50bookchallenge #3/50

It’s prob­a­bly a piece of triv­ia I should have remem­bered from Junior High, but I learned some­thing I’d often won­dered about from *Assas­si­na­tion Vaca­tion*. An overused cliché from action movies and TV shows (and even nov­els) is the would-be killer bul­let stopped by some object in the would-be vic­tim’s vest or coat pock­et. I’d won­dered whether there was ever a doc­u­ment­ed case of a pock­et­watch or cig­a­rette case sav­ing its car­ri­er’s life.

Turns out (and I can thank Sarah Vow­ell for inform­ing me of this) the sto­ry comes from the 1912 attempt on Ted­dy Roo­sevelt’s life. Although unlike the fic­tion­al accounts where the hero is mirac­u­lous­ly unscathed, the steel eye­glass­es case and the man­u­script Roo­sevelt car­ried mere­ly slowed the bul­let enough that it made only a flesh wound. He still bled all over the speech he was to give. The Rough Rid­er gave his speech as sched­uled, but his suit was ruined by more than a tiny hole.

Per­haps a bit of a mor­bid premise, *Assas­si­na­tion Vaca­tion* is not pre­cise­ly a his­to­ry book but a mem­oir of a present-day inves­ti­ga­tion into the assas­si­na­tion of three Amer­i­can pres­i­dents: Lin­coln, Garfield, and McKin­ley. Vow­ell tells a per­son­al account of her research trav­el­ing around the coun­try and delv­ing into the arti­facts of past events.

I think I’d nor­mal­ly find this sort of exer­cise a bit too post­mod­ern for my taste, but Vow­ell brings it togeth­er beau­ti­ful­ly. Nev­er is the self-ref­er­en­tial nature of the book the point of the book; she isn’t wow­ing us with how clever she is for telling the sto­ry of telling a sto­ry. Instead she sim­ply reports her expe­ri­ences direct­ly. *Assas­si­na­tion Vaca­tion* there­fore reads as being more authen­tic than the his­tor­i­cal record. We’re shown nuances and per­son­al con­jec­ture picked up from a vis­it to the site of an his­tor­i­cal event. We don’t just hear the account of Roo­sevelt’s failed assas­si­na­tion, we know that Vow­ell has seen his per­fo­rat­ed spec­ta­cle case at the Roo­sevelt birth­place in New York and the blood­stained speech in the Smith­son­ian. Some­how this makes the events of a cen­tu­ry or two ago real: these aren’t just words on a page or an intel­lec­tu­al­ized fig­ment, but pieces of his­to­ry that per­sist with us today, items you or I could see.

Vow­ell’s opin­ions, analy­sis, and dark humor run all through *Assas­si­na­tion Vaca­tion*. I found it very inter­est­ing to see her trace the trans­for­ma­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty from the Par­ty of Lin­coln to it’s present-day obses­sion with the destruc­tion of every ide­al Lin­coln held dear. Most fas­ci­nat­ing and sad­den­ing was her draw­ing the par­al­lel between the McKin­ley admin­is­tra­tion and the present one. Eli­hu Root dragged his feet and only after pres­sure from a pub­lic out­raged by the reports from Sen­ate hear­ings did he order the courts-mar­tial of offi­cers accused of tor­tur­ing pris­on­ers in the inva­sion of the Philip­pines. So per­haps when I com­plain that our present lead­er­ship is sell­ing the soul of our nation, I should remem­ber that our nation’s soul has sur­vived the atroc­i­ties of the pre­vi­ous administrations.

Yet Vow­ell nev­er lets us for­get how deeply human the fig­ures she describes were. That same Sec­re­tary of War Eli­hu Root broke down weep­ing and could not admin­is­ter the oath of office to Vice-Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt on McKin­ley’s death, and all present bowed their heads to wait for him to regain his com­po­sure. This sort of detail is too eas­i­ly for­got­ten in the encroach­ing fog we call history.

I want to thank Ham­mer­head for invit­ing me to hear Sarah Vow­ell speak. It was hear­ing her read and talk about selec­tions from this book that inspired me to pick it up.