By Elena Oumano

Harold Holzer calls himself an “opportunist,” but this is true only in the most positive sense—he embraces all promising opportunities that cross his path. “If a project comes along that sounds exciting, it doesn’t matter how impossible it is,” he says. “I try to dive into it.” The opportunities have come fast and furious for him, leading to a career-balancing act few others could manage.

As senior vice president for external affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Holzer “transforms curatorial visions into direct appeals to the press and public” alongside the 150 people he leads in handling “public relations, communications, marketing, advertising, multicultural audience development and outreach, internal communications, government relations and visitor services.” Weekends, vacations and the stray free evening feed Holzer’s insatiable curiosity—first sparked by a fifth-grade project—about all things Lincoln. The result is 43 books—many award-winning—he’s either penned himself, co-authored or edited on the 16th president of the United States. This includes his latest, Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America, commissioned by Steven Spielberg as the companion young adult book to his new film,Lincoln.

Holzer’s understanding of his real-life “protagonist” and the society of his times is profound, and driving his writings is a mission to illustrate lessons found in the horrors and achievements of a part of our history that mirrors keenly the issues of our own contemporary culture. Somehow Holzer also speaks and appears on television frequently; he even performed a nationwide tour with actor Sam Waterston of their theatrical piece. And he also squeezes in family life with his wife, two grown daughters and grandkids.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” Holzer says of his work with the Met and the president, and he is careful not to let one seep into the other. The few intersections include a portrait of Lincoln painted from life in Springfield, Ill., in June, 1860, that the Met hung in Holzer’s office, and visiting celebrities such as Tony Bennett, who count Holzer as yet another of the museum’s countless treasures. “They come to the Met because of its standing in the world,” he says modestly. “I happen to be standing at the door.” That’s sometimes literally true. During the Met’s landmark Alexander McQueen exhibit, notorious for up to four-hour waits to get in, Holzer stayed until 2 a.m. during the final weekend, scouting the lines of people winding throughout the museum to cull out seniors and others he felt should be escorted inside.

The Lincoln-related opportunities have snowballed over the years, but Holzer, who started out as a journalist and then flacked for Bella Abzug, never considered scaling back his Met position, one he describes as a “combination graduate school, museum, fishbowl of society, diplomatic center—it’s extraordinary, everything I ever imagined it would be and much more.” That is, until he was recently appointed the first Roger Hertog Fellow at the New York Historical Society. He assumes residency in January and, along with lecturing there, will continue working on his next book, one that explores the relationship between Lincoln and the press. “I will continue to represent the Met as my top priority,” he says, “but I will be letting go of day-to-day branding, marketing and promoting of exhibitions and programs after 20 years in order to focus on strategic press issues and government relations, which I enjoy very much. We have wonderful relations with the city, state and federal governments, including leaders—many of whom I’ve known for years.” This includes former governor Mario Cuomo, with whom he co-authored 1990’s Lincoln on Democracy (which sports a Tony Bennett watercolor of Lincoln gifted to Holzer by the artist/singer on its front cover). “I’ll continue making the argument during these last weeks of fiscal-cliff negotiations that the uniquely American idea of giving charitable donors tax deductions for contributions to health, cultural, scientific and religious institutions and universities is crucial for a society that doesn’t provide government funding for these things,” Holzer goes on to say. “That’s an advocacy we want very much to make, not only on our own behalf but for, say, Bellevue, which needs charitable contributions to rebuild. There’s no Bellevue Hospital in New York for the first time in 200 years!”

Harold Holzer will appear with playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner on Jan. 29 at the New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West) for a discussion following a 7 p.m. screening of the movie Lincoln. Checkwww.nyhistory.org or call 212-485-9268 for more information.

Holzer recently sat down with Our Town to talk about putting together the exhibit, and how Lincoln’s image was forged in New York.

Historian Harold Holzer thinks Lincoln’s relationship with New York has been underappreciated. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Q: Why has Lincoln’s relationship with New York been underappreciated until now?

A: I think because other states have always been in frenzied competition to claim that they made Abraham Lincoln who he was. If you go to Kentucky, you know that every building, every pathway, is marked as the place where Lincoln first opened his eyes and developed a love for the land. And, of course, Illinois geographically references his early career, the Senate races, his political development. Against that competition, it has been hard to make the case. But it is our contention, and I think we make a very good case for it.

Q: What kind of artifacts and documents are represented in the exhibit?

A: I’m so proud of what has been assembled from collections all over the country. It includes the lectern that Lincoln used at Cooper Union in his famous speech. The first painting made of Abraham Lincoln, which was made in his office in Springfield in June of 1860. He had never sat for an artist before, and it was commissioned by a New York publisher, and it really tells the story of how New York created the Lincoln image. There’s the uniform that was worn by the first Union officer to be killed during the Civil War. He was a New Yorker. He was a student in Lincoln’s law office, and one of his bodyguards. After the Civil War began, this officer marched across the river to haul down a Confederate flag from a hotel in Virginia that he could see from the White House. And the owner of the hotel shot him with a shotgun. And there is the uniform in the collection with a huge hole in the breast. It’s pretty startling.

Q: Was the Lincoln image largely made in New York?

A: Absolutely. This is where the artists and the publishers were. This is where the distribution networks were. Because just like today, New York was the media center of the nation. The biggest newspapers, the biggest picture newspapers, the biggest publishers, portraits, engravings, posters, tokens, all of those things, were manufactured here. That’s not to say that the image-makers here loved Lincoln. They simply saw him as a profit opportunity.

Q: What was Lincoln’s relationship with New Yorkers?

A: He won over the Eastern Republicans but he never won over New York. He only won 30-something percent of the vote here in 1860. He didn’t do much better in 1864. It was a big Democratic town. But all he had to do was to convince influentials like Horace Greeley and the young Republican moderates in New York that he was a viable alternative to William Seward, that he would be acceptable as a candidate. They wanted a Westerner, but they didn’t want a Western buffoon. And they had heard that Lincoln was, in fact, a sort of a buffoonish character.

Q: The New York poet Walt Whitman wrote a famous tribute to Lincoln for the 22nd anniversary of his death. Is this poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” included in the exhibition?

A: Yes, it’s written in huge letters to remind people of the grieving during that Easter period after Lincoln’s murder. So we emphasize it very much. And, of course, Whitman is important not just because he crystallized national emotions over Lincoln’s passing, but because he saw Lincoln so often in Washington. He actually saw him in New York when Lincoln came here as president-elect. Whitman was in a trolley or an omnibus, a double-decker, a horse-drawn of course, and he was pulled over near City Hall to wait until Abraham Lincoln arrived at that hotel. Whitman was very concerned that the crowd was too quiet. He found it very threatening, and he thought it portended a very serious and challenging time for Lincoln and for the country. Of course, he was right.

Q: What do you want people to take away from the exhibition?

A: I would like for them to take away a new sense of how crucial New York City is in the evolving reputation of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. We never had a battle here, but we certainly had conflict and debate. We had violence on the streets. We had vicious newspaper attacks, and we had a boisterous community of support and compassion, and efforts to help the soldiers and to support the war financially. This was a very important state in the history of America and the American Civil War. And had Lincoln never come here to give his Cooper Union address, I am convinced that he would never have become president. When people walk into the show, the first thing they will hear is my friend Sam Waterston reading highlights of the address from Cooper Union.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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“Lincoln and New York”
Through March 25
New-York Historical Society,
170 Central Park West
212-873-3400