James Garfield Shot down

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MUSIC FROM “MR. GARFIELD” BY JOHNNY CASH

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's Johnny Cash, singing about the assassination in 1881 of James A. Garfield. He was shot in a train station, just 100 days after taking office.

I'm Lillian Cunningham, and this is the 20th episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For this episode about Garfield, I spoke on the phone with Candice Millard. She's a journalist and biographer who wrote a totally riveting book called “Destiny of the Republic.”

In it, she chronicles the dark story of Garfield's murder and botched medical treatment, but also explores some of the brightest, most overlooked aspects of his life story.

So, Candice, you wrote an entire book about James Garfield and his assassination and, presumably, spent several years of your life doing the research and the writing. What drew you to his story? And what made it not just interesting to you but made you feel that it was worthwhile and important to tell?

CANDICE MILLARD: Well, I think like most Americans, unfortunately, I didn't know anything about James Garfield except for the fact that he had been assassinated.

I was actually researching Alexander Graham Bell, and I'd stumbled on the story of Bell inventing this induction balance, which is basically a metal detector connected to a telephone receiver, to try to find the bullet in Garfield after Garfield was shot. And I was really surprised for a couple of reasons. First, because I had never heard the story before. I mean, this is Alexander Graham Bell, one of our most famous, most accomplished inventors and one of our United States presidents. And I started wondering: Bell was really young still, he was like 34-years old. He had just invented the telephone five years earlier. He finally had some time, a little bit of money, some fame, and he

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 dropped everything to try to help Garfield. And so, I thought: I wonder what Garfield was like?

And that's where I was just blown off my feet. I couldn't believe -- I started researching him, and again, this is a guy very few people know anything about -- he was absolutely extraordinary. He was incredibly brilliant, incredibly brave. He hid a runaway slave. He was instrumental in bringing about black suffrage. He was just incredibly promising, and I truly believe he would have been one of our great presidents had he not been killed.

He was shot just four months into his first term and died a couple of months later, and so that's why he's been forgotten. And that's why I really wanted to tell his story, because I thought: This is this secondary tragedy to this story -- that a man of so much promise and talent and kindness and potential has been completely forgotten.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Garfield was born in Ohio in 1831, in an area outside of Cleveland that's basically rugged farmland and frontier at that point, right?

CANDICE MILLARD: Yeah.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, what are some of the things you found most surprising or telling about the way he grew up?

So, Garfield -- it's important to know about Garfield that he was incredibly poor, and this absolutely shaped all of his life. He was our last president born in a log cabin. His father died before he was 2-years old. He didn't have shoes until he was 4-years old, so you can imagine those brutal Ohio winters. And he had nothing -- except for a mother who loved him very much and believed in him and wanted, above all, for him to get an education; and his own incredible mind.

He was absolutely brilliant from a very young age. In fact, he had an older brother who had to start working to support the family when he was just 11-years old. And even his brother said, 'Whatever happens, James must go to school.' His mother and his brother were able to somehow come up with $17 to get him started. But after that, in order to pay his tuition, he was a carpenter and a janitor for the school. But by his second year, so while he's still just a sophomore -- he's just a student -- he became a professor also of literature, mathematics and ancient languages while he was a sophomore in college. And he was also this incredibly eloquent and powerful public speaker.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What's the sense you got of how outgoing or introverted he was?

CANDICE MILLARD: So, it's interesting. For a very, very intellectual man, he was very outgoing. He was full of life and vigor. You know, he would give you a bear hug instead of a handshake. He had this sort of famous, booming laugh, and he was just so full of life and such a passionate person, while at the same time, very bookish -- he read everything he could get his hands on. His house in Ohio was just full of books everywhere you looked.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I was just thinking about how your book has the word “destiny” in it. What sort of thoughts did writing the book prompt for you about American destiny, presidential destiny?

CANDICE MILLARD: Well, it's interesting to me -- the other two books I've written (I've written a book about Theodore Roosevelt and I just finished a book about Winston Churchill, it's coming out

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 in September), although in many ways they're very, very different, all three of them felt they, as Churchill put it, “had fates in their stars.” They believed that they were meant for something great.

What's so inspirational is that, not only do they believe that they're destined for greatness, they make it happen. It's within their control. Even though Churchill was British, his mother was American, and to me, that's such an American quality. You're not going to wait for somebody else to make it happen. You're not going to assume God will figure it out. You're going to make it happen yourself. You're going to fulfill your own destiny.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So here I'm going to turn for a bit to Michelle Krowl at the Library of Congress. She showed me several letters and diary entries of Garfield's that give a window into his sense of destiny and also those character traits of his that Candice has been talking about.

