Playboy's History of Assassination in America

Part II

After Lincoln, The Deluge

Assassination has never changed the history of the world. --Disraeli, On Lincoln's Death

The demons of assassination politics scourged America and the world following 1865. Booth's death kiss proved aphrodisiacal. In the 49 years from Lincoln's death until the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 unleashed the hounds of World War One, one head of state or major minister fell nearly every 18 months.

Lincoln's funeral cortege itself, wailing at each whistle stop, crossroad and town, proved the efficacy of assassination. The cars snaked through the North and around the South's hopes for a merciful reconciliation. Crowds cried vengeance on the rebels. The dead President's lenient attitude toward the defeated states perished under the hooves of carpetbaggers and their enemies, the Klansmen. The world saw that assassination worked, even if Disraeli did not, and even if the effects were ultimately incalculable. Assassination was affirmed an instrument of change, not a casual killing. Lincoln's death, together with an emergent Continental anarchism, seemed to open a golden age of assassination. Certainly, this was so in America.

Andrew Johnson watched, quaking in Lincoln's boots, as 13 officeholders were shot at during his inherited term. Twelve were killed, most of them Republicans changing things down South. Compared with that, Johnson's impeachment proceedings were safe, however much people whispered he'd benefited from just such a murder.

During Ulysses S. Grant's tenure, from 1869 to 1877, there were 20 attacks on public servants. Everything from sheriffs to collectors to governors was in season. Eleven were slain.

Assassins were busy elsewhere, too. The world's stage resembled Hamlet's body-strewn last scene: in 1870, a prime minister of Spain; and through the years, the president of Ecuador and dozens of lesser functionaries of Latin America, the Balkans and Europe shot, stabbed and bombed, until, in 1877, the killers seemed to pause for breath.

In America, this hiatus was the term of Rutherford B. Hayes, a span as uneventful as its President is unremembered. If, as is thought, assassinations protest ineffective government, then Hayes's Administration was the best of the 19th Century. But then came 1881.

The czar of all the Russias received the first message that assassins were alive again. On March 13, 1881--nine days after James Garfield was inaugurated as our 20th President--Alexander II was shattered by a bomb lobbed his way by radicals. American newspapers reacted with outrage (Lincoln was still on their minds) and blasted the totalitarian rule that could cause such crimes, such nihilists. For his part, Alexander II cried, "To the palace to die," and he did.

The next pertinent comment on assassination came four months later, on July 2, 1881, from James Garfield. Shot twice from behind with a .44 British bulldog revolver, the new Chief Executive cried, "My God, what is this?"

It was, of course, assassination again come to an American President. It proved that Lincoln's murder was not an aberration but a persistent illness roaming the body politic--and that its causes and effects were as varied as its executors. Charles Guiteau, the addled man collared immediately for shooting Garfield, seemed to be many things, though they were summed up in the phrase that won the immortality Guiteau did not. He was ordained our archetypal "disappointed office seeker."

•

Garfield was a winner. Guiteau was a loser. The score was kept by each against what the land of opportunity had promised and what to each had been delivered. For both men there was the incongruity of their reward with what might have been expected. For the victim, America had fulfilled his dream. For his killer, the dream left an ashy morning mouth, a hangover that has sickened American assassins down to the present.

James Abram Garfield was a Republican, like his predecessors Grant and Hayes. Like them, he was a Civil War veteran (what man wasn't, after all?). He was self-made, working his way up from canal laborer to college president, to general, to Congressman--and finally to President. Not without a struggle, to be sure. The meaning of the dream, of the bootstrap ethic, was struggle.

With Chester A. Arthur as the Vice-Presidential nominee, Garfield was elected in November 1880 over the Democratic war hero Winfield S. Hancock, who was forgotten before the campaign banners were down. His plurality was fewer than 10.000 votes. Still, the nation embraced this new leader. He seemed thoughtful and certainly struck a fine figure with his imposing beard, his vigorous youth (he was only 48) and his workingman's physique. Boys were told that someday they, too, might rise so far, so fast.

Charles Julius Guiteau had, unfortunately, always believed that. He was 39 when he shot Garfield, a 5'5", 120-pound man who had started along almost every route America's success map offered--and never arrived. Business, religion, politics--he tried them all, and in the end they brought him that July to the Baltimore and Potomac railway depot with his eight-dollar revolver.

Guiteau had been a sickly, nervous child, who became the youngest when the next two children died in infancy. His mother suffered post-partum psychosis with Guiteau's birth. She died when he was seven, dealing the boy an emotional blow hard to endure. For Guiteau, however, a domineering patriarch was real and near. His father was a zealous Huguenotdescended tyrant who beat his family religiously while alternately preaching the virtues of the Oneida Community's "Bible communism" (free love, fear of God, hard work) and Reformation Protestantism (just fear of God and hard work).

The elder Guiteau saw the world as a struggle between good and evil. Charles would be good, or else.

Not surprisingly, Guiteau grew up with a mania for self-improvement. Such activities could dampen the evil lurking in him and simultaneously lead him to the success America expected (other assassins--notably James Earl Ray--tried wholeheartedly before their killings to be "better" or "somebody"). Thus, Guiteau's several careers all aimed at making it, as Garfield had.

By 1860, he was at the Oneida Community in New York State, a convert to founder John Humphrey Noyes's beliefs. This delighted his father, with whom Guiteau had quarreled over Noyes's doctrines (Charles was then into body building). But Guiteau found the community's criticism sessions embarrassing and, even in a place where puritan sexual morality was anathema, he did not do well with women. His work in the animal-trap factory bored him, accented his own trapped feeling. Finally, he retrieved the balance of a bequest of his grandfather's from the communal purse and went to New York with an ambition to form a theocratic daily newspaper. He said he was "in the employ of Jesus Christ and Company, the very ablest and strongest firm in the universe." Probably the notion of the Savior as the chairman of the board had never been better expressed, but the paper didn't get started. It seemed no one wanted to invest in Jesus' medium. So it was back to Oneida for a while, full of humility, and then back out again, full of anger.

Guiteau went to Chicago, found work as a law clerk and, with the ease customary then, was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1868. In 1869, he married a Y.M.C.A. librarian named Annie Bunn. It was not a happy union. When he was not practicing his speeches and assaying his schemes for success with Annie, he was beating her. "I am your master," he'd holler. His law practice consisted of bill collecting, for which he was marvelously endowed with glibness, persistence, callousness and his own nature as a dead beat. He and Annie lived by moving into apartments and boarding-houses, then leaving before the bill was presented.

Yet a leonine ambition somehow survived in this ferrety existence. Guiteau sought its accomplishment in 1872 during Horace Greeley's Presidential campaign. He became a familiar figure at Democratic headquarters in New York. Although people avoided this nervous, volatile man who was constantly composing campaign speeches no one would deliver, Guiteau became convinced that if Greeley were elected, he would be made minister to Chile. His wife later recalled that was all he talked about. He made diplomatic addresses to her, or to a mirror, and bought, on credit, appropriate clothes. When Greeley lost, Guiteau was morose for months. He did manage in 1874 to sleep with a prostitute, who testified to the fact so as to facilitate his divorce on the grounds of adultery. He continued to collect bills, most often keeping the whole amount repossessed as his "commission." When he was exposed as the most notorious shyster in town by James Gordon Bennett's Herald, he initiated a suit against the New York publisher for $100,000 in libel damages. But he decamped for Chicago when another man brought charges against him.

In 1880, Guiteau became a politician--a Republican, obviously (Greeley, the Democrat, had failed him). In Boston, he composed a campaign speech for Grant, the Stalwart Republicans' choice. (The party of Lincoln was divided between the Stalwart, or conservative, wing and the Half-Breed, or liberal, faction.) What better aid could a formidable orator offer? But when Garfield, the compromise candidate, won the nomination, Guiteau switched both location and loyalty. He went to New York, there to shuffle about in shabby dress among the ward heelers at the Republican headquarters. He beseeched known and unknown politicos to let him take the stump. He had a new speech, appropriately strident and anti-South, called "Garfield vs. Hancock," which, if delivered, would assure the Democrats' defeat. Their proposals to give Treasury money to the South for rebuilding, to forgive war debts, would be annihilated. Guiteau could guarantee Garfield's election.

He had the speech printed. In New York, he passed out copies to prominent Republicans. Some offhandedly said they thought it interesting. Guiteau was elated. Once, he tried to speak his piece at a Negro rally on 25th Street, but the half dozen who listened tired of his manic disjointedness about the same time he became too rattled to continue.

