For many Americans who grew up in the 40′,50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, they have asked the question how much different the United States would have been if President Kennedy was never assassinated and Lyndon Johnson never became President? Even though President Kennedy did send fifteen thousand advisers to Vietnam, surely he would never had escalated the situation to all out war and by the end of his term have nearly sent half-a-million soldiers to Vietnam in hope of never being known as the first President to lose a war. And to make things worse, Nixon never would have become president nor his secretary of state Henry Kissinger finding no fault with killing hundreds of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnam citizens while another 26,000 American soldiers were killed and another one-hundred thousand wounded.
The same could be said of President Lincoln’s assassination. If he was never killed, surely the reconstruction period would have looked so much different. Unlike his incompetent successor, President Johnson never would have allowed the south to resurrect slavery under the disguise of state rights.
Ms. Millard’s extraordinary account of President Garfield’s life and presidency, short lived as it was (five months) before he died from the hauntingly inept treatments prescribed by a self serving Dr. Bliss for a bullet wound, inflicted by the assassin Charles Guiteau, that if left alone would have healed on its own.
President Garfield came from dirt poor roots that didn’t hinder his rise, rising to rank of General on the Union side during the civil war, to a scholar and president of a university, to a renowned congressman and the President of the United States who was intent on changing the nation’s corrupt political establishment.
A few quotes from this great man and what a full term or two would of meant for our country:
“There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country
like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below
forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there
forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual
drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty
deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.”
“The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people.”
“I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that i may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.”
President Garfield was a man with a loud laugh that filled his family and nation with a feeling of goodness and caring. He was a man who lived by the morals he preached, and when he passed away the nation mourned for their President in a way few presidents have ever been mourned. It is hard not to believe that if he lived, civil rights for all Americans would have been far more advanced and our country and the world would have been better off.
A Curious View 