"We...hold the power and bear the responsibility."

[Gentle Giant]

No, of course W didn't say it.


New truths from Lincoln
By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist | September 27, 2005

WASHINGTON

''FELLOW CITIZENS, we cannot escape history."

Normally, Lincoln always works for me, and accompanied by Aaron Copeland's uniquely American sound, he is especially stirring. But hearing Colin Powell read words that have been part of patriotism's essential sheet music for more than 60 years, they were for the first time in my experience a kind of damning boomerang.

At the National Symphony Orchestra's opening concert Saturday evening -- its 75th in a lovely odyssey that traces Washington's gradual emergence from a sleepy company town to a real city -- the choice of Powell, one of the local establishment's favorite figures, and his wife to perform the role of readers for Copeland's Lincoln Portrait was automatic.

But the war in Iraq intruded, causing more than one formally attired guest to glance with surprise at the person next to him or reach for a pen to get down the freshly discovered double-entendres in Lincoln's language.

After a day of stunningly large antiwar demonstrations that surrounded a beleaguered White House while its occupant attended to a more natural disaster, the Lincoln words bit hard.

''We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves," observed Lincoln long ago in a written message to Congress after the gore of Antietam but just a month before the Emancipation Proclamation. ''No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even here, hold the power and bear the responsibility."

Indeed. The inspiring words of the past mock the poses of the present.

Earlier that day, there had been a demonstration downtown that dwarfed official expectations. In an interesting abandonment of post-9/11 paranoia, the parade permit allowed a virtual encirclement of the White House by a throng that easily exceeded 300,000 peaceful souls from around the country. I have either been in or covered every peace demonstration around here since 1967, and this one was more than reminiscent of the whoppers in the Nixon years.

The people are currently leagues beyond the politicians. The link between the ongoing war and the literal storms of the past month is in the opinion polls, with solid majorities not only of the opinion that the invasion of Iraq wasn't and isn't worth its cost but demanding that money being sent overseas be invested in reconstruction at home. The problem is that no one prominent in politics is really listening.

This disengagement of the people from a war used to be one of the warnings in Colin Powell's post-Vietnam doctrine, which he developed after his service there and as he rose to the top of the civilian and military power structures through the first Gulf War. Today, however, the former secretary of state is hoist by his own language and increasingly anguished by his role in selling the need for war to a too-credulous nation and international community.

At crunch time, he might have acted on some of the Lincoln words he read last weekend: ''The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our country."

Had he chosen to, Powell might have led an inspiring independent presidential candidacy in 1996, but he chose the loyally Republican route back into government instead. He might have done more than nudge his superiors toward Congress and the United Nations in 2002, but he again chose loyalty. And he might have shared the substantial doubts and dissent about US intelligence just before the war, but he loyally chose to sell a product with false labeling.

Aaron Copeland was commissioned (by musician Andre Kostelanetz) to compose his ''Lincoln Portrait" in the dark days of 1942 following Pearl Harbor. It is vintage Copeland -- a pastiche of folk tunes and modern means of portraying America's bustle, optimism, and occasional idealism. The words are usually read by prominent Americans who add weight to their timeless profundity.

Last weekend, the words were jarring and hollow. There is fresh evidence of coverup and worse on the prisoner abuse that soils our cause, fresh evidence that the Iraqi constitution is not the consensus document advertised by the administration but grist for division, fresh evidence that the military plans a long stay even in diminished strength, fresh evidence that the true cost is being kept secret.

The rest of us can perhaps take comfort that no one thought to invite George Bush or Dick Cheney to read Lincoln's words between bursts of Copeland's music last weekend.

As it was, Colin Powell even had trouble selling Lincoln's wish, articulated for the ages after Gettysburg, ''That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."