One night last summer, all the killers in my
head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to
sing show tunes. There they were – John Wilkes
Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz – in tune
and in the flesh. The men who murdered
Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were
elbow to elbow with Lee Harvey Oswald and the
klutzy girls who botched their hits on klutzy
Gerald Ford, harmonizing on a toe-tapper called
“Everybody’s Got the Right to Be Happy,” a song
I cheerfully hummed walking back to the
bed-and-breakfast where I was staying.
Not that I came all the way from New York City
just to enjoy a chorus line of presidential
assassins. Mostly, I came to the Berkshires
because of the man who brought one of those
presidents back to life. I was there to visit
Chesterwood, the house and studio once belonging
to Daniel Chester French, the artist responsible
for the Abraham Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln
Memorial. A nauseating four-hour bus ride from
the Port Authority terminal just to see the room
where some patriotic chiseler came up with a
marble statue? For some reason, none of my
friends wanted to come with.
Because I had to stay overnight and this being
New England, the only place to stay was a
bed-and-breakfast. It was a lovely old country
mansion operated by amiable people. That said, I
am not a bed-and-breakfast person.
I understand why other people would want to stay
in B&Bs. They’re pretty. They’re personal.
They’re “quaint,” a polite way of saying “no
TV.” They are “romantic,” i.e., every object
large enough for a flower to be printed on it is
going to have a flower printed on it. They’re
“cozy,” meaning that a guest has to keep her
belongings on the floor because every
conceivable flat surface is covered in
knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she
longs for, a remote control.
The real reason bed-and-breakfasts make me
nervous is breakfast. As if it’s not queasy
enough to stay in a stranger’s home and sleep in
a bed bedecked with nineteen pillows.
In the morning, the usually cornflake-consuming,
wheat-intolerant guest is served floury baked
goods on plates so fancy any normal person would
keep them locked in the china cabinet even if
Queen Victoria herself rose from the dead and
showed up for tea. The guest, normally a silent
morning reader of newspapers, is expected to
chat with the other strangers staying in the
strangers’ home.
At my Berkshires bed-and-breakfast, I am seated
at a table with one middle-aged Englishman and
an elderly couple from Greenwich, Connecticut.
The three of them make small talk about golf,
the weather, and the room’s chandeliers, one of
which, apparently, is Venetian. I cannot think
of a thing to say to these people. Seated at the
head of the table, I am the black hole of
breakfast, a silent void of gloom sucking the
sunshine out of their neighborly New England
day. But that is not the kind of girl my mother
raised me to be. I consider asking the
Connecticut couple if they had ever run into
Jack Paar, who I heard had retired near where
they live, but I look like I was born after Paar
quit hosting The Tonight Show (because I was)
and so I’d have to explain how much I like
watching tapes of old programs at the Museum of
Television and Radio and I don’t want to get too
personal.
It seems that all three of them attended a
Boston Pops concert at Tanglewood the previous
evening, and they chat about the conductor.
This, I think, is my in. I, too, enjoy being
entertained.
Relieved to have something, anything, to say, I
pipe up, “I went to the Berkshire Theatre
Festival last night.”
“Oh, did you see Peter Pan?” the woman asks.
“No,” I say. “Assassins!”
“What’s that?” wonders the Englishman.
To make up for the fact that I’ve been clammed
up and moping I speak too fast, merrily
chirping, “It’s the Stephen Sondheim musical in
which a bunch of presidential assassins and
would-be assassins sing songs about how much
better their lives would be if they could gun
down a president.”
“Oh,” remarks Mr. Connecticut. “How was it?”
“Oh my god,” I gush. “Even though the actors
were mostly college kids, I thought it was
great! The orange-haired guy who played the man
who wanted to fly a plane into Nixon was
hilarious. And I found myself strangely smitten
with John Wilkes Booth; every time he looked in
my direction I could feel myself blush.”
Apparently, talking about going to the Museum of
Television and Radio is “too personal,” but I
seem to have no problem revealing my crush on
the man who murdered Lincoln.
Now, a person with sharper social skills than I
might have noticed that as these folks ate their
freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the
bed-and-breakfast’s teapot collection, they
probably didn’t want to think about presidential
gunshot wounds. But when I’m around strangers, I
turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I’m
dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners
build log cabins on the slopes of my silence and
then, boom, it’s 1980. Once I erupt, they’ll be
wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as
far away as North Dakota.
