TELEVISION: Birthday Gift

The title—Meet Mr. Lincoln—was so modest that for TV it was no title at all. And the NBC cameras did little more than browse through history's old photograph albums. Yet the result was one of the year's best documentaries.

In skillful succession, the show mounted more than 500 contemporary photographs, cartoons and drawings. The ever-changing face of Lincoln was there, from the casual pictures of him lounging on the doorstep in front of his Springfield home to the later famous studies by Photographer Matthew Brady. Producer Donald B. Hyatt and Scriptwriter Richard...