Mount TBR #51

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Assassins - Robert J. Donovan

This is a well-written study of the mainly delusional reasons behind the attacks on the lives of eight presidents.

Four were successful: John Wilkes Booth on Abraham Lincoln, Charles J. Guiteau on James A. Garfield, Leon Czolgosz on William McKinley, and Lee Harvey Oswald on John F. Kennedy.

Four were not successful: Richard Lawrence on Andrew Jackson, John Schrank on Theodore Roosevelt, Giuseppe Zangara on Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola on Harry S. Truman

Donovan researched materials on the 19^th century incidents and unearthed findings on psychology of the assassins, where available, on the more modern ones. His conclusion is one that we can take cold comfort from: the assassins were usually mentally unbalanced by delusions rather than political beliefs. Granted in the cases of Booth, LHO, and the Puerto Ricans, it’s hard to draw the line clearly between fanaticism and the insanity of narcissism and grandiosity. But the other assassins were plagued with cognitive and psychological problems that rendered them incapable of ordinary work and adult relationships.

Donovan observed that politics in our country has always been roiled by hysterical vitriol. Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, FDR and Truman all had sustained inflammatory attacks directed their way. Donovan says given our sad history of assassination (not the mention the disgraceful response of the criminal justice system by putting insane people to death),”in an age apparently endless tensions” we should criticize with “a little more maturity, logic, and forbearance.”

Though the Depression stopped Donovan from going to college, he was a well-respected journalist covering the White House for the New York Herald Tribune. He had a reporter’s instinct for the telling detail and odd fact. He also includes curious artifacts such as the ballads that came out of the assassinations like Charles Guiteau.

His best-known book during this lifetime was the 1961 best seller PT-109, which recounted John F. Kennedy’s WWII Navy career. About half the content of this book was first published in the New Yorker in a series of articles in the early 1950s and collected in a book in 1955. The old paperback I read was apparently a version updated in 1964 after Oswald, an oddball loner misfit along the same lines as the killers in this book, murdered JFK.