This Day in Presidential History (John Wilkes Booth, Actor-Assassin, Born)

May 10, 1838—John Wilkes Booth, better known to posterity as a Presidential assassin than as a member of a major American theatrical family, was born in a log house on a farm near Bel Air, Md. The ninth of 10 children, he was a joyous, much-loved child who exhibited little of the hatred that led him to murder Abraham Lincoln.

In a post from nine years ago, I used the occasion of a benefit performance by John and brothers Edwin and Junius Booth Jr.—the only time the brothers appeared together onstage—to touch briefly on the dynamics of this family. But a greater more can be explored on this subject. 

Inevitably and endlessly, as with other assassins, Booth’s motives and psychology have invited questioning and speculation. In Stephen Sondheim’s musical on the cavalcade of figures who attempted to take the lives of Presidents, Assassins, the character called “Balladeer” voices this incredulity:

Why did you do it, Johnny?

Nobody agrees.

You who had everything,

What made you bring

A nation to its knees?

At first glance, Booth’s relationship with his father, Junius Brutus Booth—who, in 1835, wrote to Andrew Jackson, threatening to cut his throat while he slept—offers particular fodder for psycho-biography. 

Indeed, before that night at Ford’s Theater, if any member of the Booth family could be said to exhibit consistent, long-standing trouble signs that he might murder an American President, it would have been John’s father. In fact, John’s brother, Junius Jr., lamented that “a crack runs thro’ the male part of our family, myself included.”

John could, as his poet friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich observed, empty a barroom when he had become drunken and belligerent enough. But Junius Sr.’s drinking was far more advanced than John’s, and he engaged in constant alarming incidents—including shooting a man in the face, assaulting others, and attempting suicide several times—that John did not match.

Booth biographer Terry Alford takes issue with the notion that the Lincoln assassination was the pathetic last act of a lost, lone gunman. His Fortune's Fool sees the assassin as athletic, sexy (female fans tried to tear at his clothes when he passed by), well-liked not just by fellow actors but lowly stagehands, and intelligent enough to direct a conspiracy that might have not only killed Lincoln, but also Vice-President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.

Instead of bizarre personal behavior, Alford suggests, the pre-assassination Booth evinced political extremism—a hatred of abolitionism so extreme that the actor changed his plans from merely kidnapping Lincoln to killing him after the President suggested in a speech that, for the first time in Presidential history, he would consider supporting the right to vote for some freedmen. 

In contrast, Nora Titone describes John as being locked in a contest for recognition with his father and brother Edwin that he could not win. In My Thoughts Be Bloody, she relates how John’s over-the-top acting style did not win the level of critical or popular recognition achieved by Edwin’s more naturalistic one.

Even the brothers’ agreement to stake out their own sphere of influence—Edwin in the North, John in the South—proved unintentionally disastrous, as war and  privation thinned out audiences in the Confederacy after Fort Sumter. This only fed Johns’s growing alienation not only from his family, but also from the America emerging from the ashes of the Civil War—one that no longer permitted even the small number of slaves on the Booth farm in Maryland in John’s childhood.

An actor himself, Booth might have been chagrined at the thought that he would inspire other thespians to play him on stage and screen as a wide-eyed fanatic. Notable examples include director Raoul Walsh (uncredited) in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation; John Derek in the 1955 biopic about brother Edwin, Prince of Players; Toby Kebbell in the Robert Redford-directed The Conspirator; and Victor Garber, in Sondheim’s Assassins.

Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on MLK and Malcolm X)

“I don’t think that any black person can speak of Malcolm [X] and Martin [Luther King Jr.] without wishing that they were here. It is not possible for me to speak of them without a sense of loss and grief and rage; and with the sense, furthermore, of having been forced to undergo an unforgivable indignity, both personal and vast. Our children need them, which is, indeed, the reason that they are not here: and now we, the blacks, must make certain that our children never forget them. For the American republic has always done everything in its power to destroy our children’s heroes, with the clear (and sometimes clearly stated) intention of destroying our children’s hope. This endeavor has doomed the American nation: mark my words.”—African-American novelist-essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “Malcolm and Martin,” in No Name in the Street (1972)

(I took the image accompanying this post over four years ago, while visiting the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, DC.)

This Day in Literary History (Columnist Kilgallen Dies Mysteriously)

November 8, 1965—Dorothy Kilgallen, veteran newspaper columnist and celebrity panelist on TV’s long-running game show What’s My Line?, died at age 52 in her New York City apartment. Had she been alive to see it happen to someone else, the odd circumstances surrounding her demise would have thrilled to the marrow this longtime crime reporter and gossip maven.  The timing alone was eye-opening, as she was well into what promised to be the biggest story of her career: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

In a prior post, I discussed how Kilgallen and husband Richard Kollmar became involved in a radio feud by imitating the spouse-breakfast talk show of Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald. Kilgallen’s career and her relationship are worth entire posts in themselves.