I continue. “But the main thing that surprised
me was how romantic Assassins was.”
“Romantic?” sneers a skeptic.
“Totally,” I rebut. “There’s a very tender love
scene between Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz.”
Blank stares.
“You know. He was the anarchist who killed
McKinley. Buffalo? 1901? Anyway, the authorities
initially suspected Goldman had helped him, but
all it was was that he had heard her speak a
couple of times about sticking it to The Man.
He’d met her, but she wasn’t his co-conspirator.
Anyway, the play dramatizes the moment they
meet. He stops her on the street to tell her
that he loves her. The guy who played Czolgosz
was wonderful. He had this smoldering Eastern
European accent. Actually, he sounded a lot like
Dracula – but in a good way, if you know what I
mean.” (They don’t.)
“He told her, ‘Miss Goldman, I am in love with
you.’ She answered that she didn’t have time to
be in love with him. Which was cute. But, this
was my one misgiving about the performance, I
thought that the woman playing Goldman was too
ladylike, too much of a wallflower. Wasn’t Emma
Goldman loud and brash and all gung ho? Here was
a woman whose words inspired a guy to kill a
president. And come to think of it, one of her
old boyfriends shot the industrialist Henry
Frick. Maybe I’m too swayed by the way Maureen
Stapleton played Goldman in the film Reds. She
was so bossy! And remember Stapleton in that
Woody Allen movie, Interiors? Geraldine Page is
all beige this and bland that so her husband
divorces her and hooks up with noisy, klutzy
Maureen Stapleton, who laughs too loud and
smashes pottery and wears a blood-red dress to
symbolize that she is Alive, capital A. Wait. I
lost my train of thought. Where was I?”
Englishman: “I believe Dracula was in love with
Maureen Stapleton.”
“Oh, right. I haven’t even mentioned the most
touching part. Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley
sing this duet, a love song to Charles Manson
and Jodie Foster. Hinckley and Squeaky sang that
they would do anything for Charlie Manson and
Jodie Foster. And I really believed them!
Squeaky’s like, ‘I would crawl belly-deep
through hell,’ and Hinckley’s all, ‘Baby, I’d
die for you.’ It was adorable.”
Mr. Connecticut looks at his watch and I
simultaneously realize that I’ve said way too
much and that saying way too much means I might
miss my bus back home. And I really want to go
home. I yell, “Nice meeting you!” and nearly
knock down the teapot collection in my rush to
get away from them. Though before I can leave, I
have to settle up my bill with the friendly B&B
owner. His first name? Hinckley.
On the bus home, I flip through my Assassins
program from the night before and read the
director’s note. Of course talking about the
murders of previous presidents is going to open
the door to discussing the current president.
That’s what I like to call him, “the current
president.” I find it difficult to say or type
his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him
“the current president” because it’s a hopeful
phrase, implying that his administration is only
temporary. Timothy Douglas, the Assassins
director, doesn’t say the president’s name
either, but he doesn’t have to. Clearly, Douglas
is horrified and exasperated by the Iraqi war.
He writes,
Proportionate to my own mounting frustrations at
feeling increasingly excluded from the best
interests of the current administration’s
control in these extraordinary times helps me
toward a visceral understanding of the
motivation of one who would perpetrate a violent
act upon the leader of the free world. My
capacity for this depth of empathy also gives me
pause, for I have no idea how far away I am from
the “invisible line” that separates me from a
similar or identical purpose…. Please allow me
to state for the record that I am completely
against violence of any kind as a way of
resolving conflicts.
That crafty explanation slaps me in the forehead
with all the force of “duh.” Until that moment,
I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project
of touring historic sites and monuments having
to do with the assassinations of Lincoln,
Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my
country iffily went to war, which is to say
right around the time my resentment of the
current president cranked up into contempt. Not
that I want the current president killed. Like
that director, I will, for the record (and for
the FBI agent assigned to read this and make
sure I mean no harm – hello there), clearly
state that while I am obsessed with death, I am
against it.
