Spasm the First:
Booth’s plot to assassinate Lincoln began with a plan to kidnap the president, but exactly why the actor and his henchmen wanted to capture Lincoln is one of the essential elements of the story that seems to escape Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, the perpetrators of the new “thriller” Killing Lincoln. I had planned a quick hit-and-run post on the manner and matter of this historically well-timed volume, but I’m something of a Civil War buff and have recently read a few books on both Booth and Mary Lincoln, so I got caught up in the book’s style, structure and presentation of facts, opinions and accompanying balderdash.
In a vain attempt at equanimity (the old “fair trial first, then the noose” approach), I should say what I found to like in KL. The big name co-author – his name on the cover dwarfs that of his accomplice – tells us in a brief prefatory note that the book is “written as a thriller,” and he’s right about that. Some important historical scenes are abbreviated or omitted, others emphasized. Working in the tradition of both historical novelists and scholarly historians, the authors cull, select, orchestrate, amplify. The result here is a rousing tale about the horrific last battles in Virginia (Saylor’s Creek, High Bridge), the rising hope among the Union leaders, the assassin’s simmering enmity, the plot thickening, the infamous murder, the manhunt and its climax, then the aftermath. The short chapters and a canny filtering out of many of the technical aspects of troop movements, investigation and politicking keep the story moving. It’s a page turner, a barn burner. I was reminded as I read it of the night I read The Exorcist, impressed (content and lack of density notwithstanding) by Blatty’s management of suspense and dread, hope and distress. The effective passages in KL about the lethal chess played by Lee and Grant between Petersburg and Appomattox and the villain’s flight suggest that this team of crack wordsmiths might have written a substantially more accurate and stylish book, had they taken the time. And the book has good maps, very good maps displaying troop disposition and movements, routes, topography and geography. Trust those maps.
But there’s a major problem with the lickety-split style and glib manner. If you know much about the historical period (that it was, for instance, customary for Victorian widows to absent themselves from funerals of their husbands) or the principals (Boston Corbett was likely maddened by mercury long before the war, not after he killed Booth), you’re likely to start doing a little fact checking on the details. This way lies madness.
Which is why . . . . I had never seen anyone begin a written paragraph this way before, so I thought I’d try it. No soap. You’ll have to go to KL to see how it’s done.
In the hands of these authors, the ship John S. Ide gets abbreviated as the Ides (they’re working a Roman ides theme already); the warriors who dispatched Custer all become Oglala Sioux, for brevity’s sake, presumably. Mary Surratt did not, as the book claims, “run” the tavern she owned. Twain, in their view, helped write, rather than encourage and promote, Grant’s Personal Memoirs. (As if he had the time, but you should read how he defended Grant’s style against Matthew Arnold. Ron Powers tells it well in Mark Twain: A Life.) “Daft and unbalanced” isn’t a fair epithet for the deeply depressed Mary Lincoln, and though she was prone to tantrums and grudges, the accusation that her “intellect does not match her considerable capacity for rage” seems phrased to suggest that she’s not particularly bright. If she were here to defend herself to the authors (a séance might produce her), she could shame and skewer them deftly, and in French, if she so wished. Michael O’Laughlen’s testimony in the conspiracy trial is not dependable; nor are his observations those of a sober man. Booth didn’t “steal” the motto of Virginia; we still have it.
To borrow one stylistic thread from the narrative in question: But are these the mere quibbles of a hot-headed rake? Maybe so. I like that “rake.” But here’s a variation or (as the poets of “practiced experts” and “retreat back” would have it) different variation. Speaking of Booth’s paramour Lucy Hale, our wily narrators say, “Lucy has no idea that her lover has assembled a crack team of conspirators.” That crack team, the “A Team” of American assassination, is a crackpot team, as the authors themselves will gradually disclose. George Atzerodt is a tippler and a “simple-minded drifter.” Twenty-six-year-old David Herold, whose Georgetown pharmacy training is not the education it would be today, is woefully immature. Several witnesses at the trial testified that he was still a boy, one insisting that he had the mind of an eleven-year-old. Lewis Powell/Payne has been “mentally impaired since that long-ago mule kick to the head,” and proves it more than once, despite the authors’ claim of his lucidity. Booth himself has by 1865 become a binger dedicated to brandy (not whisky), and his zealotry has left him resembling Poe’s Montresor in both shrewdness and narrowness of purpose. If this band of misfits killed Lincoln only in a novel, it would fail the test of plausibility.
[I don’t want to bore you to death at one sitting, so I’ll finish this anon.]
Here the Huffington Post comments on some of the errors in Killing Lincoln.
