The Vain Assassin

...In France the Communist leader Maurice Thorez, who had the best organized (and armed) party in the West, threw away a winning hand of cards...

...Meanwhile, Lewis Powell had enough wits about him to boldly gain access to a convalescent Secretary of State William H. Seward (a carriage accident a few weeks before had nearly killed him) by posing as a pharmacy delivery boy, but so botched the clumsy assassination attempt he only disfigured his prey in a brutal knife-slashing spree before getting into a drawn-out, bloody fight with Seward's children and caretakers, declaring simply 'Tm mad, I'm mad" and fleeing into the night...

...I toured the country in the spring of APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...

...No, Swanson is a historian, not a pulp biographer, and his subject is none other than the Big Fish of Republican president-hating thespians, John Wilkes Booth...

...The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis (PENGUIN PRESS, 352 PAGES, $27,95) Reviewed by Paul Johnson Those 44 years were packed with complex incidents, and Professor Gaddis's new book, though adequate as far as it goes, is too short (only 266 pages of text) to provide the detail needed...

...P.T...

...The portrait that emerges is of a man who treated his last days on earth as the last act of a great dramatic tragedy, going so far as to invoke Richard III and Macbeth in his descriptions of his predicament...

...On this point it's particularly instructive to note Booth's last words as he lay dying: Booth asked to see his hands and whispered, "Useless, useless...

...Were it not for Lincoln's last minute visit to the Ford Theater on April 14,1865, Booth probably would have licked his wounds over his beloved South's loss, eventually dropping the spy and dagger routine and getting on with his life of riches, mistresses, and fawning audiences...

...The Communist Czech coup in February 1948, marked by the mysterious death of Jan Masaryk, rammed the point home...

...Words played a part as they always do in history...

...The drama has outlived him...

...In Italy, Togliatti, who had an even bigger party, did the same...

...The Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson contingent of the CivilWar-era The portrait that emerges is of a man who treated his last days on earth as the last act of a great dramatic tragedy, going as far as to invoke Richard/fl and Macbeth in his description of his predicament...

...Despite the oafishly simplistic sound-bite version of the Lincoln assassination most of us learned in school, however, this success was the exception, not the rule...

...the same conspiratorial cast of characters had gathered under the auspices of another Booth plan the year before...

...For example, Booth timed his shot to coincide with the biggest laugh during Our American Cousin, meaning essentially that the last words Lincoln ever heard were, "You sockdologizing old mantrap...

...As fate would have it, the 16th president chose to spend his first downtime in four years at an establishment Booth frequented both as guest and performer...

...From the moment of the assassination, he was playing the part, leaping to the stage, breaking his leg in an unscripted moment, and shouting to the baffled audience, "Sic simper tyrannis [Thus always to tyrants...

...That probably disappointed Booth as much as it relieved Stanton...

...It also plays safe: I felt he was trying all the time to avoid offending the liberals while not treading on too many conservative conks...

...Churchill's description of the dividing line as "the Iron Curtain" crystallized everyone's fear in countries that could still choose: they all knew on which side of it they wanted to be...

...a place, in other words, where Booth's puttering and preparations for ill ends would warrant no suspicion whatsoever and where temptation to act on his still flaring anger was great...

...Three months later, Secretary Marshall formulated his aid plan to restore Europe's shattered economies, and it was Stalin's refusal to allow Communist Eastern Europe to benefit from Marshall aid that turned the division between East and West into an economic as well as a military fact...

...But equally, if Eisenhower had not vetoed Montgomery's plan for a deep, narrow-point thrust to Berlin, after the Nazi collapse in Normandy, the Red Army would never have got further than Poland...

...APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 BOOKS IN REVIEW Manhuntis full of the small, stranger-than-fiction details that give Swanson's narrative the ring of truth...

...Swanson ably illustrates the very real, pervasive fear in the aftermath of Booth's act that without Lincoln to oversee the final days of a still smoldering Civil War--not every Confederate Army unit disbanded at Lee's surrender--the "conflict might degenerate into a brutal guerrilla war that might take years to win...

...The years 1947-48 were decisive...

...The actor in question is not Sean Penn or Tim Robbins or George Clooney...

...Likewise, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was relieved when the assassination was not followed by a Confederate Army marching on Washington, D.C...

...Still, don't go searching for Swanson's book in the "Performing Arts" section of Borders...

...and also had just happened to castrate himself a few years previously when he found himself tempted a bit too easily by the opposite sex...

...As it was, the West got in Harry S. Truman, a pragmatic and decisive leader who was persuaded by Soviet action that it was unavoidably necessary to stop the rapid withdrawal of U.S...

...troops from Europe, and to keep the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean...

...Beginning in 1864, the last full year of the Civil War, the young star had marshaled his cash, celebrity and connections in service of a bold plan," Swanson relates...

...And Thomas Jones, an ex-Confederate river blockade runner who thumbed his nose at the $100,000 reward money and risked his meager livelihood out of a sense of duty to the Lost Cause to help ferry Booth from Maryland to Virginia, keeping the story to himself for two decades after the crime before relating it to a journalist for posterity...

...I think I have done well, though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me," Booth woefully scribbles in his makeshift diary when life on the lain and a lack of critical acclaim begin to depress him...

...The South is avenged...

...A.J.R Taylor, whom I first met at that time, told me: "We may soon be fighting the bear...

...These days it would be easier to list the modern actors who fail to fit such a description, since most purveyors of the profession seem to by Shawn Macomber slide that supposed caricature on as easily as a frumpy old threadbare sweater...

