I was there to visit Chesterwood, the house and studio once belonging to Daniel Chester French, the artist responsible for the Abraham Lincoln sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial. Mostly, I came to the Berkshires because of the man who brought one of those presidents back to life. Not that I came all the way from New York City just to enjoy a chorus line of presidential assassins. The men who murdered Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were elbow to elbow with Lee Harvey Oswald and the klutzy girls who botched their hits on klutzy Gerald Ford, harmonizing on a toe-tapper called "Everybody's Got the Right to Be Happy," a song I cheerfully hummed walking back to the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying. There they were - John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz - in tune and in the flesh. One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes. In the book, Vowell travels to historical sites, piecing together stories of fallen presidents and the men who gunned them down. Opinion Memorial Gardens for Political LosersĬaustic commentator Sarah Vowell discusses her new book Assassination Vacation, a road trip into the history of presidential bloodshed.
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