Nevertheless, when Garfield won, Guiteau was sure "Garfield vs. Hancock" had tipped the election. Now he would go to Washington and collect his reward, preferably an ambassadorship, preferably to Vienna. "We have cleaned them out," he wrote to Garfield, whom he'd never met.

•

With ten dollars--an insurance commission--in hand, Guiteau went to Washington on March 5, 1881, to press his application in person. He had badgered Garfield by mail since October, telling him, among other lies, that he'd soon marry a wealthy woman (he'd seen her at church in New York) who would perfectly adorn the Ambassador's residence in Vienna. He had also trapped General Grant at the G.O.P. office in New York, asking that the former President sign a letter recommending him for the envoy's post. When all failed, Guiteau went to Washington. His days there count down from a Death of a Salesman to the death of a President.

March 10: In Garfield's office, Guiteau presses a copy of his speech on the President inscribed "Charles Julius Guiteau" and "Paris consulship." Guiteau later said, "That is the only interview I ever had with General Garfield on the subject."

March 11: He sends Secretary of State James Blaine the speech, with a note saying, "It was this idea that elected General Garfield"--in the name of his Christianity and gentlemanly mien, Guiteau asks for the consulship.

March 25: He writes to Blaine again, asking for the consulship as "a personal tribute" and complimenting Garfield's choice of Blaine "for his premier."

March 26: He writes to Garfield, saying Blaine approves of him for the Paris job, and reminds the President of the favor due him.

April 2--4: Playing what he thinks is politics ("You tickle me and I tickle you," he later said), he first offers to help make Blaine President in 1884, then writes to Garfield that he'll help the incumbent defeat Blaine.

And so it went. Guiteau's already shabby wardrobe deteriorated with his spirits, as his dream, the dream, receded in the succession of snubs. His mind, never stable, sought refuge in invention. To salvage what he could of respectability, Guiteau used the President and Blaine as references and stayed in fashionable boardinghouses. Each day, until irate secretaries banished him, he'd appear at the While House, purloin stationery and send a note to the President, asking once more for the consulship. Then it was off to the State Department, or Congress, to importune whomever he'd encounter. A contemporary observer said "his own egotism" sustained him. In mid-May, the inevitable occurred: Guiteau's frustration, his ambition, his mental instability coalesced with a political crisis that provided him with both his scapegoat-target and the motivation for murder. Two New York Senators, both Stalwarts, resigned to protest Garfield's appointment of a HalfBreed as Customs collector in New York. Guiteau's sense of patronage was outraged. He clipped a Brooklyn Eagle editorial deploring Garfield's act as one sure to destroy the Republican Party.

On May 18, he was later to testify, he went to his rooming house "greatly depressed in mind and spirit from the political situation, and I should say it was about half past eight, before I had gone to sleep, when an impression came over my mind like a flash that if the President was out of the way, this whole thing would be solved and everything would go well. That is the first impression I had with reference to removing the President."

Thus, in trance--as with Theodore Roosevelt's attacker 30 years later--was born the idea of killing a President. Of course, for Guiteau, it was to be a "removal," a gesture to save the Republicans, hence the republic. He would be (continued on page 180)After Lincoln, The Deluge(continued from page 132) rewarded, he thought. The more he thought about it, in fact, the more he was convinced he had been inspired to this removal, that it was a "divine pressure" commanded by God and certainly not the Devil's work. Riding this conviction, he slid down the days until July second.

May 23: Guiteau wrote to Garfield that "Mr. Blaine is a wicked man, and you ought to demand his immediate resignation; otherwise, you and the Republican Party will come to grief."

June 6: He entered John O'Meara's gunshop to examine the largest pistol on display, the five-shot, .44-caliber British bulldog with a white-bone handle. "That will kill a horse," the amiable shopkeeper told Guiteau, who knew nothing of guns.

June 8: Borrowing $15 from a cousin, Guiteau bought the bulldog, a box of cartridges and, oddly, a woman's penknife--all for ten dollars. He took the fancy-handled gun because, he said later, it would look better in a museum. O'Meara showed him how to load and pointed out a good place to learn marksmanship, in a wood by the Potomac, not far from the White House. Guiteau would practice nearly every day, then repair to Lafayette Square, across from the Executive Mansion, where he relaxed.

June 12: Guiteau--like other American assassins--stalked his victim. He thought of shooting the President that Sunday in church but feared he might hit someone else. The temptation was strong, though, to kill in a sacred place.

June 16: With the compulsion to explain that has marked several of our assassins--clearest in the diaries of Booth and Sirhan--Guiteau composed an "Address to the American People," saying Garfield had wrecked the Republican Party "and for this he dies." There emerged from the cocoon of his obsession the usual justification for political murder: "This is not murder. It is a political necessity ... [it will] save the republic."

June 18: Guiteau had read that Garfield would go to Long Branch, New Jersey, with his sick wife. He resolved to shoot the President at the depot then but softened when he saw the frail Mrs. Garfield on her husband's arm and, besides, it was a "hot, sultry day." This peculiar susceptibility to emotional and climatic changes has marked other assassins, as we'll see in the cases of John Schrank, who attacked Theodore Roosevelt, and Giuseppe Zangara, who fired his pistol in the direction of Franklin Roosevelt. Such deflections, unhappily, are only temporary for the dedicated assassin.

June 25: Fixed in his goal, Guiteau visited the District of Columbia Jail to see for himself his future accommodations. He concluded that it was "a very excellent jail."

July 1: Evening in Lafayette Square. Guiteau watched Garfield leave the White House, cross Pennsylvania Avenue and stroll to Blaine's house nearby. Following, Guiteau stopped in an alley. Soon the Secretary of State and the President appeared, on their way back to the White House. Their amiability proved that the Half-Breeds were winning, just as Guiteau had said. Guiteau trailed Garfield and Blaine to the White House, watched their backs but did not attack. Again, he said it was too hot and sultry.

But the morning of July second was just right.

Guiteau left the fashionable Riggs House at five A.M., ambled to Lafayette Square, where he read a newspaper. At seven, he returned to the hotel for a good breakfast. In his room, he wrote a few letters, wrapped a package containing his autobiographical writings and put his revolver in his right hip pocket. He wore a clean white shirt, a black vest, a coat, trousers and a hat. A bit before nine, he left the Riggs House, ducking a bill for the last time. A horse car took him to the depot. There he arranged for a taxi to whisk him away from any lynch mob that might form after the shooting. It would take him to the Congressional Cemetery, an appropriate place close to the jail, whence he would run to turn himself in. Then he had his shoes shined. He had 20 cents left, not enough to pay the taxi driver two dollars for his escape, but for Guiteau that was a small matter. He left his package with a newsstand vendor, went to the rest room to verify that the revolver was in working order and waited for Garfield.

The President arrived about 9:20. Unguarded, he and Blaine strode through the ladies' waiting room. Guiteau stood behind a bench. When the two were almost across the room, Guiteau drew the bulldog, walked up behind the men and shot Garfield in the back, low and on the right. He fired again and the bullet grazed the collapsing President's arm. Guiteau ran for his taxi, but a policeman stopped him near the exit. "I wish to go to jail," he told the officer. "Arthur is President and I am a Stalwart." In his left hand, he held a note for General William Sherman. It explained how he had shot the President several times to make his death as easy as possible and asked for troops to protect the jail from violence.

On the depot floor, Dr. Smith Townsend, the District of Columbia health officer, examined Garfield's wound. He told the President it wasn't serious. Garfield replied, "I thank you, doctor, but I am a dead man." The blood spread over the gray traveling suit as the President was put onto a mattress, carried to a police ambulance and taken to a second-floor bedroom in the White House. The Cabinet rallied to his bedside. Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was Secretary of War. It had been 16 years since four conspirators had been hanged for the murder of his father, the first American President assassinated. At the White House, Lincoln said, "How many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town."

Immediately after the shooting, while the nation waited to learn whether or not Garfield would recover and so whether or not Guiteau would hang, the rumors of conspiracy spread. People remembered the Lincoln affair and shuddered. James Brooks, chief of the Secret Service, vowed to run down every lead. Word came in that behind the shooting were socialists, or still-smoldering Southerners, or disgruntled business leaders, or Continental nihilists. Henry Ward Beecher, like the Warren commissioners of our time, called it the "act of an isolated lunatic." And Brooks could find no evidence of a conspiracy. He had only Guiteau, safe in the District of Columbia Jail (though, as with Booth's conspirators, rumor had him in irons on a monitor in the Potomac--an ironic myth nourished by Garfield's being attended by Joseph K. Barnes, Army Surgeon General, who'd treated Lincoln after Booth's shot).

