Nicolay, who eventually became Lincoln’s private secretary, may not be well-known today, but he was one of the most significant people working behind the scenes in the Lincoln administration and his efforts on behalf of the 16th president changed the course of American history. Possessed of organizational skills that Lincoln lacked, Nicolay managed White House operations and protected Lincoln’s time, allowing the president to become perhaps the nation’s most active and involved wartime commander-in-chief. Nicolay was devoted to Lincoln and his friendship eased the president’s burdens during the terrible ordeal of civil war. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Nicolay and his friend John Hay worked for years on a massive biography of Lincoln that shaped the president’s image as the good and wise Father Abraham who saved the Union, ended slavery, and gave America renewed freedom. Nicolay helped Lincoln achieve greatness in both life and legend.

Born Johann Georg Nicolai in 1832 in the village of Essingen in what is now Germany, Nicolay was five when his family arrived in the United States, anglicized its last name, and settled in a German immigrant community in Cincinnati, Ohio. When Nicolay’s mother died soon thereafter the family left for a series of western locations, eventually settling in Pike County, Illinois, where they operated a grist mill. While physically frail, the academically inclined George, as he was called, learned English quickly. By the age of 14 he had lost his father and been dismissed from the family mill by his eldest brother. But he soon landed a job at the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, the county seat of Pike County, Illinois.

Lincoln at the time was a circuit-riding attorney who often argued cases in the Pike County courthouse, across the street from the newspaper’s offices. Nicolay followed Lincoln’s court appearances and budding political career with growing interest and enthusiasm. Like Lincoln, Nicolay was drawn to the new Republican Party, which opposed slavery’s expansion. And like Lincoln, he was vehemently opposed to Senator. Stephen A. Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which negated the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and permitted slavery anew in territory that had been closed to it.

At the Free Press, Nicolay worked his way up from printer’s apprentice to reporter to sole proprietor. The paper supported Republican candidates in Illinois, including Ozias M. Hatch, who after his election as Secretary of State in 1856 invited Nicolay to become his chief clerk. After selling the newspaper, Nicolay moved to Springfield to join Hatch’s staff in 1857. While executing his duties at the state library and election archives, located directly across the street from Lincoln’s law office, Nicolay finally got to meet Lincoln in person. Although Lincoln was 23 years older than Nicolay they became fast friends, often conversing and playing chess in the State Library.

In 1858, Lincoln ran for Douglas’s senate seat, engaging in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates that cemented his reputation as a moderate and reasoned anti-slavery voice within the Republican Party. He lost the race, but Republican leaders decided that transcripts of the debates should be published and distributed nationally to promote the party’s cause. Lincoln called on Nicolay to hand deliver the copies to a publishing company in Ohio, writing in his letter of introduction, “Mr. Nicolay is a good Republican … a good man and worthy of any confidence that may be bestowed upon him.” Given these sentiments, it didn’t take long for Lincoln and Nicolay to forge a partnership in politics.

Lincoln’s star was on the rise. Many Republicans thought he’d make a great vice presidential candidate in the 1860 election, but he and Nicolay envisioned something more. In February, 1860, Nicolay began pushing Lincoln’s prospects for a presidential run, writing an editorial endorsing Lincoln for president in the Pike County Free Press. Nicolay was present at the Chicago convention when Lincoln won the nomination. Soon thereafter, Lincoln offered him the position of campaign secretary.  

Lincoln liked Nicolay and admired his abilities, but there was also a political calculation in choosing a widely respected German immigrant to play a key role in his administration. German American voters had been alienated by the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery, as well as by the American (or “Know Nothing”) Party and its anti-immigrant positions. When the “Know Nothings” merged into the coalition forming the new Republican Party, German American voters were unsure where they belonged. By appointing Nicolay his private secretary, Lincoln assured German Americans that he was not a nativist.

