Assassination Vacation

Kevin Coolidge

The ballot is stronger than the bullet—Abraham Lincoln


Ahem, please allow me to state for the record, and for the Homeland Security agent assigned to read my column this week (can you double check my spelling and punctuation?) that though I am often obsessed with death, I am quite against it, especially my own. Like Lincoln, I want to believe that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Of course, he did say that before that fatal night on April 14th, 1865. It takes an inflated ego to be a president, or a presidential assassin for that matter. Can any one man really make a difference? Can one man fix our poverty, our potholes and our public schools? Should one narcissistic man with a handgun decide any different? Just who do you think they are?

One woman passionate about death, US history and road trips dares to ask such questions. Meet Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation, published by Simon & Schuster. In this wacky travelogue, Sarah drags readers on a pilgrimage exploring the places associated with three presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

Along the way, we get to visit such places as old cemeteries, plaques, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where fragments of Lincoln's skull are on display, and more obscure places such as the Mutter Museum which has specimens of John Wilkes Booth's thorax and Charles Guiteau's (Garfield's assassin) brain--relics of a past age, treasured, close to divine, and crucial in the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of the macabre.

What can we learn from an examination of these three president assassinations? The more things change, the more they remain the same. Lincoln was a controversial politician blamed for the hardships of war and was hated by many. Booth thought he’d be a hero. Instead, he created a martyr.

Vowell draws interesting parallels between McKinley’s preemptive war against Cuba and the Philippines and the current war in Iraq (I guess God to McKinley to “annex” the Philippines), and to gain better understanding of Charles Guiteau, she takes us to the Oneida Community in upstate New York, a religious commune that preached a combination of free love and the second coming, He was the one guy in a free love commune who could not get lucky. No wonder he was regarded as insane by his own father. His father lacked the funds to seek proper treatment from mental health professionals. It could have allowed Garfield more time to devote to rearranging his library and enjoying German poetry. He loved Faust.

Don’t forget the “presidential angel of death”, Robert Todd Lincoln who was present when his father died, witnessed the shooting of President Garfield, and upon arriving in Buffalo in 1901, learned that President William McKinley had been assassinated minutes before his arrival. Robert Todd Lincoln also was ironically yanked to safety by Edwin Booth, John Wilkes’ brother, when he fell off a train platform onto railroad tracks.
Assassination Vacation is the most entertaining book on presidential assassination I’ve read, an engaging ramble through the first three presidential murders. Vowell mixes history, personal experience and social commentary that brings new life to dry, dusty back roads of American history. Now on with the road trip, I call shotgun…

The ballot? Or the bullet? Email me at frommyshelf@epix.net Miss a past column? Exercise your right to read. Visit the archive at frommyshelf.blogspot.com. Hobo wishes malice towards none, not even that plotting squirrel on the back porch. Be sure to read his children’s book “Hobo Finds A Home” Having a food dish didn’t make Hobo a diner, until he ate what was in that bowl…