Guiteau relished his notoriety. He prepared statements for newsmen; thus, he helped create our first media assassination. He was quoted widely, most often saying that he had acted to save us all, at the behest of the Deity. Unmoved, the press vilified him while building Garfield to heights of human perfection unsealed even by the martyred Lincoln. The President's long illness gave writers ample time to canonize the stricken general.

In early September, the President, weak and in great pain, was conveyed in an excruciating rail journey to the New Jersey seashore, where he hoped he would feel better. Nothing helped. Though he rallied periodically, Garfield was doomed by the bulldog's bullet, which had smashed ribs and vertebrae before nicking a large artery and stopping behind the pancreas. An aneurysm formed on the artery, halting the bleeding. It kept him alive until it burst on September 19, when he died after an 11-week struggle against chills, fever, vomiting, increasing weakness and his own mystification. "He must have been crazy," Garfield had said of Guiteau.

With Garfield's death, the nation went mad with mourning and with anger. It now seems familiar to us--the princely funeral, the family grief, the national keening, the eulogies, the selling of a martyred President. There were also the cheap rumors, the denigrating folk songs, the phrenology pamphlets showing Guiteau's criminal, un-American mind.

He was brought to trial two months later, in November 1881. The issue was simple: Was he sane and so culpable? The decision was to mark our treatment of assassins for generations, but it and the effects of our second Presidential killing are quickly told.

Guiteau's behavior was manic. In the courtroom, he cavorted like the Chicago Seven. He mocked his well-meaning lawyers (including his brother-in-law) and heaped abuse ("old hog ... fraud") on the prosecution. He told Judge Walter Cox he stood in court as "an agent of the Deity." Judge Cox was lenient, perhaps because, in another irony, he had in 1865 defended Michael O'Laughlin and Samuel Arnold on charges in the Lincoln assassination, had then seen authorities ride roughshod over the rights of the accused. This consideration was lost on Guiteau, who claimed not only divine justification--"the actual interjection of some foreign substance into my brain"--but also secular approval. He displayed letters from admirers (James Earl Ray would get hundreds after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death) and announced that the Stalwarts would spring him so that he might stand for President when he was acquitted. His defense sought, naturally, to show him mad (just as Richard Lawrence, who attacked Andrew Johnson in 1835, had been declared insane and so was spared death). But the prosecution stood by England's common law, the M'Naghten rule, which stated that a person who knew the nature and consequences of his act, and knew it was forbidden by law, was sane and subject to trial. An alienist affirmed that Guiteau did know these things. Guiteau's former wife said he was sane, although how she arrived at that opinion is unknown.

The defense labored to show that Guiteau was chronically aberrant. His sister recounted how he had threatened her with an ax. A letter from his late father was introduced, which opined that Charles was "a fit subject for a lunatic asylum." Witnesses told of his odd behavior at Oneida and elsewhere. Hut it was useless. The nation was aroused. Two attempts were made on Guiteau's life after he was imprisoned (one by a disgusted guard) as the rage reflex of Booth's alleged slayer Boston Corbett and much later Jack Ruby Look effect (it didn't help Guiteau when a New York landlord swore the bill collector once vowed he'd have fame, if need be, the way John Wilkes Booth had won it).

The prosecution told the jury Guiteau was feigning madness just as he did in business--that he was an "artful simulator." As with Lincoln, the Government seemed to need someone guilty and executed. As with Lincoln, it worked to assure that verdict. Despite having the acknowledged killer in jail, the state's lawyers coached witnesses on their testimony and bribed some experts to testify that Guiteau was, within the M'Naghten rule, sane. They suppressed or destroyed letters and documents that might show that he was crazy.

On January 21, 1882. the jury heard the last plea for Guiteau. He made it himself: "To hang a man in my mental condition on July second, when I fired on the President, would he a lasting disgrace to the American people." He wept and postured. Four days later, after the prosecution's summation, the jury retired for one hour and five minutes before coming in with the guilty verdict. All appeals were denied. Guiteau was sane and must pay with his life. The new President, Chester Arthur, refused clemency. Guiteau was hanged at 12:40 P.M. on June 30, 1882, before a crowd of 250, some of whom had paid $300 for the privilege. When the trap dropped, he was singing a childish poem he'd composed that morning, which ended. "Glory Hallelujah, I am going to the Lordy!" At the autopsy, the physicians were especially interested in his brain. Close examination revealed abnormalities indicative of syphilis or malaria.

Today, few know the name Charles Julius Guiteau, which would probably have surprised him. No more, however, than the establishment in 1883 of the Civil Service Commission and the merit system, which eliminated the craven office seeking that apparently at last had unhinged him. After Garfield, too, some citizens agitated for stricter control of guns, although Guiteau was hardly a gun nut and had bought his revolver legally. The legal profession awakened to the possibilities of "moral insanity" (i.e., severe antisocial or regicidal tendencies without overt delusions or extreme aberrant behavior) and so moved toward new defenses for assassins. Doctors called as expert witnesses paid closer attention to hereditary madness, recalling that Guiteau had had one uncle, two aunts and two first cousins who were certified crazy. And there were the usual calls for more protection for our Presidents. As events proved, it was needed.

•

In the 20 years, two months and four days between Garfield's last walk and William McKinley's reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. New York, the Western world changed rapidly. A middle class burgeoned, while a working class demanded its fair share. Industry ruled, but Marx was in reaction.

The changing economic and psychological and political realities loosed strikes, riots and assassinations. A chief cause was economic unrest and its concomitant, the nihilistic notion that if industry's captains and Government's ministers could not assist the mass of men to better lives, then we'd be better oil without them. As early as Garfield's assassination, Ulysses Grant proposed a remedy for the fear that stalked America and the world between 1881 and 1901: "If this is the outgrowth of nihilism, I am in favor of crushing it out immediately by the prompt execution of the would-be assassins and their followers."

Leon Czolgosz, the sell-styled anarchist who killed McKinley, would suffer just that. But the act of this stooped factory worker was a natural outgrowth of his times.

•

Like John Wilkes Booth and Charles Julius Guiteau, the men who attacked McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt thought they were saving the republic's best traditions. For Czolgosz in 1901, the popular McKinley symbolized "prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man." For John Schrank, the attempt in 1912 to kill Roosevelt--he failed but wounded him--was a fulfillment of a prophetic dream in which the dead McKinley had ordered him to kill Roosevelt.

Czolgosz' melancholy adventure began in Detroit in 1873. A fourth child, he had been conceived in Poland by parents emigrating in search of prosperity. Arriving in Detroit. Czolgosz' father worked for the city sewer system while his mother did laundry. She died shortly after the birth of her eighth child, when Leon was 12. The family then was in northern Michigan, in a Polish settlement, where Leon learned to speak Polish and finished five and a half years of schooling. He was the studious one of the family. He read and grew up shy, quiet and solitary. Occasional displays of anger broke his calm. When he was 16, the family moved to Natrona, a Polish town close to Pittsburgh. Leon went to work in a bottle factory for 75 cents a day. The next stop was Cleveland, where he found a job in a wire mill for ten dollars a week. He worked there until he was 25, the dreary tenor of his existence leavened mightily by a strike in 1893, which set him thinking and reading about capitalism, anarchism and the validity of the Roman Catholic faith in which he'd been raised. After the strike was settled, he returned to work as Fred C. Nieman, ostensibly using an alias because he feared official retaliation for his participation in the strike. He continued reading and joined a socialist discussion group.

The discussions, his taste for sociological and Utopian writing and his later flirtation with real anarchists were all the intellectual life Czolgosz ever had. His work was menial. He and his family, although industrious and ambitious, hadn't yet made it as the dream had forecast. Not that they were without everything. They'd all chipped in to buy 55 acres 12 miles from Cleveland, and Leon liked it on the farm, walking in the woods, doing chores. But he still worked in the mill and in Cleveland, his life was as straight, hard and uniform as the wire he made. He hung around saloons, drank an occasional whiskey, smoked, played a desultory hand of cards. In 1895, when he was 22, his father facilitated these activities by buying a saloon. The socialists arranged to meet upstairs and Leon often sat in with them. But still, life just went on.

