Let’s Remember Some Presidents
by J.D. Connor
The state of Ohio is a place with a lot of boyhood homes to visit—it has been big enough and important enough for long enough that plenty of politicians and inventors and astronauts come from there.
And then they mostly leave.
When I was growing up in Ohio, the boyhood home was as common a field trip destination as a museum or a factory tour. A number of the former residents of these historic places departed to become presidents, and nearly all of them were bad at it: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, Taft, Harding. (Since the absolute worst things keep happening, I imagine JD Vance, born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, will take his place among them soon enough.) Only Grant and McKinley got second terms. McKinley and Garfield were assassinated.
I have been thinking about assassination, and I imagine you have, too. Let’s say it’s because Trump was nearly assassinated last year. For those of us thinking about it, conveniently enough, Netflix has a Garfield miniseries right now called Death By Lightning. There are prestigey credits that show off a clockwork political circus and a prestigey title song, in which Hanni al-Khatib adds a twangy blues guitar to the lyrics the assassin Charles Guiteau sang to himself as he mounted the gallows—the whole thing very much recalling Jack White in his “Union Forever” mode. The show is in four parts that don’t add up to four hours total, produced as a modernized version of the classic ’80s U.S. network miniseries, with a tonal range that veers from American-The-Thick-of-It farce to lumbering, irony-strikes-again portentousness. I didn’t much like it, but the performances are egregiously good relative to the actual script.
The title comes from a letter in which Garfield wrote, “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning and it is not best to worry about either.” He speaks the line in the show. But the wild thing about Garfield’s assassination is that there was nothing lightning about it. It took forever—two and a half months from the shooting to his eventual death from sepsis.
Keep us breathing fire!
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