ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE FIFTH COLUMN

In the span of a single month, two books are appearing on this subject, the subversive activities of the Civil War period. The other book, The Hidden War by Wood Gray (Viking) was reviewed on page 280. And now this one, which has a wider range of popular material -- the birth of the Federal Secret Service, various Confederate Fifth Column activities and organizations, the methods used to apprehend and crush the conspiracies, and so on. But -- where the Gray book is orderly and scholarly, almost to a fault, this seems confused, unorganized, and the story -- in itself a dramatic one -- bogs down in a plethora of unfamiliar names, attempts at colloquial expression and picturesque details, and general vagueness and elusiveness. The parallels to methods used then and now, are fairly obvious -- yes, even to hiding behind the New York Daily News and McCormick (Cyrus, that time) in Chicago.