Assassination Vacation

I think I want to be Sarah Vowell. Yes, she has the weird voice (see: Violet in Pixar's The Incredibles) and she bears more than a (self-admitted) passing resemblence to Wednesday Addams, but here is a funny, smart woman who seems to get obsessed with an interesting topic, research it like crazy, and then write and publish funny, smart books on said topic. What's not to envy?

In the case of Assassination Vacation, Vowell delves into the circumstances and persons surrounding three presidential assassinations: Lincoln (of course), Garfield (who?) and McKinley (the George W. Bush of his time--Vowell makes a case). The main thread holding these three men together--aside from death while holding office--is...the presence of Robert Todd Lincoln at each of their assassinations. Put that in your conspiracy theorist pipe and smoke it!

Yes, the son of Abraham Lincoln not only lost his father to assassination, but was standing with President Garfield in the railroad station when a disappointed ambassadorship-seeker shot him (It is perhaps important that Charles Guitau--a real nutter--claimed during his trial that he only shot the president: It was the doctors and their grubby probing for the bullet that killed him). Later, Robert Todd Lincoln was just disembarking in Buffalo, NY when anarchist Czolgosz shot McKinley in a receiving line. I must say, the younger Lincoln does not come off as a very nice man in this book (for one, he bungled the Lady Franklin expedition to the North Pole, but that's another topic) and that's even without his "second career as presidential angel of death."

This book was great. Once I got past my vague distaste and discomfort at reading about presidential assassinations, I discovered that I was learning a ton of information in easily digestible bites. Vowell knows and loves her stuff. Before I had kids, I could have joined her in her fascination with the weird and macabre. Now, I have to filter some of the ugliness from my life--too sad, too depressing, but Vowell still revels in it and it is fun. She visits The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which is a place I could have gotten lost in years ago. It's full of weird medical curiosities (she's there to view the thorax of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln assassin). She buys recipes from the Mudd family farm, she seeks out the sad little marker (next to a garage) in the sad seaside town in which Garfield took two months to die; she hikes up and down the NY mountain which Teddy Roosevelt had to rush down in pitch blackness in order to become president at McKinley's death. If it's connected, however tenuously, Vowell visits.

I got a much fuller appreciation of the impact of Lincoln's death than I had before and really got to read and ponder some of his speeches. I learned more about one of the forgotten presidents, Garfield, whose diary entries Vowell claims, could be summed up with "I'd rather be reading." How refreshing is that? And McKinley? Well, his death gave us Teddy Roosevelt, a man's man, the ultimate outdoorsman (in spite of his, er, somewhat ample physique). Vowell imagines his theme song as an arrangement of the Kinks' "I'm Not Like Everyone Else" butchered by a high school marching band. I don't even know the song (I don't think), but that seems a great way to usher in the 20th Century.

Vowell takes friends and family along for her touristy ride, mainly because she does not drive and needs rides, but how could anyone resist? I guess this book is for the rest of us.