By Paul Carrier
If you conjured up a mildly neurotic writer whose persona includes equal parts insightful humorist, irreverent history buff, keen trivia fan, wry observer of the passing scene, and devotee of the offbeat, with just a pinch of self-absorption thrown in for good measure, you’d have a close approximation of Sarah Vowell.
And if you gave that writer enough of an interest in the untimely deaths of U.S. presidents to send her scurrying around the country peering at monuments, memorials, museums and mementos, including the occasional body part, you’d have Assassination Vacation, Vowell’s quirky look at the killings of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley.
This 255-page mashup of blasts from the past, travelogue and personal essay makes for a quick read that is at once educational and damn funny. Visiting the Confederate White House in Richmond, Va., with a friend, for example, Vowell suddenly realizes that her male pal, who is peppering a matronly staffer with questions, is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Porn Freak Rehab."
We learn that bed-and-breakfasts make Vowell nervous. (She’s expected to chat with strangers while eating.) Being assassinated carries at least one “perk.” (Secular sainthood.) And terrorists would be wise to recruit famous people. (Celebrity makes it easy to travel anywhere at any time, as John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor, did during the Civil War.)
Vowell is the kind of person who gets excited about plaques and markers, sometimes because they commemorate events that move or inspire her and sometimes because she finds them so off-putting she’s intrigued by their creepiness. She blends thoughtfulness and erudition with a breezy writing style, whether she’s providing a straightforward factual overview of historical events, examining the past through her own unique lens . . . or summarizing someone’s biography in a breathless burst of reconstructed dialogue.
When Vowell visits what was the Washington, D.C., home of Maj. Henry Rathbone, who was in the presidential box at Ford’s Theater the night of the Lincoln assassination, she isn’t sure she’s found the right place. So she asks a receptionist, who doesn’t know who Rathbone was.
This sets up a scene that is vintage Vowell. She tells the receptionist that Booth stabbed Rathbone in the arm, but she doesn't stop there, adding “that Rathbone never fully recovered; that he was actually blamed for not stopping Booth; that he went slowly insane; that Clara (his fiancée) married him anyway and had his children; that when Henry insisted on moving to Germany she agreed, hoping the change would do him good; that crazy Henry shot and killed Clara in Germany just as Booth had shot Lincoln; that he would have killed their children too if a nanny hadn’t stopped him,” etc.
During a tour of Ford’s Theater, Vowell notices that the National Park Service ranger does not mention that Booth timed the fatal shot to coincide with a laugh line from Our American Cousin, the play that was being performed that night. So she asks the ranger why not. The ranger doesn’t think the line, which refers to a female character as a “sockdologizing old man-trap,” is funny. So Vowell asks the ranger what “sockdologizing” means. It means manipulative. So she asks if it means “lying son of a bitch” manipulative or “gosh darn you” manipulative. This triggers a discussion between two park rangers; they disagree on the correct interpretation.
Vowell devotes almost half of Assassination Vacation to Lincoln, which is just as well because Garfield and McKinley don't come close to having Abe’s star power. “The most famous thing ever said about President James A. Garfield is about how nobody has any idea who the hell he was,” Vowell writes.
Yet past lives, even that of the unheralded Garfield, come alive for Vowell, who offers up history lessons that range from the weird to the dramatic. On the bizarro side of the equation, Garfield’s assassin, a wacky fellow Republican named Charles Guiteau, at one time belonged to a “group marriage” cult in which the men had to refrain from ejaculating during sex. On a more serious note, we learn that McKinley’s death forced Vice President Teddy Roosevelt to race down a mountain in the Adirondacks, so he could take the oath of office as president.
The deaths of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were the first three presidential assassinations in American history, and they all occurred within a span of less than 40 years. So the book has a unifying theme, not least because Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's eldest son, figures in all three deaths.
“I call him Jinxy McDeath because he's this cursed figure,” Vowell told NPR a few years ago. “He just got to Washington the day his father was assassinated (in 1865) and was there at his deathbed when he died. And then Robert Todd Lincoln is in the train station with Garfield (in 1881), because he was Garfield's secretary of war. And he's just getting off the train in Buffalo when McKinley was shot” there in 1901.
