Assassination Vacation (2 page)

S
omewhere on the road between museum displays of Lincoln’s skull fragments and the ceramic tiles on which Garfield was gunned down and McKinley’s bloodstained pj’s it occurred to me that there is a name for travel embarked upon with the agenda of venerating relics: pilgrimage. The medieval pilgrimage routes, in which Christians walked from church to church to commune with the innards of saints, are the beginnings of the modern tourism industry. Which is to say that you can draw a more or less straight line from a Dark Ages peasant blistering his feet trudging to a church displaying the Virgin Mary’s dried-up breast milk to me vomiting into a barf bag on a sightseeing boat headed toward the prison-island hell where some Lincoln assassination conspirators were locked up in 1865.

I remembered that my friend Jack Hitt had written a book called
Off the Road
in which he retraced the old pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. So I floated my pilgrimage theory to him in an e-mail and he wrote back that at one point on his Spanish trip, he saw “the flayed ‘skin’ of Jesus — the entire thing, you know, with like eyeholes and stuff, mounted on a wooden frame.” Cool. His e-mail went on to say that in the Middle Ages,

Relics were treasured as something close to the divine. Often when a great monk died and there was a sense that he might be canonized, the corpse was carefully guarded in a tomb — often twenty-four hours a day. Visitors could come to the tomb. Most of the funeral vaults of potential saints had a small door, like you might have in your suburban house for cats. Visitors could poke their heads in the little door and breathe in the holy dust. Most people thought that such dust had curative powers since it was associated with a near-saint whose corporeal matter had been directly blessed by God. So, getting near a relic, touching it, being near it was considered extremely beneficial and treasured.

Curative powers? I wondered how taking the train to Philadelphia to look at a sliver of the Garfield assassin’s brain floating in a jar is supposed to fix me. “There was a late Renaissance king of Spain whom I loved,” Jack went on.

He was so inbred and crazy, incapable of eating food or reproducing that he was called
El Hechizado
— the bewitched. He was probably retarded. After destroying the world’s largest empire (ever, in all history) and bankrupting a nation drowning in New World gold, he came to die. Half the College of Cardinals arrived to recite prayers over his feeble frail body. They split a live dove over his head every morning. And they had brought with them the most powerful curative tool then known to man, the putrefying, stinking rotting corpse of Saint Francis of Assisi, then (and maybe now) the greatest saint ever. It was laid in the bed next to
El Hechizado
and for the rest of his days, the King of Spain shared his bed with the greatest relic ever in the hopes that it would restore his health and grant him the potency to generate an heir. Neither happened and the empire eventually dissolved into warfare with England around 1588 and became a backwater.

I can relate. (Not to being retarded, though it has been my experience that if you go on your historical pilgrimage while wearing your
Jackass: The Movie
ball cap some people look at you like you are.) I crave my relics for the same reason Señor Bewitched bunked with the late saint. We’re religious. I used to share the king’s faith. And while I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something bigger and better than myself. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “I believe in America,” chants the first verse of one of my sacred texts,
The Godfather.
Not that I’m blind to the Psych 101 implications of trading in the martyred Jesus Christ (crucified on Good Friday) for the martyred Abraham Lincoln (shot on Good Friday).

One thing the Spanish king’s Catholicism and my rickety patriotism have in common, besides the high body count, is that both faiths can get a little ethereal and abstract. Jesus and Lincoln, Moses and Jefferson can seem so long gone, so unbelievable, so dead. It’s reassuring to be able to go look at something real, something you can put your hands on (though you might want to wash them afterward). “What’s that smell?” wondered the bewitched king. Actual Saint Francis, staining the sheets. Did a fellow as shrewd and sad and poetic and miraculously the right man for the right job at the exact right moment as Abraham Lincoln truly walk the earth until gunned down? Well, come along on one of these We Cannot Escape History weekend escape packages and we’ll genuflect before the bone from inside his head
and
the hats he wore on top of his head. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War — when I really think about them they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea. But somehow, jumping up a foot to stare at my own face framed in Lincoln’s Springfield shaving mirror makes the whole far-fetched, grisly, inspiring story of the country seem more shocking and more true. Especially since when I jumped up to the mirror, I set off a super-loud alarm.

Jack’s e-mail about the relics ended with an aside about how he had just been shopping on eBay and stumbled onto “a guy selling tiny specks of ‘George Washington’s hair.’ Literally, these clippings were nothing more than single strands of hair less than a quarter of an inch long. They came in little ampoules and with documentation.”

