"Lincoln's First Love" by Mark E. Neely, Jr., in Civil War Times (Nov.-Dec. 1995), P.O. Box 8200, Harrisburg, Pa. 17105-8200.

If there is one president whose political career marks him as ever calculating, overly ambitious, suspicious, and willing at times to resort to "dirty tricks," it is, of course, Richard M. Nixon. And seeming to stand in saintly contrast is the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Historians don't like to admit it, contends Neely, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at St. Louis University, but there was more than a little Nixon in Honest Abe.

Politics was Lincoln's "first love," Neely asserts. His ambition, as his law partner once said, was "a little engine that knew no rest." He served one term (1847-49) in the U.S. House of Representatives, ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1855, and tried again three years later.

His famous debates with Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, the last of them on October 15, 1858, are often cited among the great moments in American political history. But they were only part of his hard-fought campaign as the Republican candidate for the Senate. He spent most of the next two weeks giving speeches, greeting voters, and writ- ing letters. In those days when state legislatures, not the voting populace, chose U.S. senators, Lincoln was trying to help enough Lincoln, pictured in 1857, "lived the life of a professional politician."