But the nature of her death says much by itself about how even the spotlight inevitably created by great celebrity is not enough to ensure more than a cursory police investigation—and how conspiracy theorists batten on such amateurish detective work.

“What happened to Dorothy?” is the insistent, breathless refrain of Lee Israel’s biography Kilgallen. At points, she gives serious credence to the fevered speculations of arch conspiracy theorist Mark Lane. It is also difficult to know Ms. Israel’s own subsequent troubled history (a guilty plea in federal court to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property in interstate commerce, part of a scheme to forge and sell hundreds of letters by the likes of Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Lillian Hellman) and not wonder seriously about the biographer's credibility.

But a number of the circumstances that Ms. Israel and others have recounted about Ms. Kilgallen’s death can only lead to wondering about the slipshod work of the NY Police Department at this time:

*She was found in the apartment’s master bedroom, which she had not occupied for several years;

*She was found sitting up with a book, but her eyeglasses were not in the bedroom where she died;

*She went out, after taping What’s My Line?, to both her usual bar, P.J. Clarke’s, and the Regency Lounge, but no patrons at the former were interviewed and police were not even aware that she had gone to the latter;

*She was known to be working on the Kennedy assassination story, but none of her notes were ever discovered.

The coroner’s determination that Ms. Kilgallen died through a mixture of alcohol and barbiturates did nothing to quell the nascent JFK assassination conspiracy industry. The columnist had never been satisfied with the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, and the rumor that she was pursuing leads following an eight-minute interview with Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, only increased skepticism among those inclined to distrust the official version of events.

Kilgallen was definitely among the latter. Her interest in the assassination was a natural outgrowth of her fascination in the last few years before her death with several types of stories: CIA attempts to murder Fidel Castro, famous homicide cases, and gossip about high-level officials on both sides of the Atlantic.

In addition, she had learned, at least by the second year of Kennedy’s administration, that he was a philanderer, and, after receiving a copy of the Warren Commission Report prior to publication, she had started raising pointed questions about it, both on particular points (Who was the “rich oil man” mentioned in the report’s discussion, since no witness was cited?) and in general (“It's a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances”). She was hoping that a chapter on the assassination in a proposed book of hers, Murder One, would land the biggest scoop of her career.

Israel’s biography offers ample evidence of Ms. Kilgallen’s increased drinking and unhappy marriage (including an affair with singer Johnnie Ray). Indeed, the biographer could not dismiss the possibility that Kilgallen may have taken her own life, in despondency of a much younger man referred to by Israel as “The Out-of-Towner.”

No matter in what way Ms. Kilgallen died, it came to obscure a career in which she was a trailblazer for subsequent female journalists. She had leaped to fame in 1936, the result of a 21-day race around the world against two older male reporters (recounted in her book Girl Around the World). By 1950, her column had an estimated 20 million readers. Her métier may have been murder trials, most notably those involving Bruno Richard Hauptmann and Dr. Sam Sheppard. (In the case of the latter, her disbelief about the initial jury verdict and deposition about the judge’s bias were instrumental in eventually freeing the defendant.)

Despite the occasional archness of her prose and descents into rightwing nonsense about Communists in her gossip column, Ms. Kilgallen brought a skeptical, questioning intelligence to her work. The NYPD could have used some of that in investigating her death.

Flashback, April 1865: Thousands Bid ‘Bye to Honest Abe in NYC

For two straight days, in the city where he made one of his crucial pre-election speeches—the same metropolis that, three years later, rioted over the draft in the war he waged against slavery—hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers paid their final respects as the funeral train of the Abraham Lincoln made its long, sad journey.

In 1860, Lincoln delivered a speech at Cooper Union that solidified his credentials as a credible candidate for the Republican nomination for President against favorite son Sen. William H. Seward. While in the city, on the same day as his speech, he had also had his photo taken by Mathew Brady, in firm if ironic recognition that his admittedly homely appearance, as part of his campaign, needed to take this step in image creation.

But the city, never really a stronghold of GOP sentiment, had voted for his Democratic opponent that fall in the Presidential race, and again in his reelection campaign four years later. Worse, in July 1863, in one of the greatest non-battlefield crises of the Civil War, poverty-stricken Irish and Irish-Americans, unable to buy a substitute for themselves or another family member, had reacted to the appalling death toll at the Battle of Gettysburg with the worst riot in American history.

It was all so much different on April 24-25, 1865, when 10 days of grieving over his assassination culminated in hundreds of thousands turning out for ceremonies honoring the President. The ferryboat Jersey City moved across the Hudson River with the coffin.

