'Destiny' probes James Garfield's murder

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard. Doubleday, 339 pp., $28.95.

The story of James A. Garfield almost always begins with his death. In "The Destiny of the Republic," Candice Millard gives him life.

Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was an accomplished scholar, general and senator. He nominated John Sherman at the 1880 Republican Convention, only to be chosen himself on the 36th ballot. Millard's title is from that speech.

Charles Guiteau, his delusional assassin, was a job seeker who believed he was on a divine mission -- and also thought he should be named consul to France.

The shots fired by Guiteau were only the beginning of Garfield's torment. He endured for 80 days, treated by doctors whose 19th century medical techniques approached the medieval.

Millard chronicles all this with precision and skill. She creates a vivid portrait of the times, a vulnerable nation, political hardball, nightmarish decision-making and the eloquent Garfield, who's merely a footnote for generations of high school students.

She covers topics as diverse as the fiefdom of New York senator and patronage dispenser Roscoe Conkling, and the mind of Alexander Graham Bell, working on an electrical device to find the bullet lodged in Garfield's back. Millard seamlessly unfolds multiple tales.

Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin and grew up desperately poor. He worked on the Erie Canal at 16, and nearly drowned in it.

"Providence only could have saved my life," he later wrote. "Providence, therefore, thinks it is worth saving."

Guiteau had survived the catastrophic 1880 collision of the steamships Stonington and Narragansett. "Guiteau felt certain that he had not been spared, but rather selected -- chosen by God for a task of tremendous importance," Millard writes.

Garfield would go from canal man to Williams College honors graduate and become a member of Congress seeking equal rights for slaves. Millard notes, "He admired men who seemed not to notice even the most insurmountable of obstacles."

At the nation's Centennial Exhibition, Garfield would marvel at advances in science. This world's fair featured Bell unveiling an "iron box receiver" that would become the telephone. Nearby, Joseph Lister advocated "preventing infection by destroying germs," a complex system resisted by most American doctors.

Millard finds the ironies of history throughout this stirring narrative, one that's full of suspense even though you know what's coming. She makes you a witness, not a reader. It's richly detailed storytelling from the author of "The River of Doubt," about Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing Amazon trip.

Here, she describes a gracious president constantly faced with people wanting positions in the administration. Guiteau was a frequent visitor and applicant. Finally rejected, the deranged Guiteau thought, "If the President was out of the way, every thing would go better." At the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station, Guiteau fired the gun he had carried for a month.

A bullet broke two of Garfield's ribs but didn't hit a vital organ. The first doctor there probed the wound with an unsterilized finger, "almost certainly introducing an infection that was far more lethal than Guiteau's bullet."

D. Willard Bliss, Garfield's chief physician, "had very little respect for Lister's theories on infection and even less in following his complicated methods for antisepsis." Searching for the bullet, Bliss inserted two unsterilized probes and then a finger into Garfield's back.

Bliss viewed other doctors as threats and isolated Garfield. The president, in constant, excruciating pain in a White House full of rotting woodwork and vermin, remained a "wonderfully patient sufferer."

A four-hour autopsy found that the cause of death was septic poisoning. The bullet was on the left side, not the much-probed right. Millard concludes that "far from preventing or even delaying the president's death, his doctors very likely caused it."

Guiteau went to the gallows. President Chester Arthur, a former Conkling associate, advocated civil service reform. Lister would be seen as "the greatest conqueror of disease."

And Bliss, who stubbornly insisted that Garfield died of a broken backbone, submitted a $25,000 bill to Congress.

It was cut to $6,500.

The players in 'Destiny of the Republic'

JAMES A. GARFIELD -- The 20th president of the United States, second to be assassinated. Former professor of ancient languages, literature, mathematics; Civil War hero; senator; abolitionist; Republican. Didn't seek presidency. Compromise choice at divided GOP convention.

CHARLES GUITEAU -- History of mental illness. Family members believed he should be institutionalized. Once a member of Oneida Community. Lawyer. Disgruntled job-seeker in GOP. Shot Garfield. Believed he'd be freed. Hanged.

JOSEPH LISTER -- Pivotal figure in medicine and modern surgery. Pioneered antiseptic treatment focusing on cleanliness and prevention of infection. Used antiseptic treatment with carbolic acid as disinfectant. Made a British peer for his service to medicine.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL -- Inventor of the telephone. Worked to develop an induction-balance device to locate the bullet in Garfield's back, but search made on wrong side of Garfield's body. Worked on a precursor to the X-ray machine, used in World War I.

