Three volumes into a monumental biography of the 16th president, the Clinton aide is still part of the political scene

In the Palm restaurant at Dupont Circle, amid the buzz of Washington’s political talk, Sidney Blumenthal is discussing John Brown’s raid of 1859 and its place in his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He pauses, thinks, and smiles.

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“I would say the investigation into Harper’s Ferry conducted by Jefferson Davis was fairer than the Benghazi investigation.”

It’s a pointed remark.

In the 1990s, Blumenthal was an adviser to Bill Clinton during the impeachment crisis. In the 2000s, he was an adviser to Hillary Clinton in the race against Barack Obama. Now, as 2020 looms, he has become a bogeyman to Donald Trump’s Republican party, a political Zelig lurking in every rightwing nightmare.

His reference to Benghazi is to congressional hearings in 2015 in which he spent a day being questioned over his relationship with Hillary and the 2012 incident in Libya in which four Americans died. He walked out unbowed but when we first spoke about his work as a writer, in 2016, he was fresh from TV studios in which he had been asked more about Benghazi than anything in his life of Lincoln.

When we discussed volume two, a year later, Blumenthal was mostly off the stage. But this time we meet amid dark hints from Republicans that the “Clinton attack dog”, as Fox News gleefully calls him, had something to do with the Steele Dossier, the file of opposition research on Trump that fuels fever dreams on both sides of the aisle.

Blumenthal skips over a question about that but his work on Lincoln is fueled by deep experience of all the brutalities of Washington. Volume three, All the Powers of Earth, concerns the late 1850s, years of division over slavery and the slide to civil war.

“I think I have an unusual and broad range of political experiences, yeah,” he says. “In the beginning, with the anti-war movement when I was at the university, even before that I had participated in a rally at which I’d seen Martin Luther King, down to the present.

“I certainly have a view on impeachment that’s more than academic, having been the third and final witness in the Clinton impeachment and seeing everything firsthand, and everyone.

“So I would say that experience, combined with my journalistic experience, creates a way of not only understanding history that makes it seem vivid and the conflicts understandable in a contemporary way, but that have to be translated into a method for researching and coming to the realities of what politics is.”

We’re back to the how of the Lincoln biography, the why springing from a fascination instilled as a child in Chicago and an adult life writing for the Washington Post and the New Yorker – and the Guardian – as well as working for the Clinton machine.

Blumenthal is now 70. His Lincoln, the summit of his career, will run to five volumes. It tells the story of the president who came up in Illinois in the 1830s, served in Congress in the 1840s, shaped the Republican party in the 1850s, won the White House in 1860 and was killed after winning the civil war.

It is also a political history of a riotous national scene which in volume three Lincoln doesn’t enter until page 183. This could be daunting but Blumenthal’s style is as propulsive as it is exhaustive. As before there are chapter-length portraits of key players: the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, Preston Brooks, the South Carolina fire-eater who caned him, and Thaddeus Stevens, radical Republican and implacable foe of slavery. As Lincoln scholars have said, the result is a magisterial read, the familiar made fresh.

“It requires relentless work,” Blumenthal says, happy at the thought. “Following footnotes to sources and then footnotes of the sources, all the way down, and reading everything with as fresh an eye as I can, and mining my own experience, which is different from if I were just an academic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blumenthal speaks outside court in February 1998, after testifying before a grand jury. Photograph: Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

“It helps in understanding the psychology and motives of people engaged in struggles for power and what the stakes are, having been involved in that.”

Such stakes have been high, notably so in the end of a close friendship with the writer Christopher Hitchens, over what was said or not said about Monica Lewinsky.

Hitchens died in 2011 so I chance a question about him, asking if such a painful experience might help Blumenthal put himself in Lincoln’s shoes when, say, he writes about the perfidy of Senator John J Crittenden of Kentucky, or about defeat by the demagogue Stephen Douglas in the great Illinois Senate election of 1858.

This time, Blumenthal doesn’t smile.

“I’ve had everything I have to say about Hitchens in The Clinton Wars. I wrote about him.”

His next line stops me short.

“I’m done. Thank you.”

Fortunately, he isn’t ending the interview. He’s just finished his lobster salad.

‘I haven’t reached the mountaintop”

Over coffee, we discuss what’s left to be done on a political biography that will rival Robert Caro’s LBJ in length and perhaps renown. Short answer, a lot. Volume four, Blumenthal says, “doesn’t go to the assassination. Right now it goes to Gettysburg.” The battle was won on 3 July 1863, four months before Lincoln gave the address.

“We’ll see how far it goes …” he pauses, slightly distracted, perhaps in his mind back in the scene he describes when I ask how he works: at his desk, books open, his wife at work in the office next door, facts to chase down, friends to call for discussion.