When it disembarked in New York and began its move toward City Hall, it was said, men uniformly doffed their caps and women burst into tears. It was hard to tell how much the atmosphere resulted from the German choral singers keening a funeral ode from the first book of Horace; how much from the ugly new reality of American Presidents who would require protection from assassins’ bullets; and how much from a sudden, awestruck realization that, in the simultaneous destruction of slavery and preservation of the Union, Lincoln had accomplished something that few could have foreseen before the war.

It was, all told, an astonishing turn of events, and perhaps with no irony more supreme than the change in attitude of George Templeton Strong, whose decades-long diary serves as a fascinating barometer of Gotham’s conventional wisdom in the decades immediately preceding and following the Civil War.

In mid-September 1862, this conservative attorney and public-minded citizen wrote of the President, when the prospects for victory looked dark: “This honest old codger was the last to fall, but he has fallen. Nobody believes in him any more. I do not, though I still maintain him. I cannot bear to admit the country has no man to believe in, and that honest Abe Lincoln is not the style of goods we want just now. But it is impossible to resist the conviction that he is unequal to his place."

Over the next two and a half years, however, Lincoln rose in Strong’s estimation. By the time he set down his thoughts on the President three days after the assassination—and just before he himself was to go to Washington for the President’s funeral—the diarist had quite forgotten his own former dismissal of Lincoln, though not other people’s:

“What a place this man, whom his friends have been patronizing for four years as a well-meaning, sagacious, kind-hearted, ignorant, old codger, had won for himself in the hearts of the people! What a place he will fill in history! I foresaw most clearly that he would be ranked high as the Great Emancipator twenty years hence, but I did not suppose his death would instantly reveal — even to Copperhead newspaper editors — the nobleness and the glory of his part in this great contest. It reminds one of the last line of Blanco White's great sonnet, 'If Light can thus deceive, where not Life?' Death has suddenly opened the eyes of the people (and I think of the word) to the fact that a hero has been holding high place among them for four years, closely watched and studied, but despite and rejected by a third of this community, and only tolerated by the other two-thirds."

Strong had shown scant sympathy for Irish and German immigrants who, unlike his class, could not buy their way out of the draft during the war. Many in that group, to be sure, had shown little sympathy for abolitionism, associating it with the forces that had made them cannon fodder during the recent fighting. 

But now they, too, turned out in force for Lincoln: Irish firemen were among the thousands in the parade down Broadway, on the 24^th, in the President’s honor, along with Germans, Italians, ministers of all denominations, as well as bakers, cigarmakers, Freemasons, glee club members, and temperance activists.

Whites were represented overwhelmingly in the parade. They were, in fact, overrepresented in comparison with the originally planned composition of the tribute. According to Adam Goodheart’s article on the funeral train, in the April 2015 issue of National Geographic, as many as 5,000 African-American freedmen had intended to come out for their liberator from slavery. 

But several days before the parade, a decree by aldermen stated that blacks would not be allowed in the procession. Even a telegram from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton granting permission, along with a number of sympathetic whites marching side by side, had not been enough to reverse the impact of the initial decree, as only several hundred freedmen marched. The demonstration of naked Northern racism signaled that in the coming Reconstruction era, the support of whites in assisting freedmen's adjustment to a turbulent, even violent postwar world would, at best, be grudging.

The procession appears not only to have affected marchers, but at least one onlooker: six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. In the image accompanying this post, the future President is believed to be looking out the open window in the building to the left with younger brother Elliott.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss’ account traces our knowledge of the event to TR’s widow, who had been his childhood friend at the time. Edith Carow Roosevelt recalled after his death that she had been with him and his brother. As she watched, the three-year-old girl, upset by “all the black drapings” around her, had burst into tears.  While she was steered into another room, her future husband and kid brother were left to take in the spectacle below.

TR, uncharacteristically, left no written record of his impressions. Perhaps it brought up associations he would have preferred to forget in later years—the same way he never referred, for the rest of his life, to the deaths, within 24 hours of each other, of his first wife and mother. 

As an adult, Roosevelt was effusive in praising his Republican predecessor in the White House. In his Autobiography, he contrasted the view of the Presidency he took—what he called the “Lincoln-Jackson” expansive view—with the “narrowly legalistic” Buchanan-Taft “school.”

But the Roosevelt household, like pre-assassination New York and the nation as a whole, had been at best ambivalent and at worst sharply divided in its feelings about the war and the President who conducted it. TRs father, while a stalwart supporter of Lincoln, felt constrained by the southern sympathies of his wife ("an unreconstructed rebel,"in the younger Roosevelt's phrase) to stay on the sidelines when it came to donning a uniform in the fight. As a result, he paid a substitute to take his place in the draft. In adulthood, young TR felt so embarrassed by his father’s decision to remain out of the fighting that he could not enlist fast enough when the Spanish-American War broke out.