During the Senate impeachment trial of former President Trump on Capitol Hill over the past week, the name and words of another president, Abraham Lincoln, have come up over and over. Lincoln’s eloquent speeches about deploring mob violence and binding up the nation’s wounds have never been more timely.
The 16th president’s evergreen relevancy is the focus of “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural Address,” an hourlong documentary that Vista filmmaker Ken Kebow released last month for online streaming. Initially produced in 2016 as an educational program for schools, the film stars Lincoln historian and author Ronald C. White Jr. of Los Angeles and Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss, who lives in the North County community of Olivenhain.
The team behind the documentary “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural,” Lincoln historian Ronald C. White Jr., left, filmmaker Ken Kebow and Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss of The Dreyfuss Initiative.
(Courtesy of Ken Kebow)
Dreyfuss is the founder of the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative, a 17-year-old nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that aims to revive the teaching of civics in American public schools because better-informed citizens makes for a better-run and more just society.
Kebow, a documentary and commercial filmmaker, said he was motivated to relaunch the film by the political division now roiling America.
“I looked at everything going on in this country and realized that more so than any time in history since 1865, what Lincoln said about a very divided country is so pertinent and meaningful today,” Kebow said.
The film is based on White’s 2002 book of the same name. White believes the second inaugural address delivered on March 4, 1865 — not the more famous “Gettysburg Address” from Nov. 19, 1863 — was Lincoln’s crowning achievement as a writer. Lincoln thought so, too. White says in the film that there are only a handful of people in world history whose words are still repeated regularly today and one of them is Lincoln, despite the fact that he only had one year of formal education.
“Lincoln can be a role model,” White said. “He can teach us humility. He can teach us how to respect each other, even if we differ in our opinions. He can teach us to reach out in a civil rather than an uncivil conversation.”
In the film, White says Lincoln — who was assassinated 41 days after this speech — planned to dedicate his second term to post-war reconciliation and reconstruction and this speech was meant to serve as a guidepost.
The 701-word address was delivered in the final weeks of the four-year Civil War. Although the Confederacy had lost, Lincoln didn’t celebrate the Union victory in the speech. Instead, he spoke in a somber, inclusive and sermon-like fashion about the ways Southerners and Northerners are alike, how each side had suffered catastrophic losses in the war and how all Americans were being punished for the sin of slavery.
Dreyfuss, an avid Lincoln buff himself, said he gladly signed on for the documentary because he, too, believes the speech was brilliant.
“I was standing in the hallway of a grammar school in Georgia,” Dreyfuss recalled. “The walls were covered with kids’ version of the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural, and other aspects of Lincoln’s life. I was waiting for my cue to go on, to talk to the kids, and I was again reading the Second Inaugural. All of a sudden, I realized, what an astonishing magic act he pulled. He never said, ‘We really kicked their a**, didn’t we?’ He never said what was expected of him, which was, ‘we’re winning this war, and it’s fantastic.’ Instead, he said, ‘we’re as guilty as they are.’ If he had said that at the beginning of the war, he would have been impeached immediately.”
The final and most famous lines of the speech were written to explain Lincoln’s philosophy on healing a divided nation: “With malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to ... achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.”
Lincoln has not only been cited several times during the impeachment trial, he is also the subject of a six-part series reassessing his legacy, “Lincoln: Divided We Stand,” that debuted Sunday night on CNN. Friday marked the 212th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.
Kebow said the idea for the film was born five years ago when he was working as a cameraman for UCSD-TV and White came to the UC San Diego campus to present a lecture on Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Inspired by the presentation, Kebow tracked down White at the Huntington Library in San Marino and asked about filming the lecture for classroom use. Several months later, Kebow asked Dreyfuss to participate. Dreyfuss opens the film with a dramatic reading of the speech and he hosts a question-and-answer session with White at the end.
The film has been shown in classrooms nationwide and was screened at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. For the relaunch, Kebow re-edited the film and added music and more graphics. He hopes the revised film can be introduced and integrated into exhibits at museums nationwide, like the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.
To stream the film on demand, visit vimeo.com/ondemand/lincolnsgreatestspeech or to purchase a Blu-ray DVD copy, visit lincolnsgreatestspeech.net.
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