Reading the Footnotes

BOOK REVIEWS Reading the Footnotes Thomas March Assassination Vacation Sarah Vowel1 Simon & Schuster http://www.simonsays.com 272 pages; cloth, $21 .00; paper, $14.00 It is still astonishing how easily great public power can become vulnerable to private grudges and delusions. In Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell sets out to uncover as much as she can about the stories surrounding the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. In prose that is piercingly critical yet affable and witty, she lambastes the ignorance and laziness encouraged by received ideas, whether about fallen presidents, their assassins, accused conspirators , or notable bystanders. She recognizes that to do history right, you have to get up offthe couch. While being sure to visit the usual high-profile memorials and museums, she also tracks down conspirators' hangouts, follows their movements, and looks for commemorative plaques on the sites of buildings that no longer exist. This is the virtuoso performance of an obsessive and articulate mind—the best kind. Vowell admires Frederick Douglass for "calling forth Lincoln the man. . ." in a speech delivered after Lincoln's death that addressed Lincoln's shortcomings as well as his achievements. Ordinarily, in our reluctance to criticize the dead, she writes, "all the specifics get washed away, leaving behind some universal nobody," a name on a monument associated with a good idea or a few good words. And lackadaisical preservation, the opposite ofDouglass's honesty, amounts to historical neglect no less than ignorance or willful omission. As it turns out, the folks who closely identify themselves with places or people aren't too eager to amend what they've been raised to believe. I'm afraid I know this phenomenon well. I grew up in Springfield, Illinois, in the very tall shadow of Honest Abe Lincoln. It wasn't until college , several states away, that I learned about the less savory side ofLincoln's racial politics and the notable exceptions in the Emancipation Proclamation. With an admirable appetite for the obscure, Vowell reveals how unexpectedly bizarre a story can become once you start to read the footnotes. How many people know that there were only three degrees of separation between Booth and Lincoln? Lincoln's new ambassador to Spain, John P. Hale, had a daughter who was romantically involved with Booth. Although he was by no means involved, Robert Todd Lincoln was nearby when each of these assassinations took place. Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, once lived in the Oneida Community, a commune devoted to unusual sexual practices. Perhaps more significant, though, is the fact that, as Vowell observes, "he was the one guy in a free love commune who could not get laid." That must have hurt. McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, also suffered from hurt feelings, when he reached out to the anarchists only to be rebuffed as a suspected spy. Is this information supposed to convince us that these men should be pitied rather than scorned? That's not the point at all. Vowell, no assassin-sympathizer, makes it clear (most notably in an aside written to the FBI agents she assumes are reading along) that she hates violence. Are we just supposed to understand these men and thus pity them somehow? This is not a book designed to teach parents how not to raise a political assassin. Not every former member of a sex cult turns into an assassin. Not every anarchist wanted to kill a president. And not every deranged actor is a John Wilkes Booth in the making. If that were true, the Patriot Act would transform Hollywood into a ghost town overnight, and Broadway theaters would go permanently dark. Simply put, to know the whole story, you need to know what's happening on both sides of the gun. Without that attitude, Vowell might never have found that there still exists in Virginia an out-of-the way (suspiciously or respectfully?) memorial to John Wilkes Booth. I want to know things like that. As she travels, Vowell's conversation partners —whether docents, rangers, patient friends, or a refreshingly-macabre nephew— help her to show how the most enlightening conversations can unfold from unexpected improvisations. These are no mere sounding boards functioning...