Then, in 1898, he had a nervous breakdown. A healthy, normal factory worker vanished and in his place stood a pale, agitated potential killer. He quit his job in August 1898 and took to spending days at the farm, reading an anarchist newspaper published in Chicago. He went in to Cleveland occasionally to see a doctor and he took medicine, but it didn't help. The assassination of King Humbert I of Italy in July 1900 raised his interest, and he clipped a newspaper account of the act. Media contagion seemed to set in--a phenomenon more marked in our time--and he took the clipping to bed with him for weeks.

The summer of 1900 was far more active for McKinley. He'd been renominated in June, the sign that his Administration had done well by the Republican Party and America. With Roosevelt as his Vice-President, he could well expect to defeat, as he had in 1896, William Jennings Bryan (and his free-silver, anti-imperialist running mate, Adlai E. Stevenson). President McKinley looked back with pleasure on his life. He was descended from Scotch-Irish and English who'd come to America in the early 18th Century (no recent immigrant, he). His grandfather James was a manager of a charcoal furnace in Ohio and William had reaped the benefits, the dream's rewards. They were so like Garfield's. A term of college, then heroism for the Union in the Civil War, then a law practice, election to Congress and a long, powerful career there helping the policies of his friends Grant, Hayes and Garfield.

McKinley annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898 and, with the sinking of the Maine in the Havana harbor as a motive, whipped Spain the same year, thereby winning the Philippine Islands. Trade interests also demanded a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and that was high on the President's roster of priorities. While Gzolgosz was musing over King Humbert, McKinley was putting down the stubborn Philippine insurrection, not to mention dispatching American warships to China to protect our interests during the Boxer rebellion. His heroic Vice-President mightily approved of these expansionist policies and was even more eager than he to lower tariffs a bit and move into the world's markets. Together, they were a formidable team. They marched to victory in November 1900 and on to a gala Inauguration on March 4, 1901. McKinley was at his peak, bluff and hearty, immensely popular and assured of hill-passing influence in Congress through his friendship with Mark Hanna and assorted "fixers." The nation appeared tranquil, almost freed of the acrimonious sectionalism that was the residue of the Civil War. His party was unified, unlike Gar-field's. His only sorrow was his invalid and dotty wife, Ida. A pity, since he was only 58.

Czolgosz was 28. He carried 140 pounds on a 5'7" frame and now bore a placid, nearly bovine expression on his round face. After a long period of listlessness during the election furor, he went to the family farm and asked for the money he'd put in it (rather like Guiteau at Oneida). The family promised it, perhaps partly because Leon hinted that he might soon be dead. On May 5, 1901, he attended a lecture in Cleveland by "Red Emma" Goldman, the 31-year-old Russian anarchist who then went about preaching the virtues of no government. Soon afterward, Czolgosz contacted an anarchist club in Cleveland, introduced himself as Fred Nieman and inquired whether its members might be "plotting something like Bresci [King Humbert's assassin]." The implied terrorism seems to have put them off (five days before Czolgosz shot McKinley, an anarchist paper ran a warning that a spy, noticed in Chicago and Cleveland, might be trying to infiltrate them--the description matched that of Czolgosz).

Leon did go to Chicago, early in July, traveling on his farm money. He called on Goldman, who hurried away to catch a train for her home in Rochester, New York. Not many days later, Leon turned up in West Seneca, a town near Buffalo (and not far from Rochester). Why he went there, no one knows. He later told police it was to find work, which was both uncharacteristic of his recent behavior and puzzling. Was there more work near Buffalo than in Chicago or Cleveland? Perhaps he was fascinated by the aura of the Pan-American Exposition, a show of dazzling technological progress (including the X ray) that had opened May first. Whatever, he stayed in West Seneca, passing time, until August 29, when he left, exchanging a broken revolver for part of his bill, and took a boat from Buffalo across Lake Erie to Cleveland. He stayed only a day, then returned to Buffalo. On August 31, he rented a room above a saloon, registering as John Doe. By then he knew what was to come.

September 5: McKinley spoke before 50,000 persons, telling them he now favored reciprocal trade and lower tariffs. Everyone cheered. Czolgosz watched and was disgusted with the panoply, the honors accorded the President. "It wasn't right," he later said. But that didn't confirm him in murder. He had decided some time before, and he'd bought, on the second, for $4.50, a .32-caliber Iver Johnson revolver, decorated with an owl's head on the grip and in good condition. Hardly a devastating weapon, but then, Leon was new to this.

September 6: The public reception opened at four P.M. McKinley had returned from a visit to Niagara Falls, as had Czolgosz. After a tour of the fairgrounds, the President would shake hands for ten minutes, an obligatory gesture for the leader of a democracy much like the behavior of Gerald Ford, which has twice endangered him. McKinley was guarded by soldiers, police detectives and the Secret Service--about 50 in all--as the line advanced. It was a hot day and no one paid attention to the small man, neat in his gray suit--a workingman come to see his President--who shuffled in line, his right hand swathed in a handkerchief. After all, many were mopping their brows. When he reached the President, a Secret Service man shoved him gently ahead. He extended his left hand, the President his right. Czolgosz slapped McKinley's hand aside and fired the Iver Johnson twice through the handkerchief, setting it afire. The first slug ricocheted off the President's breastbone (later, like the "magic bullet" of the J.F.K. murder, it fell out of McKinley's clothes). The second burrowed through his walruslike girth, traversed the stomach, the pancreas and a kidney and came to rest near McKinley's back muscle wall.

So it was done. Vengeful guards jumped Czolgosz and nearly killed him there. "Don't let them hurt him," McKinley called.

"I did my duty," Leon muttered.

McKinley was taken to the home of John Milburn--president of the exposition--after emergency surgery in the fair's hospital. Doctors were hopeful, so much so that they refused the aid of the newfangled X ray Thomas Edison sent them. But John Hay--who had been Lincoln's secretary, a friend of Garfield and now McKinley's Secretary of State--shook his head and said the President would die. McKinley agreed. Though he rallied at first like Garfield, gangrenous blood poisoning consumed him bit by bit. He told his doctors, "It is useless, gentlemen. I think we ought to have prayer." He sighed, "His will, not ours, be done," mumbled the last verse of Nearer, My God, to Thee, and died about 2:15 A.M. on September 14.

His funeral, like those of our other slain Presidents, was grand. Nearer, My God, to Thee became more popular. The national mourning was loud and prolonged. Mrs. McKinley understood "her dearest's" death but not much else, and she retired to their home at Canton, Ohio, uncertain of what had happened.

The most immediate effects were the swearing in of Roosevelt as President and the trial of Czolgosz. There wasn't much to the latter. For one thing, Leon kept uttering outrageous anarchist things: "I don't believe one man should have so much service.... I thought it would be a good thing for the country to kill the President," and so on. For another, he refused the aid of his lawyers, who weren't anxious to assist him, anyway. The trial lasted eight hours and 26 minutes. The jury was out 34 minutes before it declared Czolgosz guilty. He had been, the jury thought, just as a panel of five experts had said, "the product of anarchy, sane and responsible." Czolgosz was electrocuted at 7:12 A.M. on October 29, 1901--53 days after shooting McKinley. As they strapped him into the chair, he said, "I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people--the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime." The autopsy revealed no cerebral abnormalities. In a remarkable display of haste and hatred, sulphuric acid was poured into the coffin.

Acid could not eradicate certain effects and questions, however.

First, as we might expect, the good working people weren't helped by Leon's act. If anything, some were put out of work. There was a minor Wall Street panic and an immense antianarchist wave. Employers fired and mobs attacked known anarchists. Goldman and others were arrested, abused and threatened before proving they were innocent of McKinley's death. Paterson, New Jersey, where Giuseppe Zangara was to live, was targeted for sacking, since it was a notorious anarchist stronghold, full of working stiffs and other low types--but authorities intervened.

Second, the familiar conspiracy talk began. Why had Leon gone to West Seneca? What was he doing there with the broken revolver he'd given the hotel-keeper? Was he an agent of some splinter group of nihilists? But no proof ever rose that he had acted in concert with others.

Third, questions again arose about what constituted sanity in a murderer. After Czolgosz' execution, several psychiatrists considered his case. They concluded that he had become schizophrenic during his breakdown and gradually built delusions--chiefly, that he was an anarchist and that it was his duty (as he'd said) to kill the President. Why else all the senselessly brave talk from a man who knew he was doomed? As with Guiteau, some jurists wanted thenceforth to be more careful in defining madness in the accused.

Fourth, laws were enacted to the detriment of Czolgosz' kind. New statutes banned the immigration of known anarchists and nihilists. They were called human sewage. More to the point, the Secretary of the Treasury directed the Secret Service to provide full-time and complete protection for the President. It had taken Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, but now professional security men would guard the Chief Executive.

