AS HEADS IS TAILS: John Wilkes Booth, hero? Martyr? Thomas Hibbs visits Ford's Theater:

Sitting in a coffee shop with our three pre-teenage children just blocks from Ford's Theater, where we had just heard a presentation on Booth's assassination of President Lincoln, our nine-year-old daughter commented, "That man made it sound like the bad guy was the good guy and the good guy was the bad guy." The bad guy turned good guy would of course be John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious assassin in American history. In the revisionist history now officially on display at Ford's Theater, Booth's prophecy appears to be coming true, "The world may censure me for what I am about to do, but I am sure posterity will justify me."

* * * Suffering from the crudest of childhood educations, our Ranger confessed that he had been taught in grade school that Lincoln was the great emancipator and that Booth was crazy. He then proceeded to a laundry list of Lincoln offenses — suspending habeas corpus, refusing to release prisoners of war, and causing the number of the dead to far eclipse the number on display at the Vietnam Memorial. Each of these accusations was preceded by a rhetorical "Did you know...?" and followed by the exclamation, "Nobody told me that!" No mention here of the unprecedented historical context of civil war, of the constitutional crisis precipitated by the threat of secession, of the opposition from the North to Lincoln's plans of postwar restraint toward the south, or of the possibility that Lincoln was exercising political prudence in his handling of the issue of slavery.

Having slipped from one crude conception of Lincoln to its polar opposite, from the grips of one shallow myth to another, our Ranger had no time for the complexities of history. Instead, he busied himself with reviving the memory of Booth. Booth, we were assured, was not insane; he was a successful actor, who had been provoked by Lincoln's misdeeds. Indeed, he never planned to kill Lincoln even after the war, until Lincoln had a band play Dixie at a public ceremony commemorating the end of the war. "Lincoln shouldn't have done that," our Ranger thundered. "Can you guess who was in the audience that day?"

"Our ranger said quite emphatically that there were things Lincoln never should have done, but he never came close to saying anything like this about Booth's actions", Hibbs writes. "Lincoln is thus brought low yet again in Ford's Theater, not this time by an assassin's bullet but by vulgar revisionist history. Ford's Theater, it seems, is now the house that Booth built".