MICHELLE KROWL: The earliest diary that we have for him is Volume 1 here.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's the actual diary?

MICHELLE KROWL: This is the actual diary. July 1850. And, you know, he's just given this commencement, and he says, “The exercises are over and my part is performed, for better or worse. However, I did better than I expected. The ice is broken. I am no longer a cringing scapegoat, but am resolved to make a mark in the world.”

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Oh my Gosh. And here's actually one of my favorite lines, the one that you open to, where it says, “There's some of the slumbering thunder in my soul and it shall come out.”

MICHELLE KROWL: Yeah. He was someone who was very ambitious, and several people talk about what a restless person he was as well. His brother later on did a reminiscence, and he said: ‘When James used to go to school, the teacher complained to mother that James would not sit still, and he was afraid he would not learn. But then, James was never still.’

And he even talks about this himself, when he's in a period of time where he doesn't quite know where he's going and what he's doing. He says: I can't sit still. When I'm still, I want to move. When I'm doing this, I want to do something else.

And so, there is this sort of idea of the thunder within -- that he wants to achieve something in the world but is not always either quite sure how to do it or feeling stymied that it's not happening fast enough.

But he does write to a friend later in his life that, for some men, coming from poverty was a mark of pride – the ‘look at all I've achieved, and I've pulled myself up from my bootstrapsl kind of thing. For him, he did take pride in what he was able to accomplish, but at the same time he identifies those 17 years as having been a time of chaos. He didn't have a father, so he felt that, had his youth had different set of circumstances, he might have achieved more in his life.

And the other thing he mentions is that when he's around other people who came from more privilege that he felt his inferiority -- or they made him feel his inferiority, you know. So, his early youth was a problem for him in some ways; and in other ways, particularly later in the 1880 campaign, it then becomes a marker of something that is achievable for Americans.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 So, for example, I happened to bring this book, it's “Garfield and Arthur,” and it was published for the 1880 campaign. And the reason I bring it is because of the cover. At the bottom, it's a canal boat being tugged by a person on a mule, and there's this ladder that goes all the way up into the clouds with the White House, and it says, "Candidate for President," and each rung is something different that Garfield had done.

So it starts with him as a canal hand -- because when he was a boy he had read a book and the sea sounded so adventurous and he wanted to run away, and as far as he could get was a canal boat . He was terrible at it. He kept falling into the canal, and he couldn't swim, and it didn't work out. But you can see that, much like Lincoln, his story was being used as a selling point for Garfield.

Maybe for some Americans, they saw a bit of themselves in Garfield, even though if they had had a chance to read his personal correspondence, they would have seen someone who was very much lamenting the lack of opportunities and the poverty that made it harder for him to rise.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: He did rise though. He rose from canal hand to brilliant student to a teacher. He then left Ohio to attend Williams College in Massachusetts. He graduated with honors, and then came back to Ohio and served as president of Hiram College by age 26. That's the school he originally had gone to.

In addition to classics, he taught math, he taught geology, history, literature. By the time he was 30-years old, he had done all of that. Plus, he had become a minister. Plus, he had studied law on his own and passed the bar to become a lawyer. Plus, he served as the youngest member of the Ohio state legislature.

When the Civil War broke out, he decided to go into battle. He rose from lieutenant colonel all the way to become the youngest officer to hold the rank of major general. He then served eight terms in Congress. He started out being considered one of the most radical voices in Congress, and, as the years went on, got more moderate or at least more politically savvy.

He served on a bunch of committees -- the Banking and Currency Committee, Appropriations, House Ways and Means, Military Affairs. His early bookishness stayed with him, and that became one of his main political and leadership tools. He would voraciously study subjects in order to formulate his positions. And actually, while he was in Congress, he wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem that was published in The New England Journal of Education.

MICHELLE KROWL: Garfield is curious. He's intellectual. And he really is a scholar. He's not just interested in politics, he's not just interested in classical languages. There is so much of the world that interests him.

He's a very good patron of the Library of Congress. He even mentions in his diary that he's off somewhere, and he says, "I miss Spofford,” who's the Librarian of Congress. He misses Spofford because he wants to talk to him and he comes by all the time to see what new novels come in from England. You know, he's a political animal on one level, but he's also such a vibrant intellectual. It is of interest to him to research all of these subjects.

