Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SANDBURG'S LINCOLN (NBC. Friday, Sept. 6, 10-11 p.m. E.D.T.) is, alas, faithful to the spirit of its source, a poet's exercise in mythmaking rather than a balanced and entirely persuasive biography. The Lincoln created by the populist bard has been the unacknowledged source of all the mass media's grapplings with this most enigmatic of great American leaders. Now we are once again in the presence of a figure too compassion ate, charitable, humble and wise to be quite credible--the commoner as saint, but with the sanctity cleverly humanized by just the right amount of self-deprecating cracker-barrel humor.

This first in a group of six programs is subtitled Mrs. Lincoln 's Husband, and it comes close to being a situation tragedy: "At Home with Abe and Mary."

In it we find the busy Executive distracted from the pursuit of the war by a wife (Sada Thompson) far gone in status panic--running up huge bills, insulting society ladies, publicly accusing her husband of infidelity, even being investigated for disloyalty by a congressional committee. Lincoln's nobility in the face of this passeth all understanding, despite a canny, understated performance by Hal Holbrook.

A nation needs its mythic heroes, and no nation needs them more than the U.S. at this moment. But Lincoln scholarship has advanced since Sandburg's day. The Lincoln whose ambition was described by a contemporary as "a little motor constantly running," the Lincoln of the migraines and the immobilizing self-doubts, is a man who might speak more vigorously and with deeper appeal to a modern audience.

Perhaps he will begin to emerge in future episodes. One hopes that later programs will spare us the pageantlike pace of George Schaefer's direction and give us some supporting characters who are not just mouthpieces for historical exposition. From them we might learn something of the spirit of a time in which a figure we are expected to regard as a demigod had an uncommon number of enemies. At the very least they should goad the central figure into some emotion less tedious than all-forgiving humility.

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