The truth is that I already had written a good deal about Lincoln in a peripheral fashion, but I had always stayed away from the main subject.

But I do agree that one of Lincoln's faults was his excessive loyalty to his subordinates - whether in the military or in the civil service.

But added to those accomplishments, of course, there is the assassination, and Americans have a fascination with assassinations and their legacy.

When I made the decision to go ahead with the project, I said I was going to try and write as if no other biography of Lincoln had yet been written.

Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes.

But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics.

Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.

What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them.

I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.