We look at the past to find ourselves. One of my favorite parts of reading about presidential history is finding the parallels between America then and now; it gives a comforting sense of continuity between the present day and the past. (Admittedly, that continuity is sometimes more depressing than comforting.) In his new book The President and the Assassin, Scott Miller does fine work in writing a historical book that feels contemporary. He paints McKinley as the first modern American president, a handsome politician who wouldn’t have bested anti-corporatist candidate William Jennings Bryan if the major corporate interests hadn’t coalesced their massive funds and considerable aptitude for bullying behind him. I mean bullying quite literally here: Workers received notes in their paychecks saying that if Bryan became president, they would all be laid off on the day after election day. McKinley was steadfastly in the pockets of big business, and his influence on the presidency is still felt today.
If you’ve read Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, you’ve already gotten a brief, humorous look at Leon Czolgosz, the antisocial geek who shot McKinley. Miller’s take is so un-flippant that it feels almost like a completely different story. (Vowell made a lot of hay over Czolgosz’s inability to get laid in a free love commune, while Miller paints him as more of a template for the sad, broken young men who go on shooting sprees in colleges and high schools today.) The actual assassination is at the very beginning of the book; for most of Assassin, Miller tracks the two men on their collision course.
This is a good summer vacation book; while it’s not light and cheery, Miller puts you directly in between the two men, bouncing from a man cresting the absolute peak of American civilization to the scummy life of a mentally unbalanced drifter living among the dregs of the nation. It’s a tragic story—a thriller with an unhappy ending—with real-world ramifications that we’re still confronting today. I read it in a single sitting, amazed at how Miller was able to make the story of one of our most under-examined presidents into the core of a page-turner.
I am sure that I will love this book. Thank you Paul for bringing it to our attention.
Miller lost me at the reading when we described the Philippine–American War as a conflict with “atrocities committed on both sides.” If ever there was a dog whistle for trying to excuse American Imperialism, that line is it.
In point of fact, it was Charles Guiteau, the assassin of James A. Garfield, who couldn’t get laid in a free-love commune.
I certainly don’t mean to celebrate the assassination of an American president, but the ending of the story is not completely unhappy, for the epilogue is Teddy Roosevelt assuming the presidency.
@3 is correct about Guiteau. Also, I just read Assassination Vacation and Vowell definitely paints a sad portrait for Czolgosz as a lonely guy who gets snubbed by anarchists.
I went right to my library account to put this on hold, to find they only had the audio version. WTF?
Wondering how to bring up Czolgosz in conversation without embarrassment? his name sounds like “choll-gosh”. And then there is McKinley’s wife, Ida Saxon, who suffered from epilepsy. If say, during a state dinner at the White House, Ida began to experience an attack, the ever-gallant president would drape a large napkin over her head and proceed as if all was well. Or so I’m told.