important to him. 'All men are created equal under God' is the ultimate. It's the ultimate principle for America's freedom. ... But Lincoln acted on it in a difficult political environment. People forget that he was in a very tough reelection campaign, and it wasn't until Sherman makes it to Atlanta that his prospects brightened. Secondly, Lincoln had a strategic vision for the country. One of the great presidential decisions ever was to keep the country intact. ... The question oftentimes in history is what would have happened if a different decision were made. We'd have been Europe." Of his own presidency, he says, "Obviously, there were some very difficult moments, and there was some doubt as to whether or not decisions I had made were going to become fruitful. But I also realized there's a whole history of what would have happened, what are the consequences had you not made a decision. So, like on Saddam Hussein, maybe it's a historian's perspective ... but no doubt in my mind, if he were in power today, all that's happening in the Middle East now would be much more dangerous." And what might have happened in Libya during the recent uprising, Bush asks, if he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair hadn't convinced Qaddafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction? The same logic applied, he says, during the financial meltdown during his last months in office. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman and a preeminent historian on the causes