Just for fun, I checked one of our checkout registers for the Library of Congress, and his checkout history within a couple-year period, just in the 1860s, consumes a page-and-a-half worth of material. So, he's somebody who delves into a subject very carefully. I know, for example with

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 currency issues, he was more of a hard-money man -- he wanted to continue the national currency being the gold standard -- and with these financial things, he would go study other financial systems of England and European countries to make a comparison. He was very learned in that way of studying up on an issue.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Now, Candice had mentioned how Garfield was able to be both studious and contemplative and also outgoing and warm. So, that warm gregarious part of his personality is something that I asked Michelle about, and it led us into a conversation about his marriage to Lucretia and a number of the other relationships throughout his life.

MICHELLE KROWL: Something that you might not think of with Garfield -- because so often with these figures, people refer to them as the endless succession of bearded males that just seem kind of one-dimensional -- but the interesting thing about Garfield is that, perhaps because he was the youngest child and was the favorite of his mother’s, he was always very petted. He came from a family where love and affection was very out in the open. There was touching, there was hugging. People expressed their feelings and expressed their love that way.

He seems to have been very needy along those lines when he got into relationships as an adult. He gets himself in trouble a few times because he's attractive to women, and they respond to him, and he responds to them.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: A polite way to put it.

MICHELLE KROWL: And so, there are a succession of women in his life. He falls in love with this woman, Mary Hubbell, as a young man. And she and her family think that he's promised to marry her, and then he doesn't. And he gets into a little bit of a problem with his social circle.

As a result of that, he meets Lucretia -- Lucretia Rudolph. She had been in school with him and was also one of his students in that time period when he's both a student and teaches. I believe he was her Greek teacher.

But then he'll go on to Williams College, where he meets another woman, Rebecca Selleck. And Rebecca Selleck definitely falls in love with him, but he's got Lucretia back in in Ohio and they're engaged. And so, at one point, Lucretia just says, essentially: If you love her so much, you should marry her instead.

And he's conflicted about that. But here's the way he describes Lucretia. "First, and most important of all, I think her to be a genuine Christian with a tender conscience and with principles predicated upon truth and justice. She has a well-balanced mind, not of the deepest and most extensive kind, but logical and precise. She has a good faculty for acquiring knowledge but not the most unbounded ambition. Perhaps not enough. There is one question I have not yet settled in regard to her social nature -- whether she has that warmth of feeling and that adhesive nature, which I need to make me happy."

So there is this sort of…I hesitate to say narcissism, but there is this neediness about Garfield.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: He does end up marrying Lucretia, but they have a rocky start, both during their engagement and also in the early years of their marriage. There's evidence that shortly after he was married and went off to war, he had an affair with a widow. It's really only after being

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 married for several years that Garfield and Lucretia finally seemed to fall deeply and securely in love with each other.

MICHELLE KROWL: So, with Lucretia and James, it seems that -- perhaps once he got those wild oats out of the way or something -- James and Crete finally, after traveling on different paths and kind of missing one another romantically all those years, found one another and they fell absolutely in love with one another. Sometimes to the overly sacchariney sweet kind of things that they do.

So, for example, he says, "I hope this new birthday has not dimmed the eye of your love nor made your relish for love letters less keen. I've been your fellow student, your teacher, your friend, your lover and I hope I am now your husband lover, more tenderly cherished than ever before. At no moment of my life have I loved to think of you, dream of you, long for you so much as now."

And then he says something about -- oh yes, here it is. "Were I now alone and with an unwedded hand and heart, but knowing your nature as I now know it, I would woo only you and use all the powers of honor and effort to win you and make you mine as against the world. How strange it is that marriage can be considered a bond, a shackle. To me, it is liberty, love, life."

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: By the presidential election of 1880, there are two different factions that have emerged within the Republican Party. Now, the issue that's dividing them is the spoils system. And so there's one Republican faction called the Stalwarts, and they want the spoils system to remain as it is, which basically means that they want to be able to dole out political jobs and favors to their allies once they get into power.

Now, the other faction thinks that the spoils system is corrupt and that we need to institute civil service reform, where we set official standards and tests for who actually gets to hold government jobs so it's not just a system of favoritism and kickbacks. That faction is called the Half-Breeds.

Of course, they get to the Republican nominating convention and these two factions deadlock. They can't decide on a candidate. And that's when Garfield's name emerges as a potential compromise. He gets the nomination but he is actually more of a Half-Breed, in that he does support cleaning up the system, basing it more on merit than just on political favoritism.

