Tony Kushner

Q & A with Tony Kushner

Q: What lessons have you learned from working on the Lincoln script?

A: Lincoln was just kind of a miracle worker in terms of finessing almost impossible circumstances and getting a result that he felt that he needed. It was a combination of cunning and ruthlessness — he was sometimes very hard on his friends and asked them to make terrible sacrifices of their own ambitions. The job of the president is both to make the compromises necessary to actually have things happen in a democracy, which means compromising at a slower pace than anybody would necessarily like. At the same time he has to keep telling us where we’re going, what we’re trying to arrive at. And I think that Obama has done an astonishing job of doing that over and over, of reminding us that government is a good thing, and that we share responsibility for one another because without that shared responsibility our own lives are destroyed.

Q: I’ve heard you consider Obama to be a good student of Lincoln.
A: There’s this wonderful thing that John Rawls, the philosopher of law, says, and I think he’s actually quoting an old maxim: that the politician thinks about the next election, but the statesman thinks about the next generation. More than any President than I can remember, President Obama really seems to understand that he’s building something. I think he inherited a situation that’s as desperate in its way as what Franklin Roosevelt inherited. Nothing is as desperate as the Civil War that Lincoln stepped into, but the mess that Obama inherited from the previous administration is as great as anything an American President other than Lincoln has faced.

One of the things it has required of him is a willingness to compromise his own, I would assume, deepest desires in order to keep government functioning, in spite of the unprecedented level of obstruction from the Republican Party. And I think he’s asked the people who support him to understand that maintaining a hold on power and rebuilding a progressive base in the halls of power in Washington for many terms to come. This is very much what Lincoln was faced with. He had to get re-elected, but he also had to keep the border states from seceding. It’s a very mature and difficult understanding of democracy, that democracy isn’t an expression of pure ideals or personal purity, and that the pace of change is sometimes much slower than we would like.