“Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President”, by Candice Millard

432 pages, Anchor Books, ISBN-13: 978-0767929714

I remember visiting the James A. Garfield Memorial in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, when I was a kid and was struck by the immensity: I mean, the guy didn’t even serve one year as 20^th President of the United States and there was this overwrought and unbalanced tribute to what he might have done if only that psycho, Charles Guiteau, hadn’t shot him (in fact, at the time, I said to my Dad that a lot of what was said about Garfield in 1881 sounded a lot like what would be said about Kennedy in 1963). But after reading Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard I see how wrong I was, as Garfield had the makings to be one of our greatest-ever Presidents. However, Destiny is not just the rags-to-riches story of Garfield; it is also a stirring account of American life and politics at the start of the Gilded Age, not long after the conclusion of the Civil War, and of a presidential murder.

Garfield’s early years are sketched out in cursory fashion, his (sometimes troubled) relationship with and eventual devotion to his wife Lucretia is covered in only a few pages, and the death of his youngest child receives little more than a mention. Rather than focusing on Garfield’s personal life, Millard devotes her attention to political divisions within the Republican Party (particularly Garfield’s battles with New York Senator Roscoe Conkling and Chester A. Arthur, the Veep he all but controlled), as well as Garfield’s frustration with the obligations of the office that he had little desire to hold. Guiteau, the President’s assassin, is given nearly as much attention as Garfield himself (and man, what a whackadoodle). There are times when the book has the feel of a thriller, as the ominous Charles Guiteau weaves in and out of the text, inching himself closer to the President. Millard depicts Guiteau as a con man with delusions of grandeur whose madness was characterized by a growing belief that his plan to assassinate Garfield was divinely inspired. The assassination occurs at the book’s midway point, after which Millard then treats us to a different kind of political battle, a medical drama about doctors who vie for the opportunity to treat the president and who, ironically, become responsible for his death. Arrogant in their refusal to believe in the existence of germs(!), American doctors rejected evidence accumulated over several years by the British Dr. Joseph Lister that antiseptic surgical conditions increase a patient’s chance of survival. The dirty fingers and unwashed probes inserted into Garfield’s wound in search of the bullet sealed the president’s fate, infecting an injury that Garfield would likely have survived if left untreated. The book concludes with an account of Garfield’s autopsy and Guiteau’s trial.

Destiny of the Republic succeeds on two levels. 1^st, it is informative, as Millard fills the text with interesting facts culled from a variety of primary and secondary source materials – including frequent quotations from contemporaneous news stories and Garfield’s diary – to set the scene for his too-brief presidency. We learn enough about the man to understand that he would have made an admirable president as Garfield, despite his love of farming, was a scholar, a professor of literature and ancient languages, well-versed in mathematics and keenly interested in science. Garfield’s speeches condemning slavery and the unequal treatment of black Americans were eloquent and moving, and the book is worth reading for those passages alone. 2^nd, it is entertaining, for Millard’s prose is lively and moves along at a brisk pace, despite its attention to detail. She captures personalities as if she were writing a novel and seasons the narrative with humor while creating tension as the events leading to Garfield’s encounter with Guiteau unfold. Really, my only complaint concerns the attention given to Alexander Graham Bell; granted, Bell’s life intersected with Garfield’s more than once – especially when Bell worked diligently to invent a device that would pinpoint the location of the bullet lodged in Garfield’s body – but the full chapter and parts of several others devoted to Bell’s life seem out of place, as if Millard felt the need to pad her relatively short book with filler (I, for one, would have preferred a more thorough discussion of the political aftermath of the shooting). Millard speaks movingly of the unifying effect the assassination had on a nation that was still emerging from the blood and hate of the Civil War, but provides few facts to support that proposition; a more extensive look at the impact of the assassination on the country would have been more germane than the pages devoted to Bell’s life before and after his invention of the telephone.

That criticism aside, Destiny of the Republic is excellent for readers who want to know more about a key yet-little known American President without being subjected to mind-numbing detail or leaden prose. Millard’s book is enlightening and enjoyable, and Garfield is one dead president that I’m happy to have met.