Assassination Vacation (9 page)

He gushes, “There are so many superlatives out here. I’ve worked in six coastal forts. I’ve been doing this for about twenty years, and this is arguably the finest coastal fort in the country. And heck, think of all the shipwrecks. We have nearly three hundred shipwrecks in our waters. We have the sooty tern, the birds whose migration is a world treat. People come from around the world to see our spring migration. The turtles, the sharks — some of the most important shark research that’s ever been done in the world has been done right out here less than a mile from where we’re standing. And this lighthouse,” he says, pointing up. “You don’t want to forget about lighthouses. This one was built in 1876.”

He asks if I’m afraid of heights and would I like to climb the lighthouse. I sigh, telling him that yes of course I’m afraid of heights, not mentioning that of all my phobia (water, driving, snakes, roller coasters,
Children of the Corn
) and allergies (peanuts, wheat, pet dander, springtime) I’m almost proud of my fear of heights because it seems comparatively ho-hum, sane.

To buck myself up for the lighthouse I picture Edward R. Murrow during the Blitz, taking the stairs to that London rooftop. If he can deliver an elegant radio report as the Luftwaffe tried to bomb Big Ben, I shouldn’t be such a baby about getting forty feet closer to the occasional migrating bird.

As we ascend the stairs Mike says, “You can hear the wind blowing.” Yes, I can. It is the sound of fear.

As Mike unlocks the door he says, “The view’s spectacular up here. It’s a thousand times better than where we just were. Hold on to your hat, hopefully you won’t be blown away.”

Well, I am blown away. The view is majestic. Looking out to sea Mike is giddy, cheerfully pointing out which tiny island is Long Key, which one is Bush Key, gesturing toward some whitecaps where Hospital Key used to be, narrating a live-action documentary on the miracle of migration that begins, “The neat thing about a sooty tern…”

Then, turning around to look into the interior of the fort, he says, “The only way to really get a perspective on the size and scale of the fort is to come up here. The inside, well, it competes with Yankee Stadium. You could almost say the Roman Colosseum. You could easily fit a dozen football fields with plenty of room. It’s just a really big place. And remember it’s also a very expensive place, the single most expensive coastal defense fort ever built, and that’s part of the reason why. The cost of shipping these bricks out here was sometimes as much as the cost of the bricks themselves. And several ships didn’t quite make it. There are wrecks — wrecks upon wrecks — within sight of here. The rationale here is, this would have been a really small city on the sea, kind of like having a really big wall around the middle of the ocean. And remember, you’re not only supporting your own remote, very isolated garrison, but you’re providing materials — food, gunpowder, even water itself — to the warships that came here. It helps to explain why the engineers considered this one of the most strategic sites in North America. Yes, we’re out in the middle of the ocean, yet we’re adjacent to the shipping lanes. Roughly speaking, this was the crossroads to the Gulf of Mexico.”

He concedes that because of the fort’s expense, it was very controversial. He’s not saying whether building it was right or wrong.

Then, alluding to current national defense controversies, he says, “Today our brave young men are in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the same ongoing effort — protecting our freedom, protecting our peace and prosperity, and our way of life. It comes at a huge price.”

A current-events lightbulb goes off in my head, one I’d prefer to switch back off. Remembering that little drainage ditch Mudd and Arnold dug into the concrete floor, I turn, looking south. Near here, on the far side of Cuba, more than six hundred prisoners of the War on Terror, a few of them child soldiers under the age of seventeen, are, by executive order, incarcerated at the U.S. base on Guantánamo Bay for who knows how long for who knows what reasons in what Human Rights Watch has called a “legal black hole.” Suicide attempts are epidemic. There are rumors of mistreatment — of constant interrogations, sleep deprivation, of inmates chained up in tiny cells. Some of them, maybe even most of them, are, as government spokesmen keep saying, bad people. And that’s more or less how I think of Dr. Mudd — a bad man who did bad things (but happened to be a good doctor). I haven’t decided if he deserved to eat bread made out of sticks or live in a rancid puddle, probably because I haven’t made up my mind whether anyone deserves such treatment, though I suspect that the day a person gives up on the Geneva Convention is the day a person gives up on the human race. So after I get home from the Dry Tortugas — the nicest thing I can say about the boat ride back to Key West is that I only threw up once — I will click on the Guantánamo link at the Amnesty International Web site and see the headline “Human Rights Scandal” and I will think of Dr. Mudd at Fort Jefferson, digging at the swamp that was his floor.

A
fter leaving Dr. Mudd’s house, John Wilkes Booth and David Herold pushed south toward Virginia, hiding out in the woods where a Confederate agent named Thomas Jones plied them with food and newspapers. Booth’s diary, recovered from his pocket after he died and currently on display in the museum at Ford’s Theatre, records the dismay with which the famous actor reacted to his latest reviews. Booth is shocked that what he thought would be regarded as a courageous act of southern patriotism against a despot is covered in the press as the treasonous crime of an evil lunatic. How ungrateful! On April 21, a week after shooting Lincoln, Booth wrote the following in his journal, comparing himself to Brutus, Caesar’s assassin immortalized by Shakespeare in the play Booth had performed with his brothers, and William Tell, the Swiss hero who warranted the famous overture for slaying an Austrian bully.

After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every mans hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat…. I struck for my country and that alone. A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for this end. Yet now behold the cold hand they extend to me.

Not that I have much sympathy for Booth’s groaning, but I think I understand where his befuddlement comes from. Where could Booth have gotten the fantastical idea that committing political murder would be greeted as an act of heroism? Not from the South. I’m pretty sure he got that cockamamie notion from the North. A little poking around in the Booth biography uncovers his earlier rendezvous with history — the 1859 execution of John Brown.