Lastly, the policies of McKinley were not changed. Roosevelt made that clear, saying, "It shall be my aim to continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy of President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity and the honor of our beloved country." Unlike McKinley, Teddy did avoid serious assassination attempts during his tenure from 1901 to 1909, no doubt due largely to Secret Service protection. John Schrank waited until 1912 to take a shot at him, when he ran as the third-party, third-term Bull Moose incarnate. He was unguarded then.

•

Schrank fit the mold of our previous assassins. He was smallish (5'4", 145 pounds), young (36), neat, male, opinionated, missing parents (father dead, mother remarried), a loner and possessed of self-esteem just this side of megalomania. Further, like Booth, Guiteau and Czolgosz. he was no more than two generations from Europe (Schrank was born in Bavaria, in fact) and was correspondingly devoted to the principles he felt were embodied in the Constitution of his adopted land. Assuredly, they did not include a third-term "king" (from 1865, we hear Booth's fears of "Emperor Abe"). Yes, Schrank was typical.

Except that he'd had those two visions.

The first, he later reported, was the day after McKinley died. There he was. John Nepomuk Schrank, in a room gazing at a coffin surrounded by flowers (so far, the same dream Lincoln had had), when a figure reared from the casket and pointed toward a man in a monk's habit. The pointer was McKinley. Schrank saw, and the monk, unlikely as it seems, was Roosevelt. The dead McKinley then intoned, "This is my murderer. Avenge my death."

The second came 11 years later, on September 14, 1912. Schrank never explained the interval, any more than he did his lapse in heeding McKinley's command. Anyway, this time Schrank was in a room on Canal Street in New York (the hotel was called the White House). He was writing a lugubrious, self-admonishing poem called Be a Man (it was the time of. Kipling), when a voice said, "Let not a murderer take the Presidential chair. Avenge my death." A tap on the shoulder and Schrank turned to look into the pale face of McKinley. Understandably, he left a week later to obey the dead President.

Between visions, unlike Guiteau and Czolgosz, Schrank seemed to glimpse, nearly to grasp, America's possibilities. He was the immigrant (arriving in America in 1889) who had it made. True, he was parentless. But he was raised and cared for by his aunt and uncle. His uncle opened a Bavarian saloon in New York, paid Tammany to keep it open and, in time--maybe seeing that his dreamy nephew needed a patron--signed it over to John. Schrank thus was made an entrepreneur. He had a wedge into American success, yet he never drove it home. Instead, he drank beer, talked, lamented his one love affair (in 1904, Ills girlfriend died when the General Slocum burned in the East River). He read widely, too, especially the writings of political terrorists and patriots. He didn't care for Marx's socialism, but George Washington, Lajos Kossuth. Thaddeus Kosciusko, Jean Jacques Rousseau were favorites. He also wrote poetry and kept a journal full of the great thoughts that came to him.

Two years after taking over the saloon, John sold it and moved into a tenement his uncle had purchased. Commerce was too stifling for him. he felt. Now he could take long walks, read more, write--occasionally tend bar to make a bit of money. He never argued politics. His uncle had taught him that that was death for saloonkeepers.

In 1912, Schrank was living in New York's White House Hotel on the $800 per year generated by what was then his tenement building. His aunt and uncle had left it to him and it was valued at $25,000. Along with his bartending, the bequest meant he could muse for the rest of his life, since he was very thrifty. It seems never to have occurred to him--as it had to Guiteau--that he could make more money, could take advantage of the markets, the free-enterprise prosperity that McKinley, Roosevelt and William Taft had sparked. He would rather compose his essay, "The Four Pillars of the Republic." He specified them as (1) a two-term limit for Presidents, (2) enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, (3) eschewing wars of conquest and (4) ensuring that only Protestants could be President (he feared Roman domination). He placed the greatest weight on the first pillar, saying that foreign-born citizens like himself could scarcely "respect our institutions" when somebody like Roosevelt wanted a third term.

After the second vision--in September 1912--Schrank decided he would kill Roosevelt. He would do it while Teddy campaigned. He borrowed $350 and bought a steamship ticket that would take him south along the Atlantic Coast, probably to New Orleans. For no good reason, that seemed a good place to shoot a Bull Moose. Before leaving, Schrank wrote on the back of a water-and-light bill, "Down with Theodore Roosevelt. We want no king.... We will not yield to Rome." Then he bought a .38-caliber Colt and a box of cartridges. Total cost: $14.55. The gunshop owner told him that unless he had a permit, pursuant to the Sullivan Law, the revolver would have to be made inoperative. Schrank pleaded that he was leaving New York, showing his steamship ticket. The owner yielded (which raises a question about the effectiveness of gun-control legislation) and Schrank, whose total firearm experience consisted of once having fired a pistol on the Fourth of July, walked away armed.

Then, like many assassins, Schrank stalked his man. Debarking at Charleston, he trailed the whistle-stopping Teddy to Birmingham, through Georgia, to Chattanooga, where he saw Roosevelt for the first time (and, presumably, connected his abstract idea with a personal animus). But there were no good opportunities to shoot. Then Roosevelt went home for a rest, leaving Schrank to swelter in the Midwest's Indian summer and await the candidate's next swing through the Republican heartland. Schrank moved slowly from Nashville to Evansville, on to Louisville and Indianapolis, until he read that Roosevelt would leave Oyster Bay, New York, on October seventh for another Midwestern tour. Schrank and Roosevelt arrived in Chicago the same clay, October 12.

Again, the Bavarian saw his target but did not shoot; he later said it was because he didn't want to dirty the "decent, respectable reputation" of Chicago (a nicety lost on its citizens, who even then lived between machine politics and organized crime). It seems that Schrank had no such friendly feeling for Milwaukee. He went there on Sunday, October 13, and awaited Roosevelt, whose itinerary called for a speech there the next day. Appropriately enough, Schrank spent Sunday in Milwaukee, drinking beer near the Hotel Gilpatrick. whose Progressive owner had inveigled Roosevelt into attending a small supper there the next evening before the speech. Schrank seems to have learned that, drunk on and, quite uncharacteristically, tipped the musicians for playing The Stars and Stripes Forever.

The next evening, Schrank stood in front of the Gilpatrick, immaculate in suit, batwing collar and fedora. He waited, standing about six feet from the open car parked in front. At eight o'clock, Roosevelt came out, entered the car, stood and waved to the cheering crowd (greeting them as Franklin Roosevelt was to do in Miami, 21 years thence, just before the shooting started). Schrank's right hand thrust forward between two onlookers, the Colt went off and Teddy staggered backward against the seat. The bullet tore into his right chest, below and to the right of the nipple, then angled upward for about four inches, fracturing a rib. No doubt it would have gone through the lung, perhaps out his back or deflected into some other organ. But Roosevelt had folded his 50-page speech in half and put it in his breast pocket, along with his metal spectacle case. The bullet lost much force penetrating the 100 pages and the case. Otherwise, he later said, he would have been killed.

After the one shot, Schrank was tackled by Roosevelt's stenographer. Police dragged him away as Teddy ordered his driver on to the auditorium. He was satisfied that he wasn't seriously hurt. As he shouted to the audience of 9000 hysterical followers, "It takes more than that to kill a Hull Moose!" He spoke for 50 minutes before seeking treatment for shock and loss of blood. He recovered quickly at Mercy Hospital in Chicago and went home on October 21. Although he was, again, a national hero, he lost the election to Woodrow Wilson. Schrank's bullet remained inside him the rest of his life.

Schrank outlived Roosevelt by 24 years (and said he was "sorry to learn" of Teddy's death). His act was not subject to the rumors and speculations usually surrounding assassinations and their attempts. The dreams had done it, that was all, the dreams and a pistol. Schrank was never tried on the charge of armed assault with intent to kill. A sanity commission of live alienists examined him. It concluded he was "suffering from insane delusions, grandiose in character ... he is insane at the present time." One alienist went on to say, "I think his disease is original paranoia, that it is chronic and in my opinion is incurable."

At the court's order, Schrank--called Uncle John by his fellow patients--spent the rest of his life comfortable enough in mental hospitals. Perhaps directly due to them, he was luckier than Guiteau and Czolgosz.