I looked away from my computer and over at a frame on my wall and wrote Jack back that my twin sister Amy had given me a teensy eyelash-size hair of John Brown as a Christmas present. She settled on the more affordable tresses of the abolitionist guerrilla warrior Brown because Lincoln’s hair was out of her price range. That is the kind of person I have become, the kind of person who rips open a package in snowman wrapping paper to discover that her only sibling has bought her an executed slavery hater’s hair. (I got her a DVD player.)

As I learned that morning at the bed-and-breakfast while I was going on and on about the singing Squeaky Fromme, most people don’t like to talk about violent historical death over muffins. I would come to find out that’s also true about lunch and dinner too. When my friend Bennett and I were trying to decide where to have brunch he suggested a dim sum place in Chinatown. He asked me if I had ever tried bubble tea. I said yes, that I think a better name for the tea afloat with tapioca globules is tea ’n’ dumplings and that I had it at the Chinese restaurant in D.C. that used to be the boardinghouse where Booth and his co-conspirators met to plan the Lincoln assassination.

Bennett asked, “You know that Kevin Bacon game?”

“The one where he can be connected to every other movie star?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Assassinations are your Kevin Bacon. No matter what we’re talking about, you will always bring the conversation back to a president getting shot.”

He was right. An artist pal, marveling at the youth of a painter in the Whitney Biennial was subjected to the trivia, “Well, John Wilkes Booth was only twenty-six when he killed Lincoln.” A gardener friend, bragging about his lilacs, was forced to endure a recitation of Walt Whitman’s Lincoln death poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

As Johnny Cash put it about how his Garfield assassination ballad went over at Carnegie Hall in 1962, “I did ‘Mr. Garfield,’ which isn’t very funny if you’re not on the right wavelength, and nobody was.” Once I knew my dead presidents and I had become insufferable, I started to censor myself. There were a lot of get-togethers with friends where I didn’t hear half of what was being said because I was sitting there, silently chiding myself, Don’t bring up McKinley. Don’t bring up McKinley.

The bright side to researching the first three presidential assassinations is that my interest is optional, a choice. One man who makes cameo appearances in all three stories was not so lucky. Abraham Lincoln’s oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was in close proximity to all three murders like some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom. The young man who wept at his father’s deathbed in 1865 was only a few feet away when James A. Garfield was shot in a train station in 1881. In 1901, Robert arrived in Buffalo mere moments after William McKinley fell. Robert Todd Lincoln’s status as a presidential death magnet weighed on him. Late in life, when he was asked to attend some White House function, he grumbled, “If only they knew, they wouldn’t want me there.”

On July 2, 2003, the 122nd anniversary of the Garfield assassination, my friend Nicole and I rented a car and drove up to Vermont to visit Hildene, Robert Todd Lincoln’s estate in Manchester. His mansion is a museum with landscaped grounds where, in the winter, there is cross-country skiing. I find it hard to stop myself from being unfair to Robert. Shown around the house, climbing the graceful staircase a guide proudly points out Robert himself designed, it’s impossible not to compare him with his father: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Robert Lincoln bought a nice ski lodge.

The person I’m really treating unfairly is Nicole, for talking her into the eight-hour round-trip drive to Hildene. I guess learning trivia about when the colossal William Howard Taft came to visit he slept on the floor because he was afraid of breaking the bed in Robert Lincoln’s guest room isn’t enough for Nicole, because at the end of the day, she pronounces the trip “kind of a bust.” Ever polite, she hastens to add, “You brought really good snacks, though.”

When we return the rental car on Thirty-fourth Street, the block is crawling with people filing into a concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The Foo Fighters are on the marquee. I walk Nicole to the subway, hoping she doesn’t notice who’s playing, because then she might remember tagging along as my plus-one to a Foo Fighters show seven years earlier, when I was still making a living as a rock critic, which I fear might remind her what I was like before I went off the historical tourism deep end, when tagging along with me to work used to be fun.

President Warren G. Harding, beware: the elderly Robert Lincoln was the guest of honor at the dedication ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. (Harding, also in attendance, returned to the White House unscathed.) Robert died in 1926, but for the rest of his life, he made it a point to visit the memorial often, gazing into his father’s marble eyes, saying, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

A pilgrimage needs a destination. For medieval Christians, that was usually the cathedral of Saint James in northern Spain. This tour of the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley ends up at the Lincoln Memorial because that’s where I’m always ending up. It is the closest thing I have to a church.

