A fifth grader picks a famous name out of a hat for a class assignment ”“ a routine event, right?
But the name was Abraham Lincoln; the boy in question, young Harold Holzer; and the gesture began a lifelong love affair of the mind that has produced 36 books to date and made Holzer, a Rye resident, one of the foremost authorities on our 16th president.
On such seemingly simple, random, inconsequential moments does fate turn.
“My friend Dennis Fine picked Genghis Khan, and he became a rock ”™n”™ roll promoter,” Holzer says.
He is like that, with a wry, under-the-radar sense of humor and a wealth of stories that make him an irresistible conversationalist. At present, he”™s holding forth on Lincoln, the Booth brothers ”“ Edwin and John Wilkes ”“ and Barack Obama in a modest white office filled with images of Honest Abe as well as other art.
Lincoln is a passion Holzer pursues on weekends and vacations. By day, he can be found dispensing quotes to The New York Times and other publications or toiling away on the red carpet as senior vice president for external affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.
These are challenging times for The Met, along with other arts institutions. On the one hand, The Met is looking to host 5 million viewers this year ”“ its highest attendance since 2001. Its endowment picture is also improving and that”™s key as cultural organizations generally draw on some of the interest earned on their endowments for part of their income.
Still, as with private portfolios, arts endowments are nowhere near what they were during the heady days of the stock-market high in October 2007.
“Even if we were today where we once were,” Holzer says, “we would still have a bad quarter to average into what we could take from the endowment.”
Plus, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg”™s proposed budget cuts would mean an almost 40-percent reduction in municipal support for The Met.
Like other institutions, The Met has cut or frozen staff positions and looked to its own collections for exhibits. Fortunately, the museum”™s collections are so deep that they are special exhibitions in and of themselves, Holzer says. Indeed, on a Friday afternoon ”“ always a heavily trafficked time ”“ the galleries are packed with museum-goers taking in a show based on The Met”™s rich Picasso holdings, a costume exhibit on the evolving image of the American woman that”™s as kicky as Champagne, and the more rarefied pleasures of Italian drawings.
Below the scurrying throngs in the bowels of the museum, Holzer sits in his office and considers the Civil War era and the vagaries of destiny.
In a sense, The Met spokesman ”“ who came to the museum in 1992 after stints as WNET”™s public affairs director and press secretary for former New York governor Mario M. Cuomo ”“ is the perfect person to straddle the worlds of art and Lincoln. At the age of 13 ”“ after writing to such Lincoln scholars as Richard Current, author of “The Lincoln Nobody Knows” ”“ Holzer began to specialize in Lincoln”™s image “and how he used the new medium of photography to create that time-tested image.
“What struck me was the incongruity of a man who made fun of his image and yet knew the importance of getting his image out there in an age when candidates did not campaign directly.”
Perhaps more important, Holzer says, “was just how close we came to vulcanization (in the Civil War). We would”™ve been destroyed had Lincoln not saved democracy.”
He did it, Holzer adds, with an ineffable blend of toughness and tenderness, unpretentiousness and genius.
It”™s always fun to speculate what Lincoln would have thought of contemporary America.
“He would not be surprised that the U.S. is as prosperous as it is, as he predicted that,” Holzer says. “He would not be surprised that the races have come to some expectation of equality. I think he”™d be happy Barack Obama is president. But what he really would love are the scientific innovations.”
Holzer”™s latest work is the new “The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory” (Fordham University Press), which he edited with Craig L. Symonds and Frank J. Williams. Unlike other scholars who couch assassin John Wilkes Booth”™s motivations in the politics of the time (his romanticization of the South and anguish at its perceived oppression), Holzer locates Booth”™s disenchantment within the bosom of the idiosyncratic, theatrical Booth clan.
“I think (older brother) Edwin was like his father: He was a professional actor. I think John Wilkes never lived up to Edwin”™s talent, and he deeply resented it. (Edwin Booth) played Brutus in ”˜Julius Caesar.”™ John Wilkes Booth identified with Brutus.”
Knowing the reporter is an Edwin buff, Holzer tells the story of how Edwin Booth calmed a panicked theater audience, and saved lives, in November 1864, when Confederate agents set fire to some shops along Shubert Alley ”“ near the recent aborted car bombing.
Edwin Booth also played a hero in real life again that year, Holzer says, when he rescued a young man who had fallen in the space between a moving train and a platform at the Jersey City station.
The man”™s name was Robert Lincoln, oldest son of the president.
Already, Holzer has three more Civil War works in the pipeline ”“ “Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War”; The New York Times”™ complete account of the Civil War, accompanied by a DVD; and a young readers”™ study of Lincoln and his sons, to be published by Boyds Mills Press.
Holzer says he likes writing for young people as it forces him to pare down his prose.
With all that writing and researching, plus his day job, Holzer has time for little else except the weekend barbecue and his latest love, toddling grandson Charlie, who”™s crazy about anything on wheels.
Says grandpa: “The only Lincoln he”™s interested in is the Town Car.”