The party decides they should appease the Stalwart faction, and so they throw a bone to the Stalwart's leader in the party, who's this guy named Roscoe Conkling. He's a senator from New York, and he's kind of the spoils system Grand Poobah. In order to appease him, they decide they're going to make the vice presidential nominee Chester Arthur -- and that's because Chester Arthur is one of Roscoe Conkling's underlings in New York.

Anyway, so that's the ticket: Garfield and Arthur. And they win. They win the 1880 presidential election against the Democratic candidate Winfield Hancock. But it's the narrowest margin of victory in American history. Garfield wins by less than 0.1 percent of the vote.

But speaking of the spoils system, there's a man named Charles Guiteau, who helped out just very tangentially on Garfield and Arthur's campaign, and he thinks, now that they've won, he should get some of these rewards.

He's had a messy past before this. He had tried to be a lawyer at one point and failed. He had tried

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 to start a free love commune and had failed. He'd been in jail and, most notably, his family had tried to institutionalize him for mental instability. He sees the presidential election as an opportunity to do a little campaign work and then to get a lot of benefit.

MICHELLE KROWL: In his mind, what he had done on behalf of the party was enough that he needed to be rewarded for it. And that's part of the culture of the 19th century -- and particularly in politics -- is the idea that to the victor belongs the spoils. You may have talked about that with Andrew Jackson. It really gets sort of codified a bit more in those years. So, this is how politics operates: If you work on behalf of the party, you contribute to the party, you are often expecting to get something in return -- whether it's a political appointment or some sort of job, or whatever the quid pro quo is.

And so it's in this environment that Guiteau has this idea, "Well, I had this pamphlet printed, and I've given a couple of speeches. And so, I've done enough for the party. I deserve something in return." And in these first letters, he wants to be basically the minister to Austria. I mean, he wants to be one of our diplomatic representatives in Vienna. He also has delusions that he's going to marry this millionaire's daughter, and so they're going to be able to live in the style that a diplomat should be accustomed to and they'll be wonderful representatives of the United States.

But he starts it off, "General, I would like the Austrian mission and call your attention to it as first comes, first serves." [That is to say:] He sent a letter off to Garfield, and said – OK, I've worked on behalf of the party, and I would like to go to Vienna please. And this is just where he starts writing these various letters. And then it turns out that the person who had been in Austria decides that they want to stay. And so then, it's -- OK, well if I can't have Vienna, Paris will be fine, so what about the Paris mission?

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Garfield enters the White House on March 4, 1881, and from the day he walks in the door, he starts getting barraged by requests from office seekers. Some of them are by folks like Guiteau, whose requests seem outrageous. But there are also tons of other people who are making requestswho actually will end up being given postings.

MICHELLE KROWL: For Garfield, and for many other presidents in the 19th century, the fact that there aren't civil service exams and more formalized ways of making appointments means that these people are just bombarded with questions and recommendations and requests for offices.

So I got out this volume. It's called "Executive Mansion Letter List." And this one is 1881, and it's from March 7 to March 15. It's just page after page after page of people who are writing to the executive mansion, which is what the White House was called at that point. But if we look through some of these pages, even just a couple of pages ahead…We've got the Honorable John Hay, who was Lincoln's secretary and at this point he's writing from the assistant secretary of state. Enclosed is a letter from Mark Twain, earnestly recommending Ned House for appointment as minister to Japan. And, you know, we've got this person's -- Eliot Shepherd’s -- numerous recommendations for promoting citizens of New York on behalf of his application for U.S. attorney for southern New York.

So, it's just page after page after page of recommendations, and ‘Can I get a job?’ and suggestions why this person should be appointed, and that person. Even though Guiteau is clearly unbalanced -- he is going to be a great problem -- he's just one of many people who are looking for patronage.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: One of the only things Garfield would get to do in office in the end would be to make appointments. He picked a cabinet that mostly supported civil service reform, which of course angered Roscoe Conkling, the New York senator who was the leader of the Stalwart's faction.

Garfield then dealt an even greater blow to Conkling when he appointed a new collector of the Port of New York. This was the most powerful patronage position in the country. It was the job that Chester Arthur had once held. And there had been a practice up until that point called senatorial courtesy, where Roscoe Conkling as the New York senator had been allowed to choose the people who would get those types of kickback jobs in his state. Well, Garfield just goes over his head as president, and this leads to a huge showdown between Garfield and Conkling that culminates with Conkling resigning his Senate seat in protest.