On the National Mall in Washington, next to the Reflecting Pool, that shallow, rectangular pond in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the National Park Service has posted a sign. It features a picture of the protesters in the March on Washington listening to Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I have a dream” speech from the memorial’s steps. The sign says, “The Pool reflects more than the sky and landscape. It mirrors the moods of America, from national celebrations to dramatic demonstrations.” This reminds me of a photograph of the memorial’s Lincoln sculpture that my tour guide held up at Chesterwood, Daniel Chester French’s studio in the Berkshires.

French obsessed for years about how to sculpt Lincoln’s peculiar face, fretting and reading and thinking before committing to the brooding, seated philosopher in the memorial. He received the commission in 1913. So by the time the memorial was finally dedicated nine years later, the sculptor was a little pent up worrying how his work would come off. Hoping to celebrate, French looked upon the final installation with horror. The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects. When the light off the Reflecting Pool bounced up onto Lincoln’s face, it looked as if a flashlight had been held up under his chin. The Chesterwood guide described the photo as a “Halloween picture.” Lincoln looks frightened, startled, confused — Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
by way of Macaulay Culkin’s
Home Alone.
Apparently, “hilarious” wasn’t the aesthetic French had been going for.

Along with architect Henry Bacon, French tinkered with various solutions, concluding that only electric lighting placed above Lincoln’s head could correct the travesty. For years, he pestered the government to pay to fix it. I’m happy for French that he lived long enough to see the ceiling lights installed so that his Lincoln is as dignified and pensive as he intended; otherwise the man might have died of embarrassment.

But I like that picture of the panicky Abraham Lincoln. Lately, I think I might prefer it. Given what that sign says about the Reflecting Pool mirroring American moods, and given that the current mood is on the edgy side what with all the new coffins being buried every day in the Arlington National Cemetery behind the statue’s back, a freaked-out Lincoln gaping at the current government might look a little more true.

Then again, in the 1860s, at least half the country loathed Abraham Lincoln for filling up too many soldiers’ coffins. Which is why Daniel Chester French isn’t the only reason that marble likeness sits there on the Mall. John Wilkes Booth deserves some of the credit — a notion that would make the assassin want to throw up. After all, if no one had hated Lincoln, there would be no Lincoln Memorial to love.

The bullet that killed Lincoln (based on an undated allegorical lithograph in the collection of the Library of Congress, in which John Wilkes Booth is entombed inside his own ammo). The actual bullet that killed Lincoln is considerably more smushed and on display in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., next to bone fragments from the president’s skull.

Chapter One

G
oing to Ford’s Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food. So I had intended to spend the first act of 1776, a musical about the Declaration of Independence, ignoring the stage and staring at Abraham Lincoln’s box from my balcony seat. Then I was going to leave at intermission. Who wants to hear the founding fathers break into song? Me, it turns out. Between eloquent debates about the rights of man, these wiseacres in wigs traded surprisingly entertaining trash talk in which a deified future president like Thomas Jefferson is deplored as a “red-headed tombstone.” George Washington’s amusingly miserable letters from the front — New Jersey is full of whores giving his soldiers “the French disease” — are read aloud among the signers with eye-rolling contempt, followed by comments such as “That man would depress a hyena.” Plus, Benjamin Franklin was played by the actor who played the Big Lebowski in
The Big Lebowski.
I was so sucked into 1776 that whole production numbers like “But, Mr. Adams” could go by and I wouldn’t glance Lincolnward once, wrapped up in noticing that that second president could really sing.

Deciding to stay for act II, I spend intermission in the Lincoln Museum administered by the National Park Service in the theater’s basement. There are the forlorn blood spots on the pillow thought to have cradled the dying Lincoln’s head; the Lincoln mannequin wearing the clothes he was shot in; the key to the cell of conspirator Mary Surratt; the gloves worn by Major Henry Rathbone, who accompanied the Lincolns to the theater and was stabbed by Booth in the president’s box; Booth’s small, pretty derringer; and, because it’s some kind of law for Lincoln-related sites to have them, sculptor Leonard Volk’s cast of Lincoln’s hands.

Intermission over, I found myself looking forward to the rest of the play, happily bounding back up to my seat. But I paused on the balcony stairs for a second, thinking about how these were the very stairs that Booth climbed to shoot at Lincoln and how sick is this? Then I remembered, oh no they’re not. The interior of the Ford’s Theatre in which Lincoln was shot collapsed in 1893, but then, in 1968, the National Park Service dedicated this restoration, duplicating the setting of one of the most repugnant moments in American history just so morbid looky-loos like me could sign up for April 14, 1865, as if it were some kind of assassination fantasy camp. So how sick is that?

