Abraham Lincoln is one of the most written about Americans of all time. It’s estimated there may be as many as 18,000 books about him.
One of those thousands of books was a 2004 volume by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. And even with all those 1000 of other books, Cuomo felt he needed to call his book Why Lincoln Matters.
As he told me when we talked about his book in the summer of 2004, Abraham Lincoln transcended political parties (after all, Cuomo was a Democrat) and came to symbolize certain principles that politicians of both parties have been eager to embrace for decades.
At the time of this interview the 2004 presidential campaign was just beginning to heat up, and former President Ronald Reagan had just passed away days earlier.
So let’s talk Abraham Lincoln.
Here now, from 2004, Mario Cuomo
Mario Cuomo died in 2015. He was 82.