Quick, think of everything you know about James A. Garfield. Were you able to dredge up the fact that he was the twentieth president of the United States and one of the four who were assassinated? If so, you know more about him than I did when I started reading Candice Millard's riveting book about his assassination Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (#253). What emerges from the pages of this book is a portrait of an extraordinary man and a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been had he not been untimely struck down by a madman's bullets.
The question this book seeks to answer is: who actualy killed Garfield? Was it Charles Guiteau, the peculiar and delusional man who sought to be appointed Counsel to Paris? Or was it the team of doctors, headed by the iron-fisted Dr. Doctor Bliss who began treating the president within minutes of the shooting, and thus sealed his fate?
The whole story from start to finish is amazing. From Garfield's humble beginnings (like Lincoln, he was born in a log cabin) to his startling rise through his own scholarly efforts and personality to his unexpected occupancy of the White House (which was definitely not a place you would want to live after reading the descriptions in this book!) there is much to admire in his character and principles.
It's hard for us to imagine today the freedom of access everyday citizens had to their president, yet this very openness made it possible for Guiteau to become a familiar figure at the White House and State Department, as he sought the political patronage that was the norm. When he didn't receive it and was quietly banned by Garfield's personal secretary, Guiteau decided God had directed him to "remove" the president.
Yet it wasn't even the two bullets he fired at Garfield in train station that killed Garfield. Many soldiers during the Civil War had survived far worse wounds. If the doctors had only left Garfield alone, he would probably have survived. But this was a period when American doctors who had heard Dr. Lister lecture on his antiseptic measures at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibit only five years earlier not only scorned his proven successes in England and Europe, where his methods were widely adopted, but took pride in the blood and pus on their clothing and persons as signs of their wisdom and experience. How very ironic that the man who wrenched control of Garfield's care from his personal physician and made the president's existence a misery with his constant probing and resistance to any opinion but his own, was named Bliss. Guiteau was executed for his crime; Bliss sent a bill for $65,000 to Congress!
Even though Garfield only spent a few months in office, and his name today is largely forgotten, he still bestowed a lasting legacy upon the country. Garfield's wounding and subsequent death succeeded in uniting North and South, East and West, natives and immigrants as Americans for the first time since the divisive Civil War. For that alone he did not die in vain, but one can not help but wonder what he might have achieved had he lived.
This book made such an impression on me, I hope I someday have a chance to visit Garfield's beloved home Lawnfield, in Mentor, Ohio, to learn more about his accomplishments.
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