Reading, for decades, has been a pleasure confined only to time on an airplane, which has limited the types of books I have been able to read over that time to those which can be set down for a month without losing their essential story line.
And so, with more time on the weekends to unwind these days, I have been enjoying getting into a book here and there -- although, as is my wont, almost every one is about baseball, a topic which has attracted some immensely good writers and historians over time, and continues to do so -- Roger Angell, Leigh Montville, for example, and even an occasional find from a late author which I had not seen while they were alive.
In a recent email exchange with an M.I.T. classmate, we were very briefly discussing the U.S. President James Garfield, whose tenure was only a few months before being shot by an insane office-seeker and being doctored to death over the subsequent two months. He referred me to a book on the matter -- "Destiny of the Republic", by Candice Millard. Apparently unwilling to let it go at that, and possessed of uncommon generosity, he sent me a copy as a surprise.
One beauty of really good, well-researched historical books is that they provide the colorful details to events that may have occupied a paragraph's worth of our U.S. History II text in high school. They continue to surprise us by reminding us that there is always more color than we originally were presented.
Among other topics, "Destiny of the Republic" is about the disaster that was late-19th Century medicine (had the physicians simply let Garfield alone and gone home, he would most assuredly have survived, as the bullet managed to evade any vital part of the President's body). Alexander Graham Bell, in fact, has a starring appearance in the book, furiously working on a device to help locate the bullet for the lead doctor, who was, however, only interested in confirming his erroneous assumption about its path and limited the scope of the use of Bell's devices.
Another cameo is that of Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln. He took it upon himself to summon a doctor he knew to assist in Garfield's care, who would then take over aggressively and who ultimately had as much or more responsibility for the death of Garfield than the perpetrator.
I recalled from decades back reading that the assassin, Charles Julius Guiteau, had at some point after the shooting declared "I am a Stalwart, and [Chester] Arthur is President"; however, I could not have told you what a "Stalwart" was nor a "Half-Breed" (their opposition in the Republican Party of the time). Miss Millard does a remarkable job of presenting the role this internecine war played both in the country and in the mind of the assassin, such as it was functioning.
Most particularly, the presentation of the President himself as an amazing individual and leader is truly stimulating -- his rise from poverty to being a professor and then a brilliant general in the War Between the States, to serving in Congress and becoming a terribly reluctant candidate for the presidency, gaveled to his seat when he protested his name being offered in nomination.
You do finish this book with a sense of what might have been had he lived and served his term. There is a great difference in the mindset of non-fiction and historical fiction writers, no doubt, but I would be lined up outside a bookstore were Miss Millard even to collaborate with someone on the hypothetical of the subsequent few decades of the USA had there been a two-term Garfield administration. Recovering as it was from Reconstruction, the South was still appreciative of the man that Garfield was, and we can speculate on the way the integration of American society might have progressed under the leadership of a man of such warmth and intelligence.
Try the book; it's a wonderful read.
Postscript: And so you may be wondering how two college classmates (who, by the way, hardly know each other) would have an email exchange about James Garfield, a topic which does not raise itself in daily conversation. My classmate adds a brief and pithy quote of his to his email signatures, and on seeing that once, I relayed to him an interesting conversation with my late father.
When Dad was 94 in 2010, I came to visit him at his home near Ft. Monmouth, his last post for the Army where he had remained after retirement. We drove through the town of Elberon, and I noted its distinction in that Garfield had been brought there in his last few days to try to recover. I also mentioned, in passing, a quote of his -- that after being heckled during an 1863 speech while the war was still going on, then-Gen. Garfield had said on the podium "I have just come from fighting brave rebels at Chickamauga -- I will not flinch before cowardly ones" -- and finished his speech.
Dad replied "Wow, Chickamauga -- my house painter fought there." Yes, as it turned out, when Dad was a child, the elderly fellow who painted the family house had told him stories of his fighting in that battle in 1863, although on which side Dad couldn't recall. There we were in 2010, discussing second-hand tales of the War Between the States. You can't make that up.
Copyright 2017, 2014 by Robert Sutton