirts of Washington, and the subsequent assassination plan of which only the co-conspirators were aware.

All of the defendants were found guilty on June 30 following a seven-week trial at which 366 witnesses testified. Atzerodt, Herold, Powell and Surratt were sentenced to death by hanging while Arnold, Mudd and O'Laughlen were sentenced to life in prison and Spangler to six years.

Oddly, after sentencing Surratt to hang, the first woman to ever get the death sentence in a federal proceeding, five of the jurors signed a letter recommending clemency, but Johnson refused to stop the execution.

The hangings took place on July 7 at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary, while O'Laughlen died of yellow fever in prison and Arnold, Mudd and Spangler were pardoned by Johnson in February 1869.

One of the pieces of evidence that prosecutors did not introduce was a small red book which Booth kept as a diary that Conger had found on his body.

In an entry written sometime between the assassination and his capture, Booth wrote:

"For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart."

IMAGES (From top to bottom): The hanging of four of the conspirators; A "Wanted" poster; Capture of John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett farm; Sergeant Boston Corbett; Mary Surratt's house; Secretary of War Stanton; The nine military commissioners; A hooded Samuel Arnold; President Jefferson Davis; Booth's diary.

Channeling Abraham Lincoln, George Bush & Their Civil Liberty Power Grabs

No action taken during the Age of Bush may have provoked more outrage than the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in holding alleged terrorists indefinitely and prosecuting them before military tribunals. But there is an historic precedent dating back to Abraham Lincoln, of all presidents, and the infringements of the Great Emancipator on civil liberties arguably were greater than during any period in American history -- including the last eight years.

George Bush's rationale for suspending habeas corpus, which is the major constitutional deterrent against arbitrary government legal action, was much the same as Lincoln's: The fate of the U.S. hung in the balance because of a war, the laws of war are different and the president-commander in chief must be allowed extraordinary latitude to interpret and use these laws as he sees fit.

* * * * *

Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and use of military tribunals were but two of several unilateral acts that the new president took between the outbreak of the Civil War with the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 and the official convening of a special war session of Congress on July 4 of that year.

Without the permission of Congress, Lincoln also declared martial law, greatly increased the size of the Army and Navy, appropriated funds for huge purchases of arms, instituted a naval blockade of Southern ports and issued a series of orders for the military to put down any local efforts to impede the Union as it prepared for what at the time (and not unlike Iraq) was assumed to be a short war.

Much as the Bush administration wrapped some of its controversial actions in legalese and as Lincoln would do with great deliberateness for most of what evolved into an awful four-year conflict, the 16th president termed these actions not as the result of a declaration of civil war but rather the suppression of a rebellion.

Lincoln tried to assuage a wide range of groups who backed the war and favored emancipation of the slaves. He also understood that only Congress was (and is) constitutionally empowered to declare war, while suppression of rebellion was (and is) recognized as an executive function, including the prerogative of setting aside civil procedures such as habeas corpus.

Reaction to Lincoln's constitutional sleight of hand was fast and furious for a people only 70 years removed from the excesses of British rule, and there was widespread outrage that the president was permitting arbitrary arrests and quashing the right to protest the conduct of the war.

John Merryman, a pro-South resident of Maryland who recruited soldiers for the Confederate Army, was among those caught in these crosshairs.

On May 25, 1861, Merryman (photo, below right) was arrested by the military, charged with several treasonous acts and incarcerated in Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor. When his lawyer sought a writ of habeas corpus -- a procedure by which Merryman could be immediately released if his imprisonment was found to not conform to law -- Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that he was being held illegally.

Taney issued a writ to Fort McHenry commander George Cadwalader directing him to produce Merryman before the court the next day, but Cadwalader refused on the grounds that Lincoln had authorized the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

Taney (photo, below left) then issued an attachment for Cadwalader's arrest for contempt, but a marshal was unable to enter the fort to serve it. The justice, recognizing the impossibility of enforcing his order, produced the now-famous opinion, Ex parte Merryman, which vigorously defended the power of Congress alone to suspend habeas corpus.

Legal scholars, while recognizing that the Constitution permits suspension of the writ in "cases of rebellion and when the public safety" requires it, have been arguing ever since about who was in the right.

Taney relied on the fact that the right to suspend the writ is in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, which describes congressional duties, while some scholars note that it was placed there merely because the Committee on Style that organized the Constitution could find no other place for it.

But the chief justice did fail to acknowledge that the fate of the nation was indeed at stake. In any event, Congress resolved the ambiguity two years later when it permitted the president the right to suspend the writ while the "rebellion" continued.

Lincoln himself understood the dilemma he had put himself and the Union in, writing to a friend:

"Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? . . . I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy."

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Lincoln authorized military commissions because they had the capacity to act quickly and secretly.

As a rationale, he used Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which states that the chief executive is required "to preserve, protect and defend" the right of self-preservation, and Article II, Section 3, which requires him to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

Some 13,000 people were arrested under martial law during the war, including a number of outspoken newspaper editors. The Union Army conducted 4,271 trials by military tribunal, although none was as notorious as that of Clement Laird Vallandigham, the best-known Copperhead of the era, who was to the tribunal system what Merryman was to habeas corpus.

Vallandigham (photo, below right), a pro-Confederacy Democratic congressman from Ohio and leading Copperhead, was one of Lincoln's sharpest critics, charging that the president was conducting a "wicked and hazardous experiment" by suspending the writ and taking other sweeping actions without the permission of Congress.

He was arrested by Major General Ambrose E. Burnside on May 5, 1863, as he spoke at a Democratic Party rally in Mt. Vernon, Ohio and taken to Kemper Barracks, the military prison in Cincinnati. He was tried there by a military commission that found him guilty of treasonous acts and sentenced him to imprisonment for the duration of the war.

After being denied a writ of habeas corpus, Vallandigham applied for a writ of certiorari to bring the military tribunal's commission proceedings before the Supreme Court for review. His application was denied in the opinion Ex parte Vallandigham on the grounds that the high court had no jurisdiction over a military tribunal, a marked contrast to three stinging rebukes of the Bush administration by the high court, which ruled in 2006, 2007 and 2008 that the Military Commissions Act was out of legal bounds because of its suspension of habeas corpus and other kangaroo court trappings.

A year after the Civil War was over, the court revisited the habeas corpus issue in Ex parte Milligan, ruling in the case of Confederate sympathizer Lambdin Milligan (photo, left) that the writ could only be suspended by Congress and then only in a situation where civil courts were not operating. The ruling was adjusted in 1942 in Ex parte Quirin, which distinguished that Milligan had been a civilian whereby the Quirin defendants were German soldiers.

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While Lincoln was to emerge as a champion of emancipation and other progressive causes, he believed absolutely that the suspension of habeas corpus and extensive use of military tribunals were more than justified in the service of preserving the Union, while Bush's supporters have said much the same thing in the context of the War on Terror.

This would seem to put people like myself who consider Lincoln to be the greatest president and Bush among the worst in a box. It is not possible to get out of that box entirely because some of Lincoln's more extreme actions like the arrest of people who did nothing more than badmouth the president are indefensible.

But the situations then and now bear scant resemblance.

In 1861, the republic was literally torn apart, there were widespread reports of rebellions in the North and Washington itself was in danger of being captured. In 2001, a complacent administration ignored warnings of a terrorist attack on the homeland and after that attack came rounded up several hundred people, very few of them actual terrorists, torturing some and holding almost all indefinitely in an imperial power grab that in context was far greater than Lincoln's.

And while Bush was seen toting around a bestselling book about the Civil War following the 9/11 attacks, he certainly did not learn from Lincoln's mistakes.