Assassination Vacation
by Sarah Vowell
Well, now here I sit all aggrieved. But for a lucky chance--not aided by either the author or her publisher--I wouldn't have read this very good work. At no time in the publicity campaign did anyone tell me Sarah Vowell was more than just a pretty face and a strong vein of sarcasm. My good fortune the book found its way into the house on other business.
Turns out she is a driven student of history with a powerful interest in American assassinations. She's also a graceful writer. In this book she recounts some of her explorations into the killings of presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. (The attempts on Theodore Roosevelt, Truman, Ford and Reagan get mentions too.) The form is a travelogue: Vowell hangs all the stories on visits made, often with a put-upon sister and an aphorist toddler nephew, to places associated with these presidents and their assassins.
When Assassination Vacation came out, interviewers focused on the macabre sightseeing and played down both the scholarship and Vowell's integrity. So I grimly concluded there was no need to pick it up. Wrong! The author's preparation--she must have a considerable library behind her--and her serious stance (hardly ever solemn) make this a rather touching and utterly engrossing account of a disagreeable history.
The book opens at a performance of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, one of the few American musicals that actually contains an idea you can go home and talk about. Assassins asks the musical question, Does killing a president ever rise to the level of political action? Well, of course every one of the killers says yes, but we know they're all crazy. Can we, though, sanely identify a sense in which assassination fits into our political process and even becomes a mandate? This is dangerous ground (and while the show continues to get produced, it makes audiences fidget in a way that The Sound of Music doesn't). Sondheim innovates twice: first by giving each killer time to tell what led to the fatal resolve, second by making all the killers sing in chorus so that we must see them as a party, not a random collection of deranged Americans with pistols. It is a brilliant book and, maybe, one with a future.
Vowell looks at a milder form of the question: In the lives of Booth and Lincoln, of Guiteau and Garfield, of Czolgosz and McKinley, of Fromme and Ford, what led these pairs together and what followed from their encounters? Specifically, how have their stories become geography?
Which means that AV isn't really about going to the house where Garfield died or viewing McKinley's tomb, and it emphatically isn't about scoring comic points off those who do. You get the Sarah Vowell sense of humor, but in the form of reports from an engaged observer. (You wouldn't meet the folks in New Jersey who maintain the Garfield death site unless you knew enough to find the Garfield death site. The preservationists speak seriously to the author because she speaks seriously to them. It happens that they say amusing things, too: a twofer.)
Pay no mind to the hectic Daily Show irony or the knee-slapping Sarah Vowell voice. Read this book because it's good and because it's funny.
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Books and plays:
History and Archaeology
Assassination Vacation