Assassination Vacation
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In her new book, Assassination Vacation, Vowell leads readers on a virtual tour of the murders of three late-19th-century presidents: William McKinley, James A. Garfield, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. Strapping the narrative to an exhaustive physical exploration of sites associated with the murders–from Ford’s Theatre to the seaside Jersey town where Garfield went to die to the Adirondack rail depot where vice president Theodore Roosevelt learned of McKinley’s death–she gradually develops her canny thesis, which maps the excesses of the Gilded Age, its nascent imperialism in particular, onto the capital-stoked interventionism of our own day. While owning up to some sympathy for the assassins given the current oval occupant, Vowell sees a stronger kinship between the killers and their victims. “The egomania required to be a president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts,” she writes. “The assassins and presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are?” The comparison is valid if old hat–noted historian Peter Gabriel, for one, made it in 1980 in “Family Snapshot”–and the question is a good one, though one might very well ask it of the author herself.
It’s not that Vowell, or her endless supply of articulate friends–many doubling as chauffeurs–don’t have a lot of interesting things to say. Or that some of their facts are a little fuzzier than you’d hope (the dates on one incidental sketch, of the doomed Spanish king “El Hechizado,” are only off by, oh, 100 years or so). It’s that the history itself is more interesting, and you’re constantly being pulled out of it by Vowell’s tangents, some of which work but many of which don’t. When describing the not-so-famous pocket contents of the deceased John Wilkes Booth, for example, she reasonably enough introduces them by way of the rather-more-famous contents of the martyred Abe’s. Why it’s necessary to also enumerate the contents of her own is less clear. The comparison feels phony and forced, and while I can see how it might make her experience more meaningful, it didn’t do much for mine.
Maybe it has something to do with the way Roosevelt, through sheer force of personality, damn near crowds McKinley out of the chapter, an appropriate development given that he did the same thing in real life. In any event TR’s big entrance, which caps all the background material on unrest at home and the Spanish-American War abroad, seems to shove this history aside more than sum it up. And following a muted acknowledgment of the degree to which Teddy’s legacy doesn’t quite jibe with her sins-of-the-fathers thesis, Vowell retreats to the consideration of her navel, and the proclamation of her personal convictions.
Sarah Vowell