Act II of 1776 isn’t as funny as act I, and not just because Ben Franklin gets to crack fewer sex jokes. It’s time for the slavery question. Jefferson and Adams want a document about liberty and equality to include a tangent denouncing kidnapping human beings and cramming them into floating jails only to be auctioned off and treated as animals. This is followed by the expected yelling of southerners who refuse to sign such hogwash, pointing out that slavery is in the Bible, their way of life, blah, blah. What’s unexpected is the song. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (his brother would go on to sign the Constitution) sings a strange but effective
j’accuse
called “Molasses to Rum,” in which he implicates New England ships and merchants in the slave trade triangle, asking John Adams: Boston or Charleston, “Who stinketh most?”

This script as performed by these actors really does give the audience a feel for the anguish, embarrassment, and disappointment Adams and Jefferson went through yielding to the southerners’ edit. “Posterity will never forgive us,” Adams sighs, caving in.

Even though the scene couldn’t be more gripping, my head snaps up away from the action to stare at Lincoln’s box. The thing that makes seeing this play in Ford’s Theatre more meaningful than anywhere else is that I can look from the stage to Lincoln’s box and back again, and I can see exactly where this compromise in 1776 is pointing: into the back of Lincoln’s head in 1865.

“This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth reportedly wrote on the day he pulled the trigger. (I say reportedly because the letter, to the editors of a Washington newspaper, was destroyed in 1865 but later “reconstructed” and reprinted in 1881.) Booth (again, reportedly, but it sounds like him) continued, “And, looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint as the noble framers of our constitution, I, for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings, both for themselves and us, that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” So this is whom we’re dealing with — not the raving madman of assassination lore, but a calculating, philosophical racist. Then again, anyone who has convinced himself that slavery is a “blessing” for the slaves is a little cracked.

After the play I take a walk to the Lincoln Memorial. It’s late. Downtown D.C. is vacant this time of night. Like that of the Lincoln administration, this is a time of war. Back then, Union soldiers camped out on the Mall. Nowadays, ever since the attack on the Pentagon in 2001, the capital has been clamped down. How is this manifested? Giant planters blocking government buildings, giant planters barricading every other street. Theoretically, the concrete flowerpots are solid enough to fend off a truck bomb. And yet the effect is ridiculous, as if we believe we can protect ourselves from suicide bombers by hiding behind blooming pots of marigolds, flowers whose main defensive property is repelling rabbits.

I walk down the darkened Mall past the white protruding phallus that is the Washington Monument. It looks goofy enough in the light of day but ugliest at night, when the red lights at its tippy top blink so as to keep airplanes from crashing into it, a good idea I know, but still, those beady blinking eyes make it come across as fake and sad, the way robots used to look in old movies before George Lucas came along.

I’m alone out here. Even though the Mall is a pretty safe place, I’ve read way too many pulpy coroner novels with first sentences such as “I spent a long afternoon at the morgue,” so I’m feeling a little mugable. Nervously, I shove my hands in my pockets. In the forensics novels the contents of a victim’s pockets on the night of her death Say Something about her character. My Ford’s Theatre ticket stub and Jimmy Carter key chain say that I am the corniest, goody-goody person in town. Luckily, I survived the evening unscathed so no one will ever find out about that losery Jimmy Carter key chain.

The Library of Congress has a whole display case of items in Lincoln’s pockets when he died. His pocketknife, two pairs of spectacles, and a Confederate five-dollar bill are spread out on red velvet. They would probably display the lint too if someone had had the foresight to keep it. The items take on a strange significance. Those are the glasses he must have worn to read his beloved Shakespeare. He could have used the pocketknife to carve the apple he liked to eat for lunch.

The contents of John Wilkes Booth’s pockets also get the glass case treatment. At Ford’s Theatre, I looked at the five photographs of women in the womanizing Booth’s pockets when he died, and I couldn’t help but believe that I picked up new insight into his character, that he wasn’t just a presidential killer, he was a lady-killer too. Four of the women were actresses he knew. The fifth picture captures Booth’s secret fiancée, Lucy Hale, in profile. Lucy was spotted with Booth the morning of the assassination, probably around the same time her ex-senator father John P. Hale, Lincoln’s newly appointed ambassador to Spain, was meeting with the president in the White House. Hale, a New Hampshire Republican, was the first abolitionist ever elected to the U.S. Senate. One reason he was so keen on absconding to Europe on a diplomatic appointment was to put an ocean between his pretty daughter and Booth, whom the senator knew to be a pro-slavery southern sympathizer and, worse, an actor. In fact, Hale would have preferred to marry Lucy off to another young man he had noticed admiring her — the president’s twenty-one-year-old son, Robert Todd Lincoln.