MICHELLE KROWL: So, in the brief time that Garfield has as a president, he's taken on Conkling. He doesn't back down in that kind of fight. Now whether that would have continued, it's hard to know.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The reason, of course, that it's hard to know takes us back to the story of another frustrated, though far less powerful, proponent of the spoils system -- Charles Guiteau. He's written all these letters asking for a diplomatic posting, and nothing is coming of it. So, here's where I'll turn back to Candice Millard to tell us how the tragedy with Guiteau unraveled.

CANDICE MILLARD: He went to the White House every day, every day, even walked into Garfield's office at one point while Garfield was in it -- if you can imagine someone just walking into the president's office. He Went to the state department every day, and everybody told him, ‘We'll consider it. We'll consider it.’ And to him, that was, ‘It's going to happen, just eventually.’ And finally, Secretary of State James Blaine said to him, ‘Stop it. It's never happening.’

And he snapped, and he went home and he had what he thought was this divine inspiration with God telling him that really the Stalwarts need to be in power – that Chester Arthur, who was Conkling's man, needs to be president. And so, you need to remove Garfield. You need to assassinate him.

And that's when he began to stalk the president, day after day after day. He even followed him to church, he considered shooting him in church. And then he found out that the president was going to be taking a trip and would be at the Washington Potomac train station. So Guiteau got up early that day. He put on his nicest suit. He had his shoes polished. He had a gun he had borrowed money to buy and had gone to the banks of the Potomac the day before to shoot it to practice. And he was waiting at the train station when Garfield entered, and Garfield only took a few steps when Guiteau shot him twice.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It was July 2, 1881 -- just 100 days into his presidency. With Garfield in the train station were his two sons; his secretary of state, James Blaine; and his secretary of war, Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son. And this is actually incredible -- Robert Todd Lincoln had been at the deathbed of his father after he was shot. He's now witnessed James Garfield's shooting. And 20 years later, he would be present at the Pan American exposition when President McKinley is shot.

At the train station, Guiteau cried out, "I'm a Stalwart of the Stalwarts. Arthur is president now."

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 One bullet had hit Garfield's shoulder, the other bullet had gone in through his back. He collapsed instantly to the ground and was carried upstairs in the train station until they could move him to the White House.

Telegrams started going out to the family and to his cabinet and to newspapers that the president had been shot and was dying. They thought he would die any minute or any hour, but he lived through the night. And then he lived through the next night. He kept holding on as the weeks and months passed by.

And so he shoots him in July, but Garfield doesn't actually die until September. So what's happening during those months? I mean, first what's happening just in terms of how is the country running while he's being treated? And then, medically what's happening to Garfield over that time?

CANDICE MILLARD: So, there was no precedent at that time for what to do if a president was incapacitated. Lincoln obviously died right away and the country was in complete shock because they thought Lincoln's assassination was just a result of war -- that's never going to happen again. Even though there are tons and tons of assassinations happening in Europe all the time, it's like: ‘Our leaders are freely elected. We don't have any reason to want him dead.’

And so the country was just shock and chaos and incredible, incredible grief because they thought Garfield was going to die right away and then it was just this roller coaster of ‘maybe he'll survive’ -- and then he's getting worse -- and then he's getting better. It was just hard to know for the American people what was going on.

Even James Blaine, who was on Garfield's side, came to Chester Arthur and asked him to step in, and Chester Arthur refused. He knew that many people who hated him and loved Garfield thought that he was waiting in the wings; that he was thrilled by the shooting and just eagerly waiting for Garfield to die. And so he refused even to come to Washington.

So things just kind of limped along. Garfield was very, very, very sick. And he was thinking clearly, but certainly not able to run an entire country. He had a young, private secretary – 24-years old -- who was kind of keeping things together and who just didn't go home for almost three months, just lived in his office and tried to do what he could to keep the White House operating.

And Garfield -- again he was this big guy, very healthy and vigorous -- he fought off the initial infection. He was shot twice: once in the arm and then the second in his back, but it went through the right side of his back and then it went to the left and it went behind his pancreas, where it eventually insisted. But it didn't hit any vital organs. It didn't hit his spinal cord, and he was getting better.

Unfortunately, there were nine different doctors inserted unsterilized fingers and instruments in his back again and again and again. And they continued to search for this bullet in Garfield's back, introducing infection day after day after day. And he was also starving to death. He was also deeply dehydrated when he finally died. They have a death mask at his home in Ohio, and it would break your heart. He's so thin and frail.