As the Private Secretary to the president, Nicolay became the de facto first White House chief of staff. He brought his friend Hay on board as an assistant. Nicolay served as a gatekeeper of access to Lincoln, coordinating daily White House routines that included managing the president’s schedule, handling correspondence, and even ordering filing cabinets for proper storage of the administration’s paperwork (no longer was Lincoln allowed to carry around important documents in his hat). Nicolay served as the principal liaison between the White House and Congress. He sat in on Cabinet meetings and presidential interviews and took careful notes. He drafted important documents and letters. He assisted First Lady Mary Lincoln with state dinners and other matters of protocol, experiencing tense relations with her when she overspent and fudged the accounts. Nicolay and Hay were Lincoln’s sounding boards as the president conducted business in D.C. and went on missions to various parts of the country beyond as the president’s trusted eyes and ears. Nicolay conducted multiple treaty negotiations with Native American tribes. His organization of the president’s schedule freed Lincoln to spend critical hours each day in the War Department’s telegraph office monitoring developments in the field. Without Nicolay’s focus, Lincoln could have been lost in a sea of detail.

President Abraham Lincoln sits between John George Nicolay (left) and John Hay (right) in Washington, D.C., in November 1963. Hay wrote in his diary, “We had a great many pictures taken … Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having ourselves done in a group with the Prest.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Nicolay continued working for Lincoln through the president’s 1864 election to a second term, but decided he wanted to depart the White House shortly thereafter. Living in Washington had meant enduring long periods of separation from the love of his life, Therena Bates, who remained in Pittsfield, and Nicolay was growing weary of confrontations with Mrs. Lincoln. He accepted Lincoln’s offer of an appointment as American consul at Paris, but was still in his White House job—returning from a mission to Cuba—when he learned that the president had been assassinated. Devastated, he remained in his secretary post until he and Hay had organized Lincoln’s presidential papers and made the presidential office ready for Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

Nicolay and Bates got married and headed off for a new life in Paris in June of 1865. Their daughter, Helen, was born there the following year. Nicolay served as consul at Paris until he was replaced by an appointee of President Grant in 1869. He returned to the U.S. and became a naturalized American citizen on October 12, 1870. (Apparently no one, including President Lincoln, had known that Nicolay wasn’t a citizen.) In 1872 he was selected to be Marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court. This enabled Nicolay and his family to live in Washington, D.C., and allowed him to begin the legacy-cementing literary work he really wanted to do: prepare a history and biography of Abraham Lincoln and his era.

Nicolay and Hay worked with Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son, who gave them access to Lincoln’s presidential papers. Doing painstaking research, Nicolay and Hay shunned hearsay and undocumented tales about Lincoln and relied on credible documentation for every aspect of their 10-volume, 4,800-page work, Abraham Lincoln – A History, which was published by the Century Company in 1890. The work was more than a mere biography of Lincoln. It assembled a detailed military history of the Civil War and reported on the machinations of the cabinet, Congress, and the military. It portrayed Lincoln as a witty and wise man who loved to tell stories. It detailed how Lincoln bore the suffering of war on his shoulders while his faith in God grew deeper, and the ways he saw beyond the immediate ups and downs of war, keeping the ultimate goal of preserving the Union ever in his mind. It was the first scholarly validation of the president’s greatness and became the foundational work for all the scholarly writing on Lincoln to follow.

This massive effort was not viewed as flawless, but it was widely praised when it was published, and it shaped a heroic image of Lincoln that persists to this day. In Nicolay and Hay’s telling, Abraham Lincoln could do no wrong. His motives were always pure, his fairness, kindness, and wisdom were without parallel, and only he possessed the qualities of mind and character needed by the nation in its moment of gravest crisis. The book was a work of filial love, scholarly yet biased, by two men who, in their early manhood, had viewed Lincoln as an all-wise father figure who could do no wrong, the man who had saved the nation and ended slavery.

The self-effacing Nicolay—the Father of Lincoln Scholars—is practically invisible in the volumes. He always chose to work behind the scenes for his hero, mentor, and friend.

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Garrow shared some of his reasons for what he called his “huge disappointment” with the Obama presidency at a Zócalo/KCRW “Critical Thinking with Warren Olney” event, “How Did Barack Obama Create Himself?”.