The Lincoln Memorial is at its loveliest when the sun goes down. It glows. It’s quiet. There are fewer people and the people who are here at this late hour are reverent and subdued, but happy. The lights bounce off the marble and onto their faces so that they glow too, their cheeks burned orange as if they’ve had a sip of that good bourbon with the pretty label brewed near the Kentucky creek where Lincoln was born.

I read the two Lincoln speeches that are chiseled in the wall in chronological order, Gettysburg first. Shuffling past the Lincoln statue, I pause under the white marble feet, swaying back and forth a little so it looks like his knees move. A moment of whimsy actually opens me up for the Second Inaugural, a speech that is all the things they say — prophetic, biblical, merciful, tough. The most famous phrase is the most presidential: with malice toward none. I revere those words. Reading them is a heartbreaker considering that a few weeks after Lincoln said them at the Capitol he was killed. But in my two favorite parts of the speech, Lincoln is sarcastic. He’s a writer. And in his sarcasm and his writing, he is who he was. He starts off the speech reminding his audience of the circumstances of his First Inaugural at the eve of war. It’s a (for him) long list, remarkably even-handed and restrained, pointing out that both the North and the South were praying to the same god, as if they were just a couple of football teams squaring off in the Super Bowl. Then things turn mischievous: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.” Know what that is? A zinger — a subtle, high-minded, morally superior zinger. I glance back at the Lincoln statue to see if his eyes have rolled. Then, at the end of this sneaky list of the way things were, he simply says, “And the war came.” Kills me every time. Four little words to signify four long years. To call this an understatement is an understatement. To read this speech is to see how Lincoln’s mind worked, to see how he governed, how he lived. There’s the narrative buildup, the explanation, the lists of pros and cons; he came late to abolitionism, sought compromise, hoped to save the Union without war, etc., until all of a sudden the jig is up. The man who came up with that teensy but vast sentence,
And the war came,
a four-word sentence that summarizes how a couple of centuries of tiptoeing around evil finally stomped into war, a war he says is going to go on “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” is the same chief executive who in 1863 signed the Emancipation Proclamation. I’ve seen that paper. It’s a couple of pages long. But after watching the slavery agony in 1776, I like to think of it as a postcard to Jefferson and Adams, another four-word sentence:
Wish you were here.

When I used to get to the end of the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln calls on himself and his countrymen “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace,” I always wondered how anyone who heard those words could kill the person who wrote them. Because that day at the Capitol, Booth was there, attending the celebration as Lucy Hale’s plus-one. In the famous Alexander Gardner photograph of Lincoln delivering the speech, you can spot Booth right above him, lurking. And what was Booth’s reaction to hearing Lincoln’s hopes for “binding up the nation’s wounds”? Booth allegedly told a friend, “What an excellent chance I had to kill the president, if I had wished, on Inauguration Day!”

I used to march down the memorial’s steps mourning the loss of the second term Lincoln would never serve. But I don’t think that way anymore. Ever since I had to build those extra shelves in my apartment to accommodate all the books about presidential death — I like to call that corner of the hallway “the assassination nook” — I’m amazed Lincoln got to live as long as he did. In fact, I’m walking back to my room in the Willard Hotel, the same hotel where Lincoln had to sneak in through the ladies’ entrance before his first inauguration because the Pinkerton detectives uncovered a plot to do him in in Baltimore before he even got off the train from Springfield. All through his presidency, according to his secretary John Hay, Lincoln kept a desk drawer full of death threats. Once, on horseback between the White House and his summer cottage on the outskirts of town, a bullet whizzed right by his head. So tonight, I leave the memorial knowing that the fact that Lincoln got to serve his whole first term is a kind of miracle.

M
ary Surratt’s D.C. boardinghouse, where John Wilkes Booth gathered his co-conspirators to plot Lincoln’s death, is now a Chinese restaurant called Wok & Roll. I place an order for broccoli and bubble tea, then squint at an historic marker in front of the restaurant quoting Andrew Johnson that this was “the nest in which the egg was hatched.” For her southern hospitality, Mrs. Surratt, who owned this boardinghouse as well as the tavern in Maryland where Booth would proceed after shooting Lincoln, would become the first woman executed by the U.S. government. She was hanged, along with George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Lewis Powell, in 1865. Here in her former boardinghouse sat Booth, Atzerodt, Herold, and Powell, along with Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin, and Mary’s weasel son John, who would hightail it to Europe after the assassination, leaving his mom to get strung up in his stead.