There's as much crookedness as you want to find. There was something Abraham Lincoln said - he'd rather trust and be disappointed than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.

In Lincoln's day a President's religion was a very private affair. There were no public prayer meetings no attempts to woo the Religious Right. Few of Lincoln's countrymen knew anything at all of his religious beliefs.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully not merely what the evidence is but with psychoanalysts and psychologists and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

Secretary of War Stanton used to get out of patience with Lincoln because he was all the time pardoning men who ought to be shot.

My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the 'Grapes of Wrath ' his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day.

In high school I discovered myself. I was interested in race relations and the legal profession. I read about Lincoln and that he believed the law to be the most difficult of professions.

The more I have studied Lincoln the more I have followed his thought processes the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president.

So I'd be quite happy to have a three-hour Lincoln-Douglas-style debate with Barack Obama. I'd let him use a teleprompter. I'll just rely on knowledge. We'll do fine.

Lincoln's stature and strength his intelligence and ambition - in short all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village.

The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness in a way fosters the imagination. But growing up Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.