DESTINY of the REPUBLIC

This is Candice Millard's stunning look at the assassination of our twentieth President, James Garfield. It's hard to believe that in the 1880s the President of the United States didn't have Secret Service protection, or doctors that believed that germs existed! If Garfield had either of these, he probably would have gone on to become a great President. As it turns out, Secret Service worked strictly on counterfeiting and protection didn't become a reality until after President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, NY in 1901. Europe had adopted antiseptic surgery sixteen years before Garfield was shot, but the U.S. Medical Congress deemed the idea of "invisible germs to be ridiculous".

Millard spends an equal amount of time on the life and thoughts of the assassin madman, Charles Guiteau ("God wanted him to kill the president"), Garfield's rise from poverty to president, and Alexander Graham Bell's race to perfect an induction balance machine that would enable him to locate the bullet in Garfield's back. Unfortunately for Garfield, his surgical team led by Dr. D.Willard Bliss probed the bullet hole for 79 days using their dirty fingers and non-sterile probes. It's no wonder that at Charles Guiteau's trial, he admitted firing the bullet, but stated, "General Garfield died from malpractice".

Also expertly intertwined in this book is a overview of the corrupt spoils system used by political parties from 1828 until the election of Garfield in 1880. Garfield attempted to break this system, issuing offices by merit versus a rewards system for help in winning the election. His main adversary in this struggle was Senator Roscoe Conkling from NY and his lackey Chester Arthur, who was hand picked by Conkling to be Garfield's Vice-President. (As a sidebar to this issue, Arthur became a good man after he became president, shocking Roscoe Conkling into retirement.)  After Garfield passed away, his wife, Lucretia, added a wing to their farmhouse in Ohio to store the president's papers, thus creating the first Presidential Library.

Millard has written a delightfully engaging non-fiction history book, but it reads like a chilling murder novel. Well done! I'm going to have to read her first book, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. My recommendation is simple: get this book and read it; it's great!

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: Candice Millard got her Master's degree in literature from Baylor University. Both of her books made the New York Times Best Seller List. She is a former editor of National Geographic and lives in Kansas City.