...What else could a self-absorbed, preening actor ask for...

...Marine stationed in Illinois, reflected the sentiments of many when he wrote to his mother that he would like to "take a pair of shears" to Booth "and cut him in pieces as you would cut a piece of cloth...

...If the actor-turned-assassin is watching this world from somewhere out there in perdition, however, he must take some small consolation that in the already planned film version of this book starring Harrison Ford, James Swanson is on record saying he believes Johnny Depp would make a great John Wilkes Booth...

...Deprived of such contemporarytools of dissent as the press junket and a login name at The Huffington Post, Booth ended up using his wealth and reputation (think Alec Baldwin with A MOUSTACHE AND the ability to pull off Shakespeare) to draw together a group of star-struck ne'er-dowells for a decapitation strike on the leadership of the federal government...

...Those who do not 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW seek greatness would not care what the world outside thought...

...When if the world knew my heart, one blow would have made me great, though I did desire no greatness...

...Barnum paid a princely sum for the saddle Booth rode in on one leg of his escape...

...S WANSON PAINTS THE SCENE at the Ford Theater brilliantly and vividly, yet also delves into the alternately goofball and spectacularly gruesome failures elsewhere that night with refreshing due diligence...

...That last is a crock, obviously...

...George Atzerodt, directed by Booth to kill the unguarded and completely vulnerable Vice President Andrew Johnson in his room at Kirkwood House, instead got whiskey blitzed at the boarding house bar a few floors below and stumbled off into that infamous night without any blood on his hands...

...On March 12, 1947, Truman accepted Britain's desperate request to take over her role as custodian of the freedom of Greece and Turkey...

...Wesley Severs, a U.S...

...As it turns out, Shawn Macomber, a Boston-based writer, is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...How outsized must your sense of personal greatness be to strike down a President of the United States at the apex of his power and determine the impact and implications of such a dastardly deed were inconsequential...

...No one seemed to shed any tears as the Old Capitol Prison filled to the brim with a few real but mostly imagined co-conspirators...

...He visited a den of sinners (evangelical shorthand for a "theater" in those days) on Good Friday, after all...

...The worry was real enough to prompt Ulysses S. Grant to order the arrest ofallparoled Confederate officers and surgeons, only to back down when one of his aides pointed out that such a move might re-open hostilities...

...It Could Have Been Hotter T HE COLD WAR WAS A DISTINCT and lengthy phase in history...

...God knows what would have happened ifFDR had lived to serve all his fourth term...

...There's the bizarre Boston Corbett, the man who on April 26 shot Lincoln's assassin in a burning barn...

...When it began in the closing months of 1945, I was a 16-year-old schoolboy looking forward to going up to Oxford...

...Stalin believed that if the Allies had delayed opening the Second Front another year, he would have got his troops into Paris...

...was hardly more dignified, placing the blame for Lincoln's assassination on the president himself...

...Lest Severs's mother believe he had gone soft, the Marine added, "Then I would dig out his eyes and then pour in boiling hot oil," before signing off, "your affectionate son...

...A short risk-free history of the Cold War is a contradiction in terms...

...The contextualization goes far beyond character sketches, however...

...Paul Johnson's maw books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...

...Instead of the South rising again, Swanson writes, "Booth witnessed the first draft of history transform Abraham Lincoln from a controversial and often unpopular war leader into America's secular saint...

...Hiding in a pine thicket reading newspapers Jones smuggles him, Booth whines with dismay at the insistence of newspaper columnists from both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line on seeing the assassination as something less than a grandiose act...

...Booth could not for the life of him understand why the rest of the world failed to see it that same way...

...In Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer Swanson deftly peels back the hitherto mostly hidden layers of this complex moment in our nation's history with panache, verve, and a compelling command of narrative and suspense, meticulously detailing the plot and the aftermath as what it was: a complete debacle on every level save the one which counted: Booth's murder of Abraham Lincoln a mere five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia...

...Things might have been very different...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Vain Assassin Man, hunt: The 12oDay Chase for UHcoir/s Ki[[er by James Swanson (WtLUAM MORROW, 448 PAGES, $26,95) Reviewed I N HIS RECENT BOOK, Heritage Foundation legal scholar James Swanson relates the all-true adventures of a famous actor endowed with an unquenchable hatred for Republicans and a fervent belief that the sitting president is an illegitimate, constitutional rights-trampling tyrant...

...Suspected Booth sympathizers were murdered in the street by roving mobs...

...The conventional wisdom is that America's hostile response to forward Soviet moves dates from George Kennan's 8,000-word dispatch from Moscow of February 22, 1946 ("The Long Telegram"), which formulated the doctrine of containment...

...O F COURSE, THE CHARACTER who maintains center stage throughout Manhunt is Booth...

...Booth's deed has immortalized him in an eternal spotlight...

...Booth's sister Asia embraced this notion, audaciously writing later that the assassination was "the moan of the religious people, the one throb of anguish to heroworshipers that the president had not gone first to a place of worship or have remained at home on this jubilant occasion...

...He hatched a harebrained scheme to kidnap President Lincoln, spirit him to Richmond, hold him as a hostage for the Confederacy, and turn the tide of the war...

...When the Cold War ended, I was in my sixties, and it was my eldest son, Daniel, then the Daily Telegraph's German correspondent, who asked the key question at the famous press conference, which brought the Berlin Wall crashing down that night...

...But Truman and the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, had settled their policy some weeks before...

...Like many, he thought the contest would soon be hot...