CHESTER A. ARTHUR -- The 21st president of the United States and Garfield's vice president. Associated with New York GOP senator and patronage boss Roscoe Conkling. Considered unqualified, he earned respect. Not nominated for a second term.

EXCERPT: "Destiny of the Republic" by Candice Millard

CHAPTER 10

"The Dark Dreams of Presidents"

"History is but the unrolled scroll of Prophecy." -- James A. Garfield

The idea came to Guiteau suddenly, "like a flash," he would later say. On May 18, two days after Conkling's dramatic resignation, Guiteau, "depressed and perplexed ... wearied in mind and body," had climbed into bed at 8:00 p.m., much earlier than usual. He had been lying on his cot in his small, rented room for an hour, unable to sleep, his mind churning, when he was struck by a single, pulsing thought: "If the President was out of the way every thing would go better."

Guiteau was certain the idea had not come from his own, feverish mind. It was a divine inspiration, a message from God. He was, he believed, in a unique position to recognize divine inspiration when it occurred because it had happened to him before. Even before the wreck of the steamship Stonington, he had been inspired, he said, to join the Oneida Community, to leave so that he might start a religious newspaper, and to become a traveling evangelist. Each time God had called him, he had answered.

This time, for the first time, he hesitated. Despite his certainty that the message had come directly from God, he did not want to listen. The next morning, when the thought returned "with renewed force," he recoiled from it. "I was kept horrified," he said, "kept throwing it off." Wherever he went and whatever he did, however, the idea stayed with him. "It kept growing upon me, pressing me, goading me."

Guiteau had "no ill-will to the President," he insisted. In fact, he believed that he had given Garfield every opportunity to save his own life. He was certain that God wanted Garfield out of the way because he was a danger to the Republican Party and, ultimately, the American people. As Conkling's war with Garfield had escalated, Guiteau wrote to the president repeatedly, advising him that the best way to respond to the senator's demands was to give in to them. "It seems to me that the only way out of this difficulty is to withdraw Mr. R.," he wrote, referring to Garfield's appointment of Judge Robertson to run the New York Customs House. "I am on friendly terms with Senator Conkling and the rest of our Senators, but I write this on my own account and in the spirit of a peacemaker."

Guiteau also felt that he had done all he could to warn Garfield about Blaine. After the secretary of state had snapped at him outside of the State Department, he bitterly recounted the exchange in a letter to Garfield. "Until Saturday I supposed Mr. Blaine was my friend in the matter of the Paris consulship," he wrote, still wounded by the memory. " 'Never speak to me again,' said Mr. Blaine, Saturday, 'on the Paris consulship as long as you live.' Heretofore he has been my friend."

Even after his divine inspiration, Guiteau continued to appeal to Garfield. On May 23, he again wrote to the president, advising him to demand Blaine's "immediate resignation." "I have been trying to be your friend," he wrote darkly. "I do not know whether you appreciate it or not." Garfield would be wise to listen to him, he warned, "otherwise you and the Republican party will come to grief. I will see you in the morning if I can and talk with you."

Guiteau did not see Garfield the next morning, or any day after that. Unknown to him, he had been barred from the president's office. Even among the strange and strikingly persistent office seekers that filled Garfield's anteroom every day, Guiteau had stood out. Brown, Garfield's private secretary, had long before relegated Guiteau's letters to what was known as "the eccentric file," but he continued to welcome him to the White House with the same courtesy he extended to every other caller. That did not change until Guiteau's eccentricity and doggedness turned into belligerence. Finally, after a heated argument with one of the president's ushers that ended with Guiteau sitting in a corner of the waiting room, glowering, Brown issued orders that "he should be quietly kept away."

Soon after, Guiteau stopped going to the White House altogether. He gave up trying to secure an appointment, and he no longer fought the press of divine inspiration. For two weeks, he had prayed to God to show him that he had misunderstood the message he had received that night. "That is the way I test the Deity," he would later explain. "When I feel the pressure upon me to do a certain thing and I have any doubt about it I keep praying that the Deity may stay it in some way if I am wrong." Despite his prayers and constant vigilance, he had received no such sign.

By the end of May, Guiteau had given himself up entirely to his new obsession. Alone in his room, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to, he pored over newspaper accounts of the battle between Conkling and the White House, fixating on any criticism of Garfield, real or implied. "I kept reading the papers and kept being impressed," he remembered, "and the idea kept bearing and bearing and bearing down upon me." Finally, on June 1, thoroughly convinced of "the divinity of the inspiration," he made up his mind. He would kill the president.

Excerpted from "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President" by Candice Millard. Copyright © 2011 by Candice Millard. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.