Hosted by Olney, the longtime KCRW radio personality and dean of Los Angeles news broadcasters, the evening echoed many of the thematic lines—and withering criticisms—that surface in Garrow’s 1,400-page biography Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. “It’s worth reading,” Olney quipped, “but it takes a long time.” (Most reviewers agreed: The New York Times appraised Rising Star as “impressive if gratuitously snarly,” while Politico judged it to be “a masterwork of historical and journalistic research.”)

Published last spring, the book charts his subject’s transformation from a highly intelligent, rather aimless young man into a calculatingly ambitious politician who, according to Garrow, wore various masks at various life stages, walled off his emotions when it served his career goals, and remained an enigma even to friends and lovers.

“It has to be said that from at least 2001, 2002, Barack Obama has been first and foremost, fundamentally, a politician,” said Garrow, the author of well-regarded books on the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case, the Civil Rights Movement, and the FBI. “There’s a very absolute compartmentalization that Barack imposes on his life, even as a 25-year-old.”

Garrow sketched out an abbreviated version of his book’s sometimes unflattering portrait of Obama, drawing applause and nodding assents, as well as occasional gasps and murmured objections, from the overflow audience.

Following Olney’s line of questioning, Garrow started out by discussing Obama’s high school and college career, his stint as a Chicago community organizer, and his youthful romantic life. Garrow faulted the future president for dumping Sheila Jager, the half-Dutch, half-Japanese woman with whom he lived for two years in the late 1980s, because Obama had made a determination that having a white wife would have been “a political non-starter” for a black politician in the Chicago of that time.

He said that Obama, born in Hawaii and raised with a “friendship network” of international students, only really began living among African Americans once he moved to Chicago and set his sights on a political career.

In Garrow’s view, Exhibit A in the saga of how Obama selectively re-invented himself is his 1995 best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father, a reflection on his upbringing and his absentee Kenyan father. In Rising Star, Garrow describes Obama’s book as “a work of historical fiction.”

Garrow said that, in Dreams of My Father, Obama was “making a very conscious effort to reconstruct his life as dramatically more African American than it really was.” He also was attempting to re-cast himself as a rebellious tough guy, rather than the academically gifted nerd he really was, according to Garrow.

At one point, Olney quoted from the Rising Star epilogue that Obama had “willed himself into being” and that “the crucible of self-creation had produced an iron will,” but “the vessel was hollow at the core.”

“That’s pretty rough,” Olney said.

Garrow—who late in the evening described himself as “a Bernie Sanders Democrat” and “a great fan of Edward Snowden”—conceded that it was. But the author’s strongest criticisms centered on what Garrow regards as three key ways in which Obama walked back key campaign promises: by accepting large amounts of private campaign financing; by presiding over the growth of the federal government’s surveillance and anti-terrorist apparatus; and by retreating from support for same-sex marriage until Vice-President Joe Biden “got out there first.”

In response to Garrow’s comments, Olney asked whether Obama was really so different from other politicians who realized, once they got elected, that their campaign promises had to yield to more pragmatic considerations. Had Abraham Lincoln been “absolutely consistent in the things he said and the things that he did?” Olney asked, drawing one of the night’s biggest applause lines.

“I probably frankly have never read an Abraham Lincoln biography because I am almost entirely a post-1945 person,” Garrow replied.

Noting that Obama had read the first 10 chapters of Garrow’s book, Olney wanted to know what the former president thought of its less-than-glowing appraisal.

“The impression I came away with,” Garrow responded, “is that when someone has written up a version of their life story, at that point 20 years earlier, they remember better and remain attached to the version of their life which they wrote than the version which they lived.”

But if Garrow was unsparing in his remarks on Obama, he saved perhaps his harshest rebukes for Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, and the current U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama, Roy Moore—and for the American people themselves.

“The last 13 months again highlight, to me as a political historian, how American public opinion, oftentimes, lots of times, at a mass level gets huge numbers of things fundamentally wrong,” Garrow said. “I think there is a deep weakness in the American people, in American public opinion. I think there is a deep vulnerability to ignorance in American culture and American opinion that we continue to see, and that I fear we will see again next Tuesday, Dec. 12 in Alabama.”

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At this point, I know so much about Ann that I literally wrote the book on her: Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel. What started out as a passing interest in an obscure film actress turned into a 15-year quest to uncover her life story. In the process, it also turned into a deep relationship with a woman I never met.

Dvorak fought the powerful Hollywood studio system in court (and lost). She drove an ambulance in England during World War II, wrote an 18-volume history of the world, and died in obscurity on Oahu in 1979. I developed a deep connection with this incredible woman, but she also played a major part in shaping and defining who I am today.

It all started in 1995, when I was still in college, and checked out a VHS copy of Three on a Match from the Glendora Public Library on a whim. I was blindsided by Dvorak’s performance as a high-society woman who throws it all away for sex and drugs. I tried to find out more about this dynamic actress but came up empty-handed. This was years before I became a professional librarian. It was also before IMDB, Wikipedia, or even Microsoft Encarta—so the Internet wasn’t much help. I looked for information on Ann in my Leonard Maltin Movie Guide and discovered that there were no books on her at the library. But there was vintage memorabilia from Ann’s movies, and I could even afford to collect it, mainly because no one else was.

I was already a constant reader of Hollywood biographies—and here was an actress I truly loved whose life had never been documented. I decided to tell Dvorak’s story, thinking it would take me two or three years, tops.

Back then, I was an insecure student who became so paralyzed in social situations that, when friends dragged me to parties, I usually sat in a corner reading a book and chain smoking. But once I made up my mind to be Ann’s biographer, I found myself surrounded at parties by folks who were fascinated to hear of my adventures digging up information in archives, on eBay, and at movie memorabilia shows. My two- or three-year project had been wishful thinking.

When I launched www.anndvorak.com in November 2002, I was so proud of the website I designed myself in Microsoft FrontPage that I had no problem pushing it on complete strangers. (Don’t worry, it has since become a WordPress site.) Ann grew my confidence enough to become a docent with the Los Angeles Conservancy. Had I not encountered her, I’m not sure I could have willingly led groups of people through the movie palaces of downtown Los Angeles while yelling above the sounds of buses, blaring storefront music, and fire trucks. Through Ann Dvorak, I found my voice.

Ann also served as a litmus test when it came to men. I fell for a man my friends knew was all wrong for me. But then this fellow stated that if we ever moved in together, the number of Ann Dvorak movies posters hanging on the wall would need to be scaled down considerably.

That was the end of him. After all, to love me is to love my movie posters. The man who ultimately became my husband embraced me—and Ann—from the get-go. When he agreed to see Scarface at the New Beverly Cinema for our third date, I knew it was love. When he was just as excited as me to have our wedding at the Encino ranch house that Ann built in 1934, I knew it was forever.

Ann Dvorak also became a savior of sorts. When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2011 (I’m completely cured now), part of my treatment involved a round of iodine radiation. I had to be quarantined in a room at my mom’s house for more than a week, away from my husband and 1-year-old daughter. It was excruciating, but throwing myself into the writing of Ann’s story helped take my mind off of missing my family. Ann Dvorak kept me sane.

This fall, the book was published at last. And while I’ve known for years how Ann changed my life, I’ve now had the opportunity to evaluate what I’ve done for her. I possess an extensive archive of her life and career—advertising memorabilia from her decades as a film actress; movie, television, and radio contracts; personal correspondence to and from Ann; her mother’s letters; journals; canceled checks; personal photos; and a cherished scrapbook from the 1932 honeymoon that derailed her career. Ann had no children, and she outlived all three of her husbands. Whether I intended it or not, I have become the custodian of Ann Dvorak’s legacy.

People often ask me, “What’s next?” or more specifically, “Who’s next?” I’m not sure I see myself writing another biography. For one thing, my loathing of tracking down and bothering people for interviews trumps any desire to tackle a new subject. For another, launching into a project this big as a 40-year-old mom with a full-time career is daunting. But mostly it’s because I know I could never duplicate the relationship I have developed with Ann. I can’t imagine anyone else prompting me to take so long and dig so deep to make sure I tell her full story. Whatever the future holds, I am grateful for my time spent with Ann Dvorak and for what I accomplished because of her.

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