James Garfield Shot down EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. 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.