Fox Channel's Civil War Lies and Legends - Assassination of Lincoln: JWB

[L Verge]

Thanks, Betty, for supplying the full video. I am sure that I will "stand corrected" by some of you, but I actually liked the production! Maybe I'm just worn out from cheering the Washington Capitals on to repeated victories, but I thought it was much more accurate in its history than most of the similar shows that I have endured over the past twenty years or so.

I know that this is a full Fox series on the Civil War, and I have not watched the others in the series, but I kept watching for the "Legends & Lies" about the assassination and heard none - unless they were insinuating that the whole, documented history as we know it is a legend or a lie. I thought they stayed pretty close to the facts, and I appreciated the 3-4 inserts taken directly from Booth's writings.

I gave up a long time ago finding fault with characters who did not look like the real historical figure, film sets that didn't match real life, etc. This time, I only gulped a bit when I saw such a good-looking Atzerodt, Mrs. Grant outside without a bonnet on her head, Lincoln falling back in the chair after being shot, and Mary being allowed in the death room at the moment of her husband's death.

What did become a distraction for me were the large amount of talking heads that kept popping in for 1-2 sentences. Since only about four of them were familiar to me, I started a list and spent this morning googling to see their qualifications. As far as being well-known in the Lincoln assassination field, only Kate Clifford Larson qualifies as far as I am concerned. If you were as clueless as I about the others, here's a score sheet:

Brian Kilmeade is actually a Fox News personality, but he is the author of books on Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson among others; Samuel Dolan is the author of a book on cowboys and gangsters, but also an Emmy winning producer; the only reason I knew the name of David Eisenbach is because a friend gave me his book, One Nation Under Sex, to read during my medical leave, but he has also written one on The Kingmakers about the modern day press; I was very familiar with W.C. Jameson, singer and songwriter as well as prolific author with a series of books on bad guys "Beyond the Grave" and also treasure hunter; I still haven't figured out who David Smith and Andrew Nelson are (men by their names have links to sports, but no mention of Booth); Brooks Simpson from ASU does seem to be a well-respected historian and CW author; and of course, Martin Dugard was familiar for obvious reasons -- a man who first wrote about long-distance runners and became a buzz word in the field of history...

All in all, I thought the acting was pretty well done. It was also nice to see a SMILING Lincoln -- even though I thought the uproarious guffaws during Our American Cousin were a tad overdone (especially for Lincoln, a President, and in the public eye during more gentlemanly times). Other than that, I will probably watch it again and come up with different opinions.