Schrank lived to see an assassination--that of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914--trigger World War One. He lived to see the war threaten the end of Western civilization as it had been known. He heard the sounds of the jazz age through the radio and the machine-gun rattle of Prohibition violence. He read--for he still kept up--about the Syndicate and Al Capone, and about the troubles in Chicago, that nice town, and about the killing of Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak during an assassination attempt on F.D.R. He heard about Huey Long's great fall down in the bayous. He even saw the beginning of World War Two, that final assault on the traditions of the West. He protested none of it, until 1940, when he announced that Franklin Delano Roosevelt should not seek a third term and that if Uncle John could, he'd save the nation again from a Roosevelt dictatorship. He didn't add that he wished Giuseppe Zangara had been a better shot.

•

Actually, Zangara did pretty well--and there is considerable speculation that he accomplished just what he, or someone, wanted: to kill Cermak and not Roosevelt. It was February 15, 1933. In two weeks, the United States, to which Zangara had immigrated ten years before, would inaugurate Roosevelt as its 32nd President. Most hoped this polio-lamed aristocrat would somehow bring the country out of the Depression, bring back the joys and jobs of the jazz age. Zangara really didn't care. He was glad he had no work. He'd worked too long. Now he was in Miami's Bayfront Park with an eight-dollar, .32-caliber revolver in his pocket, a five-foot, 105-pound man dwarfed in the crowd waiting for Roosevelt.

The President-elect was coming ashore that evening from Vincent Astor's yacht. He'd been fishing for 12 days. Despite routine warnings about possible danger, Roosevelt had decided to say a few words in Miami. He loved the American people, he said, and he needed all the support he could muster. So an informal speech was announced and the people gathered in the park, near a bandstand built to resemble a Shriner's vision of Oriental splendor (it had, in fact, been constructed for their convention). Roosevelt would speak from his car. which could be parked on the curved driveway framing the bedomed pavilion. Behind him, on the stage, would be the dignitaries--Miami officials, F.D.R.'s advisors and Cermak, who had come to Miami to plead for Federal patronage and funds from the new Administration and to repair the political damage Cermak had sullered by his tardy endorsement of F.D.R. (though, to be sure, when the crunch had come, Tony got out the Chicago Democrats in gratifying numbers. Now there was the matter of judgeships and the like.).

It was nearly 9:30 when Roosevelt's light-blue Buick touring car curled around the driveway and past Zangara, whose size prevented him from getting up front. These big Americans pressed forward and Zangara couldn't see over them or get up near the driveway. He shoved against them. One Iowan told him, "It isn't proper for you to go and stand out and push yourself in front of someone else." Propriety was far from Zangara's mind. The whole situation reminded him of 1923, when he'd had a vague notion of killing King Victor Emmanuel III in his native Italy but was prevented from doing so by the crush of a crowd. He scuttled forward as best he could.

Roosevelt spoke briefly, delivering 132 words calculated to show that he was a regular guy, a sportsman who could put in a day's work or go fishing as well as the next, even if he was handicapped. He sat on the top of the rear seat in bright light, waving, chatting, smiling for the newsreel cameras. A perfect target, if anybody wanted a shot at him. In a minute or so, he was finished. He slid into the rear seat and waved Cermak down from the bandstand for a greeting. Miami officials started forward with a fake telegram of welcome, suitably large. The crowd moiled, the human walls split.

Then there was little Zangara, up on a chair about 25 feet from Roosevelt's car, teetering as he pulled the stiff trigger of his revolver as fast as he could. Five shots (like firecrackers, F.D.R. later said) and five people went down. Three bystanders collapsed with head wounds, a woman twisted, shot in the belly, and Cermak folded over, a bullet smashing under his right armpit and into his lung. He fell back oil the running board to Roosevelt's left.

Immediately, confusion and jerky movement. Zangara was overwhelmed by police and bystanders, his clothes were torn from him, his defiant shouts in broken English lost as he was thrown onto the rack of a limousine, sat upon by three cops and carried oil to the lockup. Cermak called, "The President, get him away!" Roosevelt ordered his car to stop--his driver had started to move away from the danger--and that Cermak be put in with him. The President-elect cradled the wounded mayor. As he later said, "I held him all the way to the hospital and his pulse constantly improved.... I remember I said, 'Tony, keep quiet--don't move--it won't hurt you if you keep quiet and remain perfectly still.' "

It was good advice but bootless. Cermak, like Garfield and McKinley, seemed to get better at first, but in three weeks he was dead from "complications" caused by the bullet, his doctors said, though the official cause of death was ulcerative colitis. The other shooting victims pulled through. Amid hosannas for his salvation, Roosevelt went on to his Inauguration, to the New Deal, to World War Two and election to four terms. Zangara--first given 80 years for the assaults before the mayor died--was electrocuted for the murder of Cermak. He welcomed death, since it ended the stomach-ache he said over and over made all rulers unbearable to him. Zangara's death did not, however, end two things: the irony that he had killed the successful immigrant personified and the rumor that he had been after Cermak all the time, that the mayor had not accidentally perished in a fusillade of gunfire aimed at Roosevelt.

This rumor is so persistent, as so many alternate theories of our assassinations, that we must scan the lives of Zangara and Cermak, the loser and the winner immigrants, if we are to fathom why anybody would contend, despite Zangara's vehement denials, that little Giuseppe was after big Tony. Start with the killer. What sort of man was Zangara?

Overall, he was poor, sick and angry. Born in September 1900 in Ferruzzano, Calabria, a harsh part of Italy's boot toe, Giuseppe's mother died when he was two. His father, as gruff and dictatorial as Guiteau's, took him out of school and put him to work at the age of eight. Zangara said he was sure this hard early work had given him the terrible pains he suffered all his life and that the rulers were at fault for making people labor so hard. He knew, too, that he hated the rich, because their children passed him on their way to school while he had to work on the streets.

There's no doubt that Zangara was a sickly child (though his autopsy showed no stomach disorders, he did have a damaged gall bladder that could have pained him) and he grew to be only a short, lightweight man, with black, bushy hair above a lupine face marked by sad brown eyes. Perhaps to escape from home, Zangara joined the Italian army as a teenager and served five years. After his arrest, he said it was when he was a soldier in 1923 that he'd felt like killing King Victor Emmanuel III. (No proof exists of this--it might have been a fantasy, but if he had succeeded, Zangara's stomach troubles would have been cured a decade sooner.)

As it was, he immigrated to the United States, arriving on September 2, 1923. He found his way to Paterson, New Jersey--still an anarchist center--where his uncle lived. He found work as a bricklayer, his uncle's trade, and he joined the A.F.L.'s Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers Union. He made good money, about $12 a day, and saved most of it. People remembered him as quiet, a loner, equally inept with women and the English language, in every way unremarkable except for his continual bellyaching (which an appendectomy didn't help) and his occasional outbursts against kings, Presidents and all authorities. He even slandered Calvin Coolidge, who certainly never tried to attract such attention. His uncle said all he did was eat (soft food) and sleep (he once rented two rooms, one to keep space between him and his neighbors). Zangara didn't drink much, because it hurt his stomach.

Giuseppe lived that way until 1929. That year, he became both a naturalized and a foot-loose citizen, as though inspired to explore this country before everyone went broke. He visited Miami, because he thought the sun would help his stomach. He returned to odd jobs in New Jersey, but he wasn't the same. In 1931, he left Hackensack to spend time in Los Angeles, bounced back to New Jersey, then in 1932 moved to Miami permanently. (These peregrinations remind one of another convicted assassin, James Earl Ray, as a malaise seems to fix on a man.) In a time when jobs were hard to keep, Zangara had willfully become an idler after laboring all those years. While the Presidential campaign, the Depression debates roared about him, he fished, bet the dogs, made trips to Palm Beach, Key West and Panama. He paid close attention to Roosevelt's victory over Hoover, not that he cared. He hated, he swore, all Presidents equally. He said he would have killed President Hoover if he hadn't read that February about Roosevelt's coming to Miami. He reasoned that Hoover was way up in Washington, where it was cold, bad for his belly, whereas Roosevelt would be right at hand, where it was warm. "I see Mr. Hoover first I kill him first," he stated at his trial. "Make no difference. Presidents just the same bunch--all same." Presumably, with that in mind, Zangara went to the Davis Pawnshop in downtown Miami and bought his pistol, a nickel-plated United States Revolver Company product. It looked like Czolgosz' weapon. When questioned later, the pawnbroker said it wasn't against the law to sell the gun, and it wasn't. "He got the money," Zangara reflected. Anyway, revolver in pocket, Zangara headed for Bayfront Park and his encounter with his opposite, Tony Cermak.

