They Called Him Pa

LINCOLN'S SONS (373 pp.)--Ruth Painter Randall--Little, Brown ($5).

Abraham Lincoln and a judge friend were bent over a chessboard when the little boy first announced that dinner was ready. Lincoln promised to come home but went on with the game. A second, more urgent call went totally unheeded. Furious, the boy marched forward and with one good kick sent board and chessmen spinning into the air. Calmly, Lincoln took the boy's hand, and turning at the door with a good-natured smile, said: "Well, Judge, I reckon we'll have to finish this game some other time." Said the judge later: "If that little rascal had been a boy of mine, he never would have applied his boots to another chessboard."

In the Shadow. Historians disagree whether the boy in question was Lincoln's eldest son Bob or his youngest, Tad, but all four Lincoln sons had received a private emancipation proclamation from the man they called "Pa." His attitude was: "Let the children have a good time." Biographer Randall (Mary Lincoln), widow of the late Lincoln scholar J. G. Randall, brings a mother-hen style to her bundle of anecdotes that will wholly please only devoted parents and memorabilia collectors, but the book does light up Lincoln as father, and what it means to grow up in the shadow of a great man.

Lincoln's eldest son, Robert Todd, was born nine months less three days after the Lincolns were married. His left eye was crossed, and something prim, shy and self-contained in his personality rasped always against his father's. When Bob was small, Lincoln low-rated him as "the little rareripe sort, that are smarter at about five than ever after." Edward, the next son, died at three. It was of him Lincoln spoke ("Here one is buried") when, as President-elect, he bade goodbye to his Springfield neighbors. Third son William Wallace was a blue-eyed "blessed angel" and his mother's favorite. But Thomas, the baby, was Lincoln's special pet. Scanning the large head and slim frame of the infant, Lincoln dubbed him "Tadpole."

Pardon for Jack. On the inaugural train to Washington, it was just like Tad to bait dignitaries with the query "Do you want to see Old Abe?" and then gleefully point out some total stranger. To Tad and Willie, the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer of the Lincoln family, the White House was a huge rumpus room. They found the central bell system and sent the White House staff scurrying up and down stairs in a dither over the President's safety. The "dear codgers" built a sled in the attic out of an old chair, with a copy of the Congressional Record for a seat, and improvised snow flurries from a binful of visiting cards left by guests.

Nightly, Tad went to bed only after the President personally undressed him and tucked him in. If "plaguy old generals," as Tad called them, took up his father's time, Tad blithefully did too. He broke into his father's inner office and won one of the famous Lincoln reprieves for a toy soldier whom the children had sentenced to death: "The Doll Jack is pardoned by order of the President. A. Lincoln.'' The boys frequently reviewed troops along with the President, and once as Lincoln held a Union banner, Tad brashly waved a Confederate flag behind him until the President glanced back and scooped him up into the arms of an orderly, who carried him out of sight.

"No One Wanted Me." Laughter died in the White House with Willie, who succumbed to an unknown fever at the age of eleven. So shattered with grief was Mary that Lincoln would not let Bob (by now a Harvard sophomore) enlist in the Union forces for fear that another death would unsettle her mind. That death proved to be Lincoln's own.

Mrs. Lincoln developed delusions of penury (though Lincoln left an estate of more than $100,000) and fled what she regarded as an ungrateful country to live abroad, taking Tad with her. He passed his 16th, 17th and 18th birthdays in German and English private schools, but TB may have been secretly eating away his life, for he came home to die before brother Bob's eyes.

Disliking politics and loving business, Bob brought the log-cabin tradition to a logical end: he married Socialite Mary Harlan and made a million dollars. Out of a sense of duty, he served as Secretary of War in Garfield's and Arthur's Cabinets and Minister to the Court of St. James's, later became president of the Pullman Co. A lifelong nagging sense of inferiority (he died in 1926) led him to say of all these honors: "No one wanted me . . . They wanted Abraham Lincoln's son."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.