“A lot of it is written but I have to write a lot of the opening chapters. Well, I want to, I have to. I want to get to the bottom of the secession, of how it was done.

“[Volume] five is pretty much done,” he adds, saying it will cover “the whole campaign of ’64 … the triumph of Lincoln, the assassination, Reconstruction and Grant.” He has not “reached the mountaintop”, he says, but he can see it. Getting there will be “the greatest contribution I can make”.

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Given that Blumenthal isn’t an academic, I ask about influences outside the great corpus of Lincoln studies.

“Trying to recreate Lincoln’s world,” he says, “involves creating all these characters that he was aware of, that he followed in real time, not knowing how anything was going to work out. So there’s a novelistic aspect to it.”

All right. We’re in the mid-19th century, the work is all-encompassing. What about Moby-Dick?

“Moby-Dick had a big impact on me when I read it in college. I write about it in volume two. It’s about the Compromise of 1850” – which dealt with territory acquired in the Mexican war of 1846-48, balancing slave states and free – “which absorbed Melville. A lot of what happened there he turned into metaphors of both characters and forces of Moby-Dick, including a sense of the driven mania of [South Carolina senator and vice-president] John C Calhoun in Ahab.

“I ended that chapter with Ishmael: I alone have survived to tell the tale. That’s Lincoln. He doesn’t know it. He’s been cast out. The whole thing has gone down, and he’s cast out into central Illinois, and he doesn’t know he’s there to develop. He’s in his chrysalis … So, I’m a big Moby-Dick fan.”

He doesn’t have much time for books not related to his grand project but he says he did recently read Adam Gopnik’s “little book on liberalism, which I wish could be taught everywhere”.

These days, any American historian is guaranteed to be asked what their new book might teach us about Donald Trump. Blumenthal has discussed the 45th president in light of the 16th almost as often as Trump has laid absurd claim to some sort of Lincolnian greatness.

He’s happy to go there again. After all, his second volume, Wrestling His Angel, contained a chapter on Millard Filmore, a notably awful president, entitled The Art of the Deal. In All the Powers of Earth there are chapters called Witch Hunt and The Birther Campaign. For a man who has denied being the first political operative to suggest a look into where Barack Obama was born, it is a provocative move.

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“Yeah, well,” he says. “John C Frémont, first candidate of the Republican party, the great explorer of the west, senator from California, a great naturalist, author, very wealthy, has a sketchy background. People aren’t quite clear on it. His father was a French Canadian … he’s accused of, worst thing of all, being a Catholic. He was, in fact, illegitimate, and it was claimed he was foreign born and, therefore, not really an American.

“These were not vague smears. These were highly massaged attacks done by campaign organizations and politicians against Frémont in order to discredit him and to discredit the new Republican party. So, that was the first birther campaign, as it were.”

I suggest he’ll get more questions about that. He continues.

“The witch-hunt, of course, is a reference to the investigation after Harper’s Ferry.”

Trump says special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was the greatest witch-hunt of all. Blumenthal smiles again.

In 1859, he says, investigators were “trying to attack all the anti-slavery figures in the Congress as tainted with conspiracy with John Brown.

“Well, maybe they colluded.”

‘The real politician’

Blumenthal does not just allude to modern politics. He’s still directly involved. In an afterword to volume three, he thanks the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin for inviting him to Capitol Hill in January, to address new congressmen and women about Lincoln and the birth of a very different Republican party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lincoln in office. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“It was an interesting meeting for a lot of reasons,” he says. “They were actually interested in Lincoln, the real politician, and what he had done and how to do it. He had walked where they had literally walked.

“How did he keep all these different factions together? How do you exercise leadership? How do you know when to step forward, when to step back, when to compromise, when not to compromise? When to follow your leader, when not to? All these things were relevant questions for the freshman Democrats I spoke with.”

As those freshmen debate whether to impeach a president, progressives among them are battling moderates for the soul of the party. I wonder if Blumenthal thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar – or Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer – might profit from reading his book. He chooses his words with care.

“It’s a dangerous environment that Lincoln’s operating in,” he says. “It’s kind of altogether a new party, which essentially has one platform plank, opposition against national slavery. People have histories in politics, and they’ve warred against each other, Democrats, Whigs. People have become Know Nothings, abolitionists.

“This is not a happy family. Lincoln is kind of holding them together, and at the same time tamping down their worst instincts and attempts to impose their own views on the entire party which could sink the whole cause. It’s a very hard project.”

He smiles.

“It requires extraordinary leadership to hold a fractious party together.”