•

"Ten Percent" Tony, his enemies called him. They said he skimmed that much in kickbacks and assorted favors during his years of power. That sort of stuff, power plays, got him killed, they said. Amateur crooks don't push the Mob around and get away with it, they said, not in Chicago. Zangara did the job on the great reformer, that was all.

Not so, Cermak's friends said. The mayor had been the best thing that ever happened to Chicago. If only he'd lived to finish cleaning up the town; if only that demented man hadn't shot at Roosevelt.... Tony was almost saintly, the epitome of the good, sell-made man, his admirers said.

Both sides could make a case.

Like Zangara, Cermak was foreign-born. He was born near Prague of Bohemian parents, and during his long ascent, he was known as a bohunk whose power base lay in Chicago's West Side Slavic neighborhoods (he was later interred in the Bohemian National Cemetery in a mausoleum that would not have been out of place at Forest Lawn). Cermak's father, a coal miner, brought the family to America, to Braidwood, Illinois, in 1874, the year after Anton's birth. Braidwood then was a mining town and, like Zangara, Cermak grew up knowing only work. He had perhaps three years of elementary school. After that, it was the mines and long hours of filthy, dangerous, dark work. Once he drove mules for about $1.50 a day, a better job than working in the mines. Cermak learned to distrust his big-business employers and to drink a lot. He was often jailed for fighting. He also became a "labor agitator," helping organize workers in the steel mills of Gary and in the mines around Braidwood. Periodically, he moved with his family to Chicago as the Cermaks tried to break out of their working-class world. They failed until Tony gave up proletarian ways and became a capitalist ("Capitalism kill me!" Zangara cried before he sat in the electric chair).

When he was 19--in 1892--Cermak started his own hauling business in Chicago's Bohemian sections. He carted wood, coal, whatever, and he prospered with hard work, unfailing geniality and loads of political hackwork in the wards from which the Carter H. Harrison faction drew its strength (though Harrison was assassinated in 1893. his followers retained power for another 25 years). By 1902, Cermak was an Illinois state representative and by 1907 secretary of the United Societies for Local Self-Government, a saloon lobby organized by ethnics to combat the growing sentiment for Prohibition. By 1909, he represented Lawndale, as Democratic leader in the house. Tony was known as a man who took care of his family and his friends. They took care to ensure that he was always his ward's committeeman, an irreducible position of clout in machine politics.

In 1912, Cermak was elected bailiff of the Municipal Court of Chicago and from that incontiestably powerful post, he attacked the first "big fix" administration of the notorious Republican mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson. Big Bill, whose two terms established the mayor's office as the primal source of corruption in Chicago, didn't take this bohunk's criticism kindly. When Cermak ran for sheriff in 1918, he lost, despite riding popular sentiment in attacking Prohibition and the hated Germans, our blood enemies of the war. It was back to the city council to take over the seat of his friend Otto Kerner, whose son's criminal behavior in the Sixties as governor of Illinois would put him in jail.

After that, it was upward for Cermak. In 1922, he was elected president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners--a position that gave him both considerable patronage power and influence with candidates for city, county, stale and Congressional elections. In 1928, Cermak was boomed for governor, but he was out-maneuvered for the nomination by Irish politician George Brennan. That same year, he ran for the U. S. Senate and was defeated. Stung, he turned on rivals among fellow Democrats and ethnics, the Irish, and wrung the party leadership from them. With help, he intended reforming the Democratic Party and winning the city from Big Bill, who was by then serving his second term. To do that, Cermak needed political support, police support and the tacit approval of organized crime's shadow government. (Everyone knew that the police and the gangs were linked other than as cops and robbers. For example, Johnny Torrio--before Al ousted him--and Capone each pocketed about $100,000 a week during the Twenties, an operation impossible without police connivance. You couldn't otherwise miss all the thousands of immigrant families cooking alcohol, the whores and the numbers, any more than the 600 plus unsolved murders.)

In short, to run--or to reform--Chicago, Cermak had to have the mayor's patronage power. The mayor could dictate who became policemen, commissioners, judges, and so control the various factions. Cermak turned to an old friend, Moe Rosenberg, for help in remolding the Democratic Party to a machine tough enough to defeat Thompson. Moe and his protégé Jake Arvey (once a power in Richard Daley's Chicago) had benefited from Cermak's influence. Moe and Jake (then an alderman) and Tony worked to reforge a puissant party so that all the spoils would be theirs. Once Cermak had that, he could turn it whatever way he willed.

In 1931, Cermak was elected mayor over Big Bill and across the nation the press rejoiced at the defeat of Thompsonism. Cermak's chief backers, public and private, were Rosenberg, Arvey, Patrick Nash and Melvin A. Traylor, president of the First National Bank of Chicago. The group represented business, government and respectable society. Rosenberg later testified that they'd wanted "to put Cermak in the mayor's chair, which we did." Thompson's charges that Moe and Tony were in collusion in a gigantic receivership business garnering huge fees for foreclosures didn't sway Chicago voters nearly as much as did the Democratic precinct captains. Registering every body in a graveyard and every wino didn't hurt, either. Cermak had made it. With his reorganized party behind him, he possessed the greatest power ever held by a Chicago mayor. Using it, he laid what some think were the foundations for his murder by Zangara, who, the speculation goes, was a dupe and a hit man for organized crime (similar logic is now applied to James Earl Ray by the conspiracy-minded).

The theory goes that because of the alliance needed to put him in the mayor's office, Cermak had close connections--closer even than Big Bill's--with the rackets. When Capone was sentenced to 11 years for income-tax evasion in 1931, Cermak saw his opportunity to bring organized crime under the mayor's control--whether for good or for ill depends on how one views Cermak's character. Either way, Capone's incarceration left a vacuum that could be filled by the mayor.

Coincidentally came the 1932 national elections. During the Democratic Convention, Cermak held out for the renomination of Alfred E. Smith. Opposing F.D.R., he kept the bulk of Illinois' votes committed to Traylor, his banker friend. When Roosevelt won the nomination, Cermak relented and delivered Chicago's votes. But he still felt uneasy about the vital Federal patronage. He needed sympathetic judges, for instance, to put away unfriendly crooks. Moreover, there was the Chicago World's Fair coming up. For that, the city's image, his image, should be burnished as bright as a clean cop's badge.

Out of these needs--to direct the Mob and to clean up the city--came the events that fed the legend of tiny Giuseppe Zangara as a contract killer.

First, organized criminals became uneasy about Cermak now that he was mayor. They'd seen that he was tough with political opponents. Like Huey Long, and our own Richard Nixon, Cermak in office was suspected, in a contemporary writer's words, of using "surreptitious means such as wire taps, mail drops, surveillance and stool pigeons to ferret out information concerning the weaknesses and foibles of administrative and political friends, taking great pains to learn the identities of his enemies." If Tony would do that, wouldn't he move on some mobsters? He was, the talk went, acting as his own police commissioner, dealing closer with the underworld than any mayor ever had.

December 19, 1932--six weeks after the elections--brought the catalyst, so the story goes.

That day, members of Cermak's special police unit raided the Capone headquarters at 221 North LaSalle Street, hard by city hall. With Detective Sergeants Harry Lang and Harry Miller in the van, the cops charged in to find several men, among them Frank Nitti, who said he was there to put a bet on a horse. Nitti, the renowned "enforcer," was fresh from Leavenworth on a tax rap, returned to operate as Capone's regent while Al was away. After all, they were kinsmen.

What happened next wasn't altogether clear until the trial of Sergeant Lang, which came after Cermak was dead, and even then the images wavered darkly in the mirrored accounts.

A detective named Chris Callahan swore he searched Nitti, found him unarmed and was holding his wrists for the cuffs when Frank the enforcer asked, "What's this about?" Then, Callahan said, Sergeant Lang leveled his gun--Callahan jumped aside--and shot Nitti three times in the neck and back. He next shot himself in the finger. Nitti was sent to the hospital to die and the police announced that he'd been shot resisting arrest, as Lang's wound proved.

Unfortunately for that story, the durable Nitti recovered, to be tried for shooting Lang (but really as much as anything for importing a gunman--Louis "Little New York" Campagna--to kill Cermak). That was the reason for the raid, Lang testified, to arrest Campagna. Lang's story didn't wash. Nitti was acquitted, largely because Lang's self-inflicted wound suggested perjury. Next, the sergeant himself was arrested and indicted for perjury and shooting the gangster.

