We know Harold Holzer primarily through his role as the vice president of external affairs at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, so we were pleasantly surprised to learn that he’s also one of the nation’s foremost Abraham Lincoln scholars—a passion, we discovered when we spoke with him yesterday, that goes back to his childhood and the New York public school system. “It was a fifth grade assignment,” he recalled. “We picked a name out of a hat and I picked Lincoln. We had a good school library, so I got the right book (Richard Current’s The Lincoln Nobody Knows) and I was off to the races.” He began collecting artwork depicting, then started writing about the political sentiments and ideals represented in those pictures. His interest in the 16th president continued through his career at PBS, then into politics, and on to the Met, where a portrait of Lincoln—on loan from the gallery of the museum’s American wing—hangs in his office.
In his off time, Holzer’s also a member of the Century Association, “one of those traditional, oak-paneled, book-filled places” for writers and artists, and he noticed a while back that the club didn’t seem to have anything planned for the Lincoln bicentennial. (Did we forget to mention he’s the co-chairman of the presidential commission for commemorating that anniversary?) “So I spoke to some of my friends there,” he told us, “and they invited me to come up with an idea.” Holzer’s concept was to dramatize The Lincoln Anthology, a collection he edited for the Library of America that brings together perspectives on Lincoln from his 1860 presidential campaign to Barack Obama’s announcement of his run for office in 2007. The Lincoln in American Memory script included passages from Frederick Douglass, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Allen Ginsberg and Delmore Schwartz, among others. Sam Waterston (who, as seen at right, played Lincoln in a 1988 television adaptation of Gore Vidal’s eponymous novel) agreed to take part in the show, which played to a sold-out room at the Century earlier this year.
“Afterwards, we went to dinner, and—do you know what the Lana Turner moment is?” Holzer asked, referring to the celebrated encounter at Schwab’s drugstore that set the actress on the path to stardom. “We’re sitting at a table, and I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and there’s Bill Moyers.” Moyers handed each of them a note telling them that the show deserved to be on television, and he was going to make it happen. The show that airs tonight should be pretty much exactly as it was performed at the Century Club, although Moyers also taped a conversation of 15-some minutes with Holzer and Waterston following their performance. (The show airs this evening on PBS; check your local listings for airtimes.)