Like director Tim Douglas, my simmering rage
against the current president scares me. I am a
more or less peaceful happy person whose lone
act of violence as an adult was shoving a guy
who spilled beer on me at a Sleater-Kinney
concert. So if I can summon this much bitterness
toward a presidential human being, I can sort
of, kind of see how this amount of bile or more,
teaming up with disappointment, unemployment,
delusions of grandeur and mental illness, could
prompt a crazier narcissistic creep to buy one
of this country’s widely available handguns. Not
that I, I repeat, condone that. Like Lincoln, I
would like to believe the ballot is stronger
than the bullet. Then again, he said that before
he got shot.
I am only slightly less astonished by the
egotism of the assassins, the inflated
self-esteem it requires to kill a president,
than I am astonished by the men who run for
president. These are people who have the gall to
believe they can fix us – us and our deficit,
our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our
potholes and public schools. The egomania
required to be president or a presidential
assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts.
Presidents and presidential assassins are like
Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. Even
though one city is all about sin and the other
is all about salvation, they are identical,
one-dimensional company towns built up out of
the desert by the sheer will of true believers.
The assassins and the presidents invite the same
basic question: Just who do you think you are?
One of the books I read for McKinley research
was Barbara Tuchman’s great history of European
and American events leading up to World War I,
The Proud Tower. Her anarchism chapter
enumerates the six heads of state who were
assassinated in the two decades before Archduke
Ferdinand was murdered in 1914: McKinley, the
president of France, the empress of Austria, the
king of Italy, a couple of Spanish premiers. Her
point being, it was an age of assassination.
Well, I can come up with at least that many
assassinations off the top of my head from the
last two years alone as if playing some
particularly geopolitical game of Clue: Serbian
prime minister (sniper in front of government
building in Belgrade), Swedish foreign minister
(stabbed while shopping in Stockholm), the
Taiwanese president and vice president (wounded
when shots were fired at their motorcade the day
before an election), two Hamas leaders (Israeli
missile strikes), president of the Iraqi
Governing Council (suicide bomber). And, in May
2004, an audio recording surfaced from Osama bin
Laden promising to pay ten thousand grams of
gold (roughly $125K) to assassins of officials
in Iraq representing the United States or the
United Nations.
“I’m worried about the president’s safety,” I
said at a Fourth of July party in 2004 when this
guy Sam and I were talking about the upcoming
Republican National Convention here in New York.
“I think you’ve seen The Manchurian Candidate
too many times,” said Sam. Guilty. Still, I
dread bodily harm coming to the current
president because of my aforementioned aversion
to murder, but also because I don’t think I can
stomach watching that man get turned into a
martyr if he were killed. That’s what happens.
It’s one of the few perks of assassination. In
death, you get upgraded into a saint no matter
how much people hated you in life. As the rueful
Henry Adams, a civil service reform advocate who
marveled at his fellow reformers’ immediate
deification of President Garfield after that
assassination, wrote, “The cynical impudence
with which the reformers have tried to
manufacture an ideal statesman out of the late
shady politician beats anything in
novel-writing.”
Somewhere on the road between museum displays of
Lincoln’s skull fragments and the ceramic tiles
on which Garfield was gunned down and McKinley’s
bloodstained pj’s it occurred to me that there
is a name for travel embarked upon with the
agenda of venerating relics: pilgrimage. The
medieval pilgrimage routes, in which Christians
walked from church to church to commune with the
innards of saints, are the beginnings of the
modern tourism industry. Which is to say that
you can draw a more or less straight line from a
Dark Ages peasant blistering his feet trudging
to a church displaying the Virgin Mary’s
dried-up breast milk to me vomiting into a barf
bag on a sightseeing boat headed toward the
prison-island hell where some Lincoln
assassination conspirators were locked up in
1865.
I remembered that my friend Jack Hitt had
written a book called Off the Road in which he
retraced the old pilgrimage route to Santiago de
Compostela in Spain. So I floated my pilgrimage
theory to him in an e-mail and he wrote back
that at one point on his Spanish trip, he saw
“the flayed ‘skin’ of Jesus – the entire thing,
you know, with like eyeholes and stuff, mounted
on a wooden frame.” Cool. His e-mail went on to
say that in the Middle Ages,
Relics were treasured as something close to the
divine. Often when a great monk died and there
was a sense that he might be canonized, the
corpse was carefully guarded in a tomb – often
twenty-four hours a day. Visitors could come to
the tomb.
Continues…
Excerpted from Assassination Vacation
by Sarah Vowell
Copyright © 2005 by Sarah Vowell.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2005
Sarah Vowell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-6003-1