But well before Lang's arraignment and Cermak's death, rumors and events wriggled in the strange illumination of the underworld. A story mushroomed that Cermak's favorite gangster leader, Ted Ncwberry. had ottered Lang $15,000 to kill Nitti and run the "greaseballs," as Newberry reportedly called tfie mafiosi, out of town. Whether that was true or not, the January 7, 1933, issue of the Chicago American reported:Ted Newberry, gentleman turned gangster, died like a gangster today. His body was found early today, shot through the head and one hand almost severed by shotgun slugs, in a ditch alongside a gravel road near Bailey Town, Porter County, Indiana.Newberry's body was identified by a diamond-set buckle given to him by Capone.

After the shooting of Nitti and Newberry's last ride, Mayor Cermak, a widower since 1928, moved from his suite at the Congress Hotel to a bungalow at the top of the Morrison Hotel. Access was only by private elevator. A Hearst newspaperman named John Dienhart, cloying in his admiration of Cermak, reported after the mayor's death that he'd visited the mayor and been told Cermak moved after he saw greaseballs hanging around the hotel. The story is questionable, but it is certain the mayor ordered a bulletproof vest early in 1933 and that after the shooting of Nitti, his force of bodyguards was increased from three to five.

More evidence that Cermak thought he was endangered came out at Lang's trial. His partner, Miller, amplified the Campagna tale. The mayor had ordered the raid, Miller said, telling the police they'd find Nitti and Campagna at the headquarters, that Cermak thought Campagna was in town to kill him because he planned to shut down gangsterism for the duration of the world's fair. The gossip mills ground on, though no one would print much about the affair, not with Cermak a national martyr and all. Rumors agitated the city. Had Miller confirmed Nitti's belief that Newberry had paid Lang, one of the mayor's own bodyguards, to kill their mutual enemy? Had Tony set up Nitti? Had the Mob decided it had been betrayed by Cermak, who seemed now to want to take over its affairs, and so had wasted Newberry? Was that, too, the reason for Cermak's death, not the gnomish Italian's stomach-ache?

The jury convicted Sergeant Lang, who said he'd "blow the lid off" Chicago politics and "wreck the Democratic Party" if he went to jail. Almost immediately, the judge granted him a new trial. He never was retried, but the police force dismissed him as "unfit." All very interesting.

But what part, we ask, in this Untouchables script could Zangara play? Is it possible that irritated mafiosi had assigned him to kill Cermak? If so, why?

The only credible motives for the Capone men's hiring Zangara would appear to be: Cermak was crowding them or Cermak was a genuine reformer. A police captain's recollection could apply to either. Cermak had told him, the officer said, "I need your help in shoving them out of town before the fair begins." Would that set off the Mob? If it did, is there any evidence that it would use Zangara and a .32 revolver from 25 feet amid a crowd and atop a chair?

Not likely. Indeed, almost nothing substantial supports the theory that Zangara killed Cermak at organized crime's behest. It is equally true that legitimate if peripheral questions fueled the suspicions and that America's propensity for sentimentalism perhaps forever confounded the case of Anton Cermak, Franklin Roosevelt and Giuseppe Zangara.

The assassin himself repeatedly said Roosevelt was his target, not the immigrant success Tony Cermak. The day he was executed, when he had nothing to lose, no retribution from alleged employers to fear, Zangara said of Cermak: "I wasn't shooting at him, but I'm not sorry I hit him."

Again and again, Zangara declared his intentions. The day he was brought to face his new sentence on the charge of murder, the defiant Zangara shouted to the court, "I'd kill any king or President," and that he didn't know of Cermak until after he was arrested. "But I want to kill Roosevelt!" he shouted. "I'm no scared about anything, because I'm sure I'm right!" he screamed at the judge on hearing sentence pronounced. "You crook man, too." On this occasion, as from the beginning, the judge and lawyers and newsmen were astonished by Zangara's courage, his obstinate insistence that capitalism and his stomach, those alone, had brought on his attack. It seemed unbelievable (though understandable--more recent assassinations evoke even higher-voltage skepticism).

Quite properly, Zangara had the last word on his beliefs. When he came to be executed, Giuseppe stated his expectations. Some were in his autobiography, which he handed to a death-room official. "There is no God," he said. "It's all below.... See, I no scared of electric chair." And Giuseppe marched over and sat in it. He glared around, the brown eyes full of contempt and behind them, the welcome for his release from pain. "Lousy capitalists," he cried again. "No pictures." That, at least, he had enjoyed. The notoriety, like Guiteau. Zangara had read all the newspaper stories, all the rumors and conjectures. Perhaps that made up for the long life of labor, of inferiority, of baffled dreams. "Goodbye. Adios to all the world," he said. Czolgosz would have cheered. "Go ahead. Push the button."

They did. in the execution cell of the Florida state prison at Raiford on March 20, 1933, at 9:15 A.M.--33 days after the attack in Bayfront Park. Again, physicians examined the assassin's brain. They found Zangara's normal, if small. The fact may have comforted the sanity commission whose report to Zangara's judges stated that while he had a "psychopathic personality," the verdict on his sanity rested with the court.

Zangara's body was unclaimed. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison graveyard. Presumably, he lies there still, along with the rumors that he was a hit man, or a terrorist, or anything except a maddened little man striking absurdly and at random against a world he could not abide. An assassin's death, of course, most often ends nothing. In Zangara's case, the effects--small and large--linger to this day. In the small category, a Mrs. Lillian Gross believed she had saved F.D.R.'s life by deflecting Giuseppe's arm, although the police said no one grabbed him until all five shots had been fired (to newsmen, Zangara said Mrs. Cross was right, but in private, he said no, the police were). A minor point, as well, is that although all accounts report five shots, if you count the bullet wounds in the five people, there are six--a fact first reported here with the hope that no "second gun" theorists, so hard to suppress in the case of Robert Kennedy, will emerge with a grand conspiracy theory designed rather than accept the physical fact that bullets ricochet off things like cars, concrete and bones with a capricious-ness matched only by eyewitness accounts.

In larger realms, it was revealed after the funeral hysterics and the first 100 days of the New Deal that along with patronage, Cerniak discussed with Democratic National Chairman Jim Farley the income-tax-evasion charges the mayor heard he might face. Predictably, the largest legacies were political. Some Democratic politicians, for example, wondered at the lightness of the 20th Amendment, ratified shortly before Zangara's attack, since it specified that if the President-elect died, the Presidency fell to the Vice-President-elect (Roosevelt's Vice-President was the undistinguished John Nance Garner from Texas, which may have been why the judge, in sentencing Zangara to death, said he did so because Roosevelt's death would have precipitated a catastrophe similar to that spawned by Sarajevo). There were, as usual, political murmurings about the Secret Service's thoroughness, since, as usual, the Secret Service announced two days after the incident that one "demented" man was responsible for it. Yet these political consequences were small compared with others.

In Congress, two laws were proposed. One would have authorized "investigation" of all those suspected of advocating the assassination of public officials (certainly, the Paterson-style anarchists, but also everybody else). The second--the Dies Law--woidd deport aliens or anyone who advocated overthrowing the Government. Though not passed as formulated, these proposals, born of Zangara, forecast the House Un-American Activities Committee and eventually the Red scare and McCarthyism.

Fittingly, perhaps, the grandest effect descended on the city of Chicago. With the death of Cermak, West Side bohunk power was broken. The pieces fell to Nash, Democratic county chairman and one of Cermak's faithful mayoral backers. Under Nash's prodding, the Democratic-controlled Illinois legislature passed an extraordinary bill authorizing the Chicago City Council, dominated by Nash-Cermak aldermen, to choose the new mayor (previously, a special election would have provided Cermak's successor). Nash selected an Irishman, Edward Kelly, for mayor. Thus was created the KellyNash machine. It still reigns in Chicago. Almost Biblically, after Kelly came Martin Kennelly, and Kennelly begat Hizzoner himself, Richard Daley, and Daley begat Kennedy, and ... so the Irish won, after all, partly through the chance convergence of a Bohemian and an Italian immigrant. Perhaps that is a lesson of democracy. That and perhaps, too, the demonstration, beginning with Guiteau and ending with Zangara, that Civil Service Commissions do not stop the business of patronage, any more than does punishment deter the murderous bent of those citizens, twisted or straight, who would protest, seek fame or allay their discomforts through assassination. Down in Louisiana was a mighty Senator who'd learn that next.

This is the second in a series of articles on political assassination in America.

Garfield Assassinated in a Train Station

The Assassin who waited in Line

Did He Get His Man?