Booth was there in Charles Town, Virginia, witnessing Brown hang. He had been acting in a play in Richmond when he heard that a local militia, the Richmond Grays, was heading north to guard the execution. Like some teenage heavy metal fan worming his way backstage at a Metallica concert, Booth the John Brown fan charmed himself into the Grays’ company, bought a uniform, all so he could see his hero breathe his last.

Booth’s admiration of Brown was not ideological. Of course, the racist, pro-slavery, future assassin despised the actual cause Brown was fighting for by attacking the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry — namely, to spark a slave rebellion that would put an end to slavery. But Booth adored Brown’s fight-picking, gun-toting methods. According to Booth’s sister, Asia, he said, “John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!” Booth’s assessment was shared, based on the sermons preached in Brown’s honor after he died, the church bells that rang in his memory across the North, the tributes written for him by the likes of the revered three-named Yankee poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Julia Ward Howe (who said Brown’s martyrdom “would make the gallows glorious like the cross”), the fact that Union soldiers turned the marching song “John Brown’s Body” into one of the top-ten hits of the Civil War. So Booth isn’t entirely misguided in thinking he’d inspire a song or poem or two himself.

I visited Charles Town with my aunt Fran and uncle Quenton. We found the site where Brown was hanged and Booth stood watch. A fine brick house was built there after the Civil War. The current owner, milling around, invited us into his yard, showed off his stained-glass windows. “They’re original Tiffany,” he says.

“Imagine that,” Aunt Fran whispers. “Tiffany windows looking out on the place where John Brown was hanged.”

The owner pointed at a tree on his lawn. “That’s where the gallows were.” A bird feeder is suspended on a limb of the tree, swaying back and forth where Brown’s neck swung. (It reminds me of North Elba, New York, where Brown is buried. Looming over Brown’s humble little farm is the mondo ski jump from the Lake Placid Olympics. A person going there to ponder the dour Brown can end up thinking a lot more about how much she misses the voice of sportscaster Howard Cosell.)

From Charles Town, Fran and Quenton drive me to D.C., dropping me off at my hotel, the Washington Hilton. Later, I’ll read the caption on a postcard in my room with a photo of the brutalist white building. It boasts, “Curved at every point, the hotel is shaped like a seagull in flight.” It reminds me more of a spatula about to scrape a bowl. Then there’s a list of all the reasons a person should want to stay here — shuffleboard for instance — but no mention of the reason I want to. This is where Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981.

Because of the news footage of the shooting, I’ve seen that bowed rock wall in the driveway, heard the shots hundreds of times. And looking at it I feel reverent, though not so much about Reagan, partly because he’s a person I find difficult to revere, but mostly because of the cheery way he yukked it up during his recovery. Not that I blame him. Just as he cracked to the doctors who were saving his life that he hoped they were all Republicans, the one time I came to in an ambulance (following a bike accident in which I hit a parked car) was during Reagan’s successor’s administration. The medic asked me who the president was and I answered, “George Bush, but I didn’t vote for him.” It pains me that, like Reagan, faced with the profundity of death my first conscious impulse was to act like a smart-alecky partisan jackass.

The reason I well up with liturgical emotion on seeing that entrance to the Hilton is not because Reagan was attacked here, but because his press secretary, James Brady, was. That Brady will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair is cause enough for empathy. That he and his wife, Sarah, turned this rotten luck into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is downright heroic. And not the soft-focus treacle that “heroic” often implies. I’m on their mailing list, and the most impressive, lovable thing about them is their rage. The last mailing I got, seeking help to close the gun show loophole laws that allow terrorists and criminals to purchase all the firearms they want as long as it’s at folding tables set up at fairgrounds, featured a letter from Jim that opens, “I’m sitting here in my wheelchair today, mad as hell, trying to control my anger,” and another one from Sarah in which she tells a story about how right after Jim was shot, her son was playing with what he thought was a toy gun in a family member’s truck, but it turned out to be real and when she learned this she stormed over to the phone and called up the National Rifle Association, telling them, “This is Sarah Brady and I want you to know that I will be making it my life’s work to put you out of business!” Unbelievably, two years after the assassination attempt President Reagan addressed the NRA’s national convention — the only sitting president ever to do so. Who should have known more than he that backing an organization lobbying against (especially) the control of handguns is against the self-interest of every president. After all, only John F. Kennedy was shot with a rifle; the other three successful presidential murders (and the attempted assassinations of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford) were committed with handguns. In fact, Booth’s dainty derringer is on display across town in the Lincoln Museum at Ford’s Theatre. It’s downright pretty until you remember the damage it did.

The next morning, Klam arrives in the driveway where Reagan’s car had been waiting. We’re going to pick up where we left off on the John Wilkes Booth escape route tour. We’re heading to the spot where Booth died.

Not far from Port Royal, Virginia, there’s a sign. It reads, “This is the Garrett Place where John Wilkes Booth, Assassin of Lincoln, was cornered by Union soldiers and killed, April 26, 1865. The house stood a short distance from this spot.”

Booth’s sidekick David Herold surrendered to the soldiers, so he would live to hang. Booth, however, holed up in the barn with a gun, refusing to come out. So the soldiers lit it on fire. There are conflicting reports about who fired on Booth — soldier Boston Corbett or a suicidal Booth himself — but shot, he staggered from the barn and lived long enough to die in Garrett’s living room. His last words, also in dispute, might have been “Tell my mother I died for my country.”