![]() ![]() ![]() Her book picks up velocity as she describes how Guiteau finally tracked down Garfield in a Washington, D.C., train station as the president was about to board a train for Massachusetts. It takes some time for Millard to reach the shooting scene, perhaps because she must work so hard to paint Garfield, a mostly forgotten leader, as someone worthy of a contemporary history. She establishes Garfield as a character destined for greatness while weaving in the story of his eventual assassin, Charles Guiteau, an unhinged office-seeker who believed that killing the president would allow him to obtain a consulship to France. Millard, who wrote the best-selling “ The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey,” begins her latest work by tracing the journeys of two men who collided with deadly consequences in a Washington train station on July 2, 1881. Though a well-known story, it is the kind of crisis that remains ripe for a crisp, concise and revealing history, and Candice Millard delivers just that in “ Destiny of the Republic,” a narrative of the assassination and its aftermath. For the first time in the decades following the tumultuous Civil War, the country was brought together in shared grief. But after lingering for 79 days, James Garfield succumbed to his wounds. Just months after taking office in 1881, the 20th president of the United States was shot. They were some of the most dramatic weeks in U.S. ![]()
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