Alexander Graham Bell had tried to help find the bullet by using his new metal-detector device, but he failed -- partly because there were metal coils in the mattress that Garfield was lying on and

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 partly because the chief doctor had told Bell just to search Garfield's right side, which was wrong. The bullet was actually lodged in his left side. If Bell had been able to help find the bullet, it may have helped. But the autopsy revealed it really was the massive infections caused by the doctors' unsanitary probing that was what ultimately killed Garfield.

Doctors look at the injury today and say Garfield could have easily survived that shooting. They could have even left the bullet in his body untouched. And what's horrible is that 16 years earlier, there was a British surgeon Joseph Lister who discovered, or pioneered, antisepsis. He realized that germs caused infection and that you had to sterilize surgical instruments and keep wounds clean. Europe had already been implementing these practices with dramatic improvements in their mortality rates. But doctors in the United States at the time of Garfield's shooting still remained skeptical of that science.

Garfield never, never should have died. Lister had gone around the world telling doctors -- warning them -- if you don't sterilize your hands and your instruments, you run the very real risk of killing your patients. And he had come to the United States. There was a big Centennial Exposition in 1876, and there was a giant medical congress and he had been the keynote speaker on surgery. And the main doctor [for Garfield’s treatment], Dr. Blix, had a couple of men who were close to him who were surgeons and they had attended Lister's talk, but they had dismissed it. They still weren't completely sure they believed in germs and antisepsis. His sterilization technique required a lot of work, and they thought it really wasn't worth it and they had their own strange little ways of doing things.

In fact, some of them who had tried antisepsis had failed miserably because, like, they would sterilize their hands and their instruments; but if a knife dropped during surgery, they would just pick it up and keep using it. And if they needed an extra hand during surgery, they would hold the knife in their mouth and continue to use it.

So, obviously, it wasn't working and it was still considered this kind of new and untested -- in the United States, only -- this new and untested medical system. And so, you know, here's a president of the United States. Everybody's watching. And these doctors aren't going to take any chances -- they're going to just adhere to the most traditional medical practices of the time.

And that's what killed him.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The most obvious lasting legacy and impact of Garfield's brief presidency seems to certainly be that it eventually prompted civil service reform. But I'm curious what you think are some of the other perhaps less obvious ways in which the country and the presidency are different today because Garfield is part of our presidential history.

CANDICE MILLARD: Well I think probably the biggest change that came out of this tragedy was that antisepsis was accepted immediately. When the autopsy results were reported, the American people understood right away that they didn't have to lose their president and they understood why they had -- and antisepsis was adopted across the country, saving countless countless lives.

But also I think that Garfield's presidency, and certainly his assassination, brought the country together for the first time since the Civil War. You know, Lincoln's assassination had only deepened that divide. But Garfield was really the first president who was accepted, since the Civil War, as the president of the whole country. The North and the South, freed slaves and former

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 slave owners, immigrants and pioneers -- they all saw in him so much promise and so much possibility. They felt that he understood them and their lives, and they felt very much that he was their president as well. And it really sort of knit the country together -- this shared sorrow. And that was a very powerful, positive thing to come out of this incredible tragedy.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Is there any particular detail about Garfield that you found either surprised you the most or has still stuck with you the most since writing your book?

CANDICE MILLARD: Yeah. You know, he had been in the Civil War, and he had seen a lot of suffering and a lot of death. And he said that he thought that illness really brought out the true character of a man. He called it the "bed of the sea," when you can see sort of who a person truly is when they're so vulnerable and ill and weak.

And, you know, his friends who were with him through throughout all of this tragedy -- and also the incredible, incredible suffering that he endured -- they all said that the best of his character came to the front, even as he's suffering and knows that he's very likely going to die.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Garfield was moved to a friend's home in New Jersey by the ocean for the last days of his life. He died on September 19, exactly two months before his 50th birthday.

One of his sons went on eventually to be the president of Williams College, following in his father's academic footsteps; and another son went on to be a close friend and colleague of Teddy Roosevelt's. He served in Roosevelt's cabinet as the secretary of the interior.

As for Lucretia, she lived for several more decades after. She never remarried, and she spent much of her time saving and collecting and organizing James Garfield's papers, trying to preserve her husband's legacy.

Charles Guiteau was put on trial and convicted. A year after the shooting, he danced his way up to the gallows platform, he recited a poem, and then he was hanged.

To end the episode, I will just leave you with this quote of Garfield’s that I came across: “If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon our hearts. The spirit should not grow old.”

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