By contemporary I meant drafts made at the time of the speech or soon after. Maybe not the best word. Anyway, Lincoln answered various requests for copies of the speech, and those included it, while the drafts made before the speech don't. Check out the link I posted for more details.
Anyway, my point in mentioning it is not to defend Obama, but to point out that there could be another explanation. Before people get to worked up it makes sense to find out which version Obama was given. If it turned out Burns used one of the other versions making a big deal accusing Obama would just make conservatives look foolish.
As usual one learns a lot reading FR. I didn’t know there was so many different (saved) versions of the Gettysburg Address. (Very seldom the drafts of historical speeches are retained.)
However, it looks like this is a made up controversy. PBS states that they asked president Obama to read the first version (the Nicolay version). I haven’t listened through all the other renditions but it appears that the other three presidents who were asked to read the address all used one of the latter versions, containing “a nation under God”.
Why this is so, whether it really was PBS who gave Obama that version, or if it was the WH who decided which version to use can always be open to discussion.
Respectfully disagree on your last point.
Obama claims and is portrayed as a huge Lincoln Afficionado. Should he have not known there were different versions? And possibly that the biggest difference between them is the presence of “under God”?
So either Obama isn’t as big of a Lincoln scholar as he claims to be (and got manipulated. By Ken Burns) or he knowingly agreed to read the Hay copy without “under God”.
You know what? It really doesn’t matter why he did it.
What matters is that he DID IT! He recited a commonly known and reverently regarded historical speech, and didn’t recite it as it is known. He edited it. He changed an important phrase of the speech, omitting words that matter to nearly all Americans. He committed political sacrilege.
Doesn’t matter why, how, etc. All that matters is that he did this. Purposely.
It is a spit in the face of all decent Americans, living and dead, and our shared history. And it was meant that way. Be assured: it was meant that way.
He is a national disgrace. It will take years to recover from this one-man blight on our country.