"Too Ricketty to venerate."(The Truth about the Lincoln Bedroom)(room in White House Used by Abraham Lincoln)

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For generations, americas reserved their most fervent "landmark reverence" for those rooms that could boast George Washington--not Abraham Lincoln--slept here.

But that was before the so-called Lincoln Bedroom in the White House assumed, just about the time of his 188th birthday this year, the status of national shrine. And oddly, the sudden transfiguration was attributable not to any new discoveries about the chamber itself or its contents, but to revelations that President Clinton had allegedly violated its hallowed ambience by inviting a procession of more or less unsavory guests to camp out there.

Suddenly, Lincoln's nineteenth-century plea for "charity for all" was being mocked as an open sesame for friends of the current President to snuggle beneath a counterpane that now seemed no less sacred than the shroud of Turin. The truth is, whatever rankled press and public about President Clinton's bulging guest list for the Lincoln Bedroom, excluded from the reasons should be the promiscuous invasion of an American hero's most …