Those ratings are in fact the latter’s governing device. It’s July 1962, and the New York Times magazine’s just-published historians’ ranking of U.S. presidents has Lincoln at the top, while Dwight D. Eisenhower, just 18 months out of office, rates an uninspiring 22nd out of 31.
Dictating his recollections into a reel-to-reel tape deck for the benefit of his biographer, the career Army officer turned reluctant commander in chief can’t help but refute the Gray Lady’s panel of Ivy League pencil-pushers. (He can take posthumous comfort in having avoided a name-check in “We Are the Mediocre Presidents,” one the finest musical numbers featured on “The Simpsons.”) He irritably answers the phone as “General Eisenhower,” instead of using his highest civilian title — old habits die hard, evidently.
But the admiring portrait Rubenstein and playwright Richard Hellensen paint is not of a hard-charging warrior, but of a compassionate, peace-loving pragmatist who steered the ship of state with humility and resolve. He finished the job of desegregating the military, and signed the first two civil rights bills since Reconstruction into law. He was a budget hawk who nonetheless raised taxes to build an interstate highway system and supported a social safety net. He was a lifelong soldier who backed the creation of NATO and cautioned against the spread of “the military-industrial complex” — the unheeded warning for which he is best remembered.
Rubinstein is a Broadway veteran who originated the title role in “Pippin.” That he little resembles Eisenhower is of no consequence. We buy him as a man of experience and accomplishment, who finds himself, in his early 70s, at last blessed /cursed with time and occasion to second-guess himself. Should he have done more to try to curb the damaging influence of red-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy? Or was it enough that he helped prevent the America-first isolationists of the 1940s and 50s from putting his megalomaniacal former commanding officer, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, into the White House?
Accidental connections among the two plays, and their subjects, abound: Eisenhower was elected in 1952, “four score and seven years” after Lincoln’s assassination, and the setting of Hellesen’s play is Eisenhower’s farmhouse in Gettysburg, Pa., the site of Lincoln’s immortal battlefield address 99 years earlier. (The set of his cozy study overlooking a golf course is by Michael Deegan, while Joe Huppert’s projections illustrate his remembrances with historical photos.) Both men experienced the awful tragedy of losing a child to illness — more than one, in Lincoln’s case.
As president, both deployed troops on American soil in the service of racial justice. Rubinstein’s Eisenhower says the decision to send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, to escort nine Black students into Central High School in 1957, was the toughest of his presidency. Having commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he appreciated as few others could the gravity of putting troops on American streets. But with Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus having marshaled his National Guard to keep the “Little Rock Nine” out of the school, Eisenhower was compelled to act.
Bakula, familiar from his TV portrayals of sensitive scientists and noble starship captains, settles almost too easily into the gentle personage of “Honest Abe.” With the application of some feral chin whiskers, and a makeup job that makes his visage more haunted and hawklike, he even looks the part — not that that matters, especially since the “Mister Lincoln” that journalist-and-biographer-turned-playwright Herbert Mitgang imagined in 1979 speaks to us from some otherworldly bardo. Misha Kachman’s set is a minimalist affair: a desk surrounded by ungoverned leaves of paper, watched over by an incomplete, grid-like photo of the real Lincoln that fills in as the show progresses.
Unlike, say, Tony Kushner, who confined his screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln” to the final months of his subject’s life, Mitgang surveys the breadth of Lincoln’s violently abbreviated 56 years. Bakula vividly conjures up young Lincoln’s recollection of a New Orleans auction of enslaved people where a minister paid a dear sum for a young girl then announced his intention to free her, solidifying the future president’s devotion to the abolitionist cause. He speaks freely of the melancholy from which he sought medical relief, roasting himself as “a burden to Hamlet.” Surely the most literary-minded of our leaders, Abe knows he’s in trouble when even his beloved Shakespeare cannot lift his depression.
One can’t help but be moved by Bakula’s nuanced performance, at the very site of Lincoln’s assassination (and of the 1980 American premiere of Mitgang’s play, with English actor Roy Dotrice in the role). But as an evening out, “Mister Lincoln” remains more reverent than revelatory. The history of “Eisenhower” (first staged at Theatre West in Los Angeles in 2022) is a lifetime more recent and yet less familiar, if only because its subject is not a national saint whose face we put on currency.
Not yet, anyway. We’ll see how he rates after another century — assuming the union lasts that long.
Mister Lincoln, through Oct. 13 at Ford’s Theatre. 90 minutes, no intermission. fords.org.
Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground, through Oct. 20 at Olney Theatre Center. 1 hour, 50 minutes